The central target of this attack on free speech is a piece by Chris Ofili, an artist from Britain of Nigerian origin, titled "Holy Virgin Mary," a painting of a Black Madonna with a breast made from elephant dung. Ofili uses this material in many of his works, saying it draws on symbolism from ancient African culture.

On September 22, ten days before the exhibit was to open, Giuliani launched a public campaign denouncing the upcoming exhibit as "sick," antireligious, and an example of "Catholic bashing." The mayor, who is the all but declared Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in next year's election, demanded that the museum cancel the showing, under threat of losing all city funding and possibly being evicted from the city-owned building. Nearly a third of the Brooklyn Museum's $23 million operating budget comes from the city budget.

Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush and New York governor George Pataki both backed Giuliani's stance. "I don't think they ought to be using taxpayer money to denigrate religion," declared Bush while campaigning in Buffalo, New York.

The U.S. Senate voted unanimously September 29 to eliminate federal funding for the Brooklyn Museum — which is already minimal — from a spending bill under discussion.

Right-wing commentator William Buckley praised the mayor's actions in a syndicated column published September 30. "Mr. Giuliani," declared Buckley, "has shown here at least as much courage as the depraved artist who believes that he should be protected by the United States Marines when he sorties into public museums to profane in wild elaborations the faith of a hundred million Americans."

New York Post columnist Mark Goldblatt likewise struck a culture-war note in a September 28 article titled, "'Sensation' as Thought Control." Describing the Brooklyn exhibit as an example of "anti-establishment bias," he wrote, "Taxpayer-subsidized museums regularly show art calculated to offend… but calculated only to offend those whose sensibilities are right of center and are thus taken to represent establishment politics."

Liberal politicians opposing Giuliani's moves to cut the institution's funding joined the chorus in condemning the content of the exhibit. "I find it offensive, but that's my judgment," City Council speaker Peter Vallone, a Democrat and one of the first prominent politicians to speak against cutting funds to the museum, stated September 24. Hillary Clinton, who is preparing her Democratic Party campaign for Senate in New York, later made a similar statement, as did Vice President Albert Gore.

The response by representatives of other cultural institutions in the city was slow. On September 28, nearly a week after Giuliani issued his threats, the Cultural Institutions Group released a statement saying that it "would set a dangerous precedent for any mayor to revoke funding if he or she finds even a single element of an institution's programs offensive: one painting in an art museum, one exhibit in a science museum, one performance in a theater, or even one book in a library." Eighteen of the 33 city-financed institutions in the group, as well as six private establishments, signed this statement at first. Several others added their names in the following days.

The New York Times published what it described as "E-mails that circulated among members of the Cultural Institutions Group" that reflected the hesitancy of many to make any comment.

"I find no fault with the Mayor's aesthetic sensibilities, only with his effort at censorship," stated Philippe de Montebello, director of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, in an October 5 New York Times column, following a long silence since the controversy erupted.

According to news reports, Brooklyn Museum officials initially met secretly with city government representatives and suggested they might remove the Ofili panting from the exhibit as a way of ending the confrontation with the mayor. After word of this was leaked to the press, museum officials insisted that the entire exhibit would go on as planned.

The museum then followed by filing a lawsuit in federal court accusing mayor Giuliani of violating the First Amendment by threatening to withdraw city funds from the museum if it went ahead with the showing of Sensation. The city responded by canceling a payment of almost half a million dollars due to the museum and threatening to go to court to evict the museum from the building it has occupied for more than 100 years.  
 

'No art show should be censored'

The evening before the show opened, more than 1,000 people turned out for a rally against censorship outside the Brooklyn Museum. A Daily News poll published that morning reflected widespread support for democratic rights, with 60 percent of those asked opposed to Giuliani's efforts to close the art show. Only 30 percent supported the mayor's stance.

A large number of students turned out for the rally, which was called by the New York Civil Liberties Union.

"I respect their right to express themselves. I don't think any art show should be censored or banned," said Herbert Weldon, a 19-year-old student from Baltimore who is studying painting and film at the Cooper Union. "I don't think anybody should be censored or funding for the museum cut off." His classmates had been talking up the protest, Weldon said, and many of them came.

Hannah Williamson, another art student, said she had seen the exhibit in Britain. It's "not designed to be offensive," she commented, adding her view that "Giuliani's trying to win right-wing votes."

Dozens of students from Pratt Institute, an art college in Brooklyn, took part in the protest rally.

Richard Kussmaul, a retired florist, said he came after seeing a leaflet posted. "This made me so angry… I had to come out and protest censorship. I choose what I want to see." He carried a hand-lettered sign that read, "What next? The Nazis banned 'degenerate' art. Censorship is dangerous."

Phyllis Talaferro, a psychotherapist who is Black, carried a picture of the "Virgin Mary" painting that read "Viva Ofili," referring to the artist. "I'm here to support the museum, to support the Bill of Rights, to support a Black Madonna," she said.

Speakers included several Congressmen and local politicians, as well as artists and other supporters of civil liberties.

There was also a small counter protest of about half a dozen during the rally. One of these was a Black man in his 30s yelling, "The Jews control this museum. They knew what they were doing." Both the museum's director and the chairman of its board are Jewish. An older woman stated that painting a swastika is considered racist, but "when they bash Catholics it's art."

In his weekly radio broadcast September 24, Giuliani made a more veiled appeal to anti-Semitism. "Where it comes to Catholic bashing, this kind of thing is never treated as sensitively as it sometimes is in other areas," he said. "If this were a desecration of a symbol in another area, I think there would be more sensitivity about this than a desecration of a symbol that involves Catholics."

"If another museum…aggressively attacks, let's say, a different religion, I'll have the same reaction to it," the mayor added in a news conference October 4. Since then opponents of the exhibit have launched a further attack on Brooklyn Museum director Arnold Lehman for supposed "Catholic bashing" during a previous job as director of the Baltimore Museum of Art.

The Brooklyn Museum opened its exhibit October 2 to record crowds. Many who came said they had not planned to see the show, but they wanted to know what the controversy was about and did not think the mayor had a right to say what they could see.

A much smaller crowd than had come out in defense of civil liberties showed up to pray in front of the museum in protest the opening day. In addition, a handful of animal rights demonstrators opposed the exhibit, objecting to pieces that include animals in formaldehyde.

In the midst of all this, the city cops made a highly publicized raid on a trendy Fifth avenue art gallery in Manhattan, arresting the art dealer Mary Boon. The cops alleged that she was offering gallery visitors bullets as keepsakes of a show by the sculptor Tom Sachs. Boone was arrested in the late afternoon September 29 and jailed until late the next evening when she was arraigned and released.

Mike Galati is a member of the United Food and Commercial Workers.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home