Search

ARCHIVES
CONTACT US
WORLD NEWS

Sensation exhibit is 'sick stuff'

Sensation:" the controversial art exhibit, is turning the art world upside down. "Sick stuff," as New York City Mayor, Rudolph Giuliani puts it.

Last week, the NYC art community was shaken up when Rudolph Giuliani told the Brooklyn Museum of Art that he would cut off millions of dollars of public funding for the museum if it opened its planned exhibition, "Sensation: A Collection of Works by Young British Artists." The exhibit features mutilated pigs, a pornographic painting of the Virgin Mary splattered with real elephant dung, mannequins of perverted children with multiple genitals, and a glorified portrait of a child killer. Giuliani is right, "sick stuff."

This exhibit is not for the faint of heart and the museum tells you so. The museum has issued a warning label, "The contents of this exhibition may cause shock, vomiting, confusion." As a person who knows a little about art and owns his own art company, I thought art was supposed to be aesthetically pleasing or thought provoking. Creations that cause viewers to become ill or the like, seem suspect as "art." Furthermore, the museum initially was denying anyone under the age of 16 to enter the "R-rated" exhibit without a parent, due to its objectionable contents. Art, no matter its subject or content, has always been accessible to all age groups because it is "art," an intrinsically valuable statement. So when a museum denies admission to young people, it makes me suspicious about whether it is truly art.

Giuliani and others who oppose the exhibit argue that some pieces are offensive, specifically a piece by Chris Ofili, entitled "The Holy Virgin Mary," which Giuliani says is aggressively anti-Catholic and insulting. So should the City of New York have the right to deny $7 million a year to the Brooklyn Museum of Art, one-third of its annual operating budget? The answer is simple: Yes.

I would like to raise a preliminary question: "why is government financially supporting art museums in the first place?" Our form of limited government was instituted to ensure our "natural rights" and to provide for us what the market place could not, like roads and sewage. When did it ever become the government's job to pay for art museums? It seems to me that it should be the job of the private market place. The survival of a museum should not depend on whether the government gives it money, but on whether there is a market demand for it or not.

In the case of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, if its exhibit is painfully offensive to a substantial percentage of the city's population then why should it have a right to its money? Let those pay for it who are willing to.

You would be outraged if your tax dollars had to pay for a "modern art" exhibit that completely insulted and degraded blacks. This is no different. You would not feel obligated to support such an exhibit because of its appalling content. Brooklyn Museum of Art and its allies are crying foul. They say that Giuliani is subverting the 1st Amendment's freedom of expression. This is absurd.

Giuliani is not telling the Brooklyn Museum of Art that it cannot exhibit the works, only that it doesn't have the right to do it with hard earned tax dollars. The Brooklyn Museum of Art somehow thinks it has a right to tax dollars. I've read the Constitution many times, and I see nowhere that it says taxpayers should fund offensive and disgusting "art."

Moreover, if the Brooklyn Museum of Art does not like politicians interfering in its business, then it should not take politicians' money. "The Holy Virgin Mary," which uses pornographic cutouts from magazines and clumps of elephant s-t is offensive and disgusting, and cows with their heads cut off and pigs cut in half suspended in formaldehyde are disgusting.

Let those people who want to see the art fully fund its exhibition, but every citizen should not be forced to pay for it. If we force people to fund art they find objectionable, then we are truly suppressing the freedom of expression. People should have the right to withhold their financial support to make their own point. That is freedom of expression.