VIRGINS NO MORE : What Saatchi's 'Sensation' really exposed - Brooklyn Museum of Art exhibition

Commonweal, May 19, 2000 by Margaret O'Brien Steinfels

The Virgin festooned with pornographic photos and elephant dung has come and gone. But her apparition in the Brooklyn Museum of Art left behind disquieting information, not about religion and art, but about art and money and the smug arrogance of an art world ready to offend but surprisingly unreceptive to being offended itself.

Last fall, New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani demanded that the picture, The Holy Virgin Mary by British artist Chris Ofili, be removed from the "Sensation" exhibit because it was offensive to Catholics. When the Brooklyn Museum director, Arnold Lehman, failed to oblige, the mayor withheld city subsidies. In March the dispute between city and museum was finally settled in federal court. The city agreed to pay all it owed the museum ($3.5 million); in return, the museum dropped its First Amendment case against the mayor. The battle of Brooklyn may be over, but the war over tax funds for controversial art is not.

For many New Yorkers the controversy was not a fight about tax funds or the First Amendment, but a form of political theater. Both Lehman and Giuliani are showmen who know that nothing entertains the citizenry more than a dispute that appears to shake the foundations of constitutional order and deeply offends religious sensibilities. The Holy Virgin Mary was arguably not the most offensive offering at the exhibit (that award could have gone to the Chapman brothers for their child mannequins deployed in various sexual poses with human genitalia as part of their facial features; in London, it was a portrait, made up of children's hand prints, of "Myra," a child torturer and murderer). But for Director Lehman it made little difference which work was found transgressive just so long as one of them was. What use is an exhibit named "Sensation" if it does not cause one? His marketing of the exhibit--broadsides promising vomiting, fainting, etc.--was meant to repulse, and thus attract, as many viewers as possible. It was his great good luck that it was the mayor who was offended.

Lehman and Giuliani, along with William Donohue of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights and Floyd Abrams, the First Amendment lawyer who orchestrated the museum's case and defended it in court, are master polemicists who enjoy a good fight. They royally entertained New Yorkers until the show closed in early January.

But for all the fireworks, it has come to look like a win-win situation for everyone. Museum admissions skyrocketed. The Catholic League found some new members and garnered more publicity. Lawyer Abrams won his case in court. And today, Rudolph Giuliani brags in senatorial campaign literature about his courageous stand, promising, if elected, to scrutinize federal art funding. But best of all, shortly before the show closed a seventy-two-year-old retiree and devout Catholic, Dennis Heiner, threw white paint on Ofili's picture. Not only was this a fitting finale, it was a bona fide certification that this was really, really art. Jed Perl, writing about the Whitney 2000 Biennial in the New Republic (April 3, 2000), made the point neatly: "Once art provoked controversy. Now it seems that controversy can give anything the aura of art. Andres Serrano, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Ofili are nothing without their controversies; that's what gives their work meaning." Objecting strenuously to Heiner's sensational defacement, museum staff quickly removed the offending white paint and returned the picture to its owner, Charles Saatchi, as offensive as when it arrived and certainly more valuable.

But the story does not end there. When the museum went to court, it was obliged to reveal the exhibit's financial and artistic arrangements. Memos and e-mail between Lehman, museum curators, and Saatchi exposed the extensive control--financial and artistic--exercised by Saatchi, the man who owned all the works in the show. In addition, financial contributions were solicited and received from Christie's, the art auction house, and various gallery owners, who, like Saatchi, would directly benefit from future sales of the artists represented in "Sensation." Was there a conflict of interest in the museum's showing of Saatchi's collection and taking money from him? In allowing him a significant role in mounting the exhibit, did the museum surrender its autonomy and artistic integrity? If the museum is in the same business as profit-making galleries, why should taxpayers help fund it?

Pretty shocking! I certainly thought so as I read the detailed account by New York Times reporter David Barstow (December 6, 1999) showing how and where ethical lines were crossed by the museum and its director. The museum's aesthetic and educational mission was subverted in favor of the financial interests of collectors and dealers. But we who were shocked turn out to be naifs, people who don't understand that the business of art is, well, business.

Exactly how much business was expansively explored at a conference organized by the University of Chicago and the Art Institute of Chicago in February, "Taking Funds, Giving Offense, Making Money: The Brooklyn Museum of Art Controversy and the Dilemmas of Arts Policy" (a title Lehman found offensive). Many audience members of the "arts community" in Chicago expressed astonishment at the astonishment of the citizenry. Like all little enclaves, especially ones that lay claim to specialized knowledge, the art world is a mystery to the general public, which has little opportunity to understand its inner workings. Art is not licensed or regulated; it is not sued for malpractice; the press rarely scrutinizes its practices. Its practitioners--rich and newly rich collectors, dealers, museum directors, and curators--cultivate an air of exclusiveness, and, at times, of sanctity and Gnosticism. Such is their insularity except when tax funds are needed; then there is talk, as at the Chicago meeting, of educating a benighted public too ignorant to recognize great (and valuable) art.