Museums in the Age of Giuliani - New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's attempts to censor "Sensation" exhibit at Brooklyn Museum of Art

Art in America, Dec, 1999 by Marshall Berman

In Edith Wharton's tragic romance, The Age of Innocence, set in New York City in the 1880s, the hero and heroine are in desperate need of a place where they can meet, talk, get close, express their mutual love and decide how far they are willing to go. They are not ready to go to a hotel; they need to explore each other to see if they will reach that point. They both know plenty of people and would be easily recognized on the streets or in a park. They need to be private in public. But where? At last they hit on the perfect place: the recently opened Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the museum they can embrace, weep, yell at each other, run down corridors--and be utterly anonymous and alone. The museum of a century ago was rich in ancient treasures, especially material from Egyptian tombs, but empty of live human beings.

Since the end of World War II, museums have become intensely contested terrain in America's culture wars. Courts have ruled that museum officials are protected by the First Amendment in their choice of what material to show. But the First Amendment has always had a catch. The great reporter and press critic A.J. Liebling put it this way: yes, the U.S. has freedom of the press, for the man who owns one. Mayor Giuliani expands Liebling's idea into the visual arts. He is exhibiting a giant self-portrait that anoints him as "the man who owns" the city's museums, and who is free to choose what art New Yorkers can and cannot see. He says we must not see "Sensation," the Brooklyn Museum of Art's current exhibition of young artists from the U.K. (Not that he has seen it himself; indeed, he boasts that he has not.) New York has long been an entertainment center, and New Yorkers are used to being spectators of our mayors' shows. But now we can be participants as well, by simply going to the Brooklyn Museum to see what the mayor does not want us to see.

Considering the vast coverage of the "Sensation" affair, strangely little has been said about what's actually in the show. In fact, there's quite a lot, more than most of us can take in at one viewing. The show's one truly "sensational" item is the first thing we see, Damien Hirst's enormous tiger shark preserved in a tank of formaldehyde, held with wires so that we can look directly into its eyes from barely a foot away. All accounts of the show highlight the shark; but they leave out what it plays against, a preserved lamb, too small to confront, just big enough to pet. The contrast brings back William Blake's classic poem "The Tiger": "Did he smile his work to see? / Did he who made the Lamb make thee?" The lamb and the tiger shark turn out to be parts of a virtual Noah's ark that Hirst has been assembling; this show includes a cabinet of morphologically related small fish and a series of cross-sections of a huge cow. Hirst's creatures could be in a natural history museum as readily as they are here. But they could be at home in a cathedral as well, striking us as memento mori. Like the late great art historian Meyer Schapiro, Hirst has a sensibility that is both modernist and medieval. His work brings art, science and religion together, and makes us think about our place in the universe. Hirst doesn't tell us what that place is, but he both forces and helps us to ask.

The show has many stars. There is the sculptor Rachel Whiteread, a mystical minimalist whom both Plato and Mark Rothko could love. Her boldest work here is a kind of city of 100 cubes, evenly spaced apart, looking at once dead and strangely radiant. There is Richard Billingham, who has done a beautifully empathetic color photo study of a day in the life of his poor and wretched family. His study evokes Walker Evans and James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. His family is a lot sleazier and grungier and looks more "dysfunctional" than the ones in Evans's photographs, but Billingham creates an aura around the family that makes it just as luminous. There is Jenny Saville, whose portraits of giant nudes expand our ideas of beauty and fulfill Willem de Kooning's dictum that oil paint was invented to evoke the depth and beauty of human flesh. There are more whose power and originality could be talked about, and others who don't look so powerful or original.

The show's most controversial painting is Chris Ofili's The Holy Virgin Mary, which incorporates elephant dung. From reproductions in the press, it was hard to tell what this painting was going to look like. In fact--and I was completely unprepared for the fact--it's gorgeous. It's a textbook case of what Walter Benjamin called "aura," thriving even after two centuries of "mechanical reproduction." Ofili has a great flair for complex techniques of ornamentation (especially applique and collage), vivid and extravagant color (often psychedelic), intensely dramatic staging and spectacular presentation. Some press accounts said the dung was "smeared" across the painting, as if in desecration, but actually Ofili has packed and shaped it very precisely into cannonball-like forms and coated it with clear resin. Why did he use this material? There's probably no one reason. But it is worth noting Ofili's African family name (though he comes from Manchester), and noting that in the parts of Africa where elephants are found, they are revered as kings and queens of beasts. There is no way to look at this picture honestly and see sacrilege or derision: you can't miss it, this is the Queen of Heaven. Ofili's Madonna blends perfectly into a 2,000-year-old Christian art of reverence and adoration. The one thing that jarred me (though none of the painting's detractors mentioned it) was the absence of a child, an absence which seems to suggest that even without Jesus, Mary's radiant splendor and inspirational force can still light up the sky.