By
Tom McDermott
The First Amendment took center stage this week as the Brooklyn Museum of Art - the people who brought you the grotesque picture of Blessed Virgin Mary covered in elephant dung last year - unveiled "Yo Mama's Last Supper." This "work of art" is a photograph modeled after Da Vinci's Last Supper, in which Christ takes the form of a completely nude woman, depicted by the artist, Renee Cox, herself. Also, all the disciples in the photograph are black except for Judas Iscariot, who is a white man.
The artist claims that the photo is her way of responding to what she considers to be the repressive teachings of the Catholic Church. Unlike the elephant dung artist, who had claimed (spuriously in my opinion) that the dung was a symbolic attempt to make a spiritual connection with the earth, Ms. Cox makes little pretense as to her motivation for the work. It is her private declaration of war on the church.
In response to the controversy generated, Mayor Guiliani hopes to create a commission to screen art displayed in publicly funded museums.
It may surprise you to learn that, although I believe the mayor has the upper-hand morally, I disagree with his course of action.
Ms. Cox has the right to attack, with all the hate and malice she can muster, the religion that I and millions of other Americans hold sacred. Let me repeat that so I am abundantly clear. Artists have a First Amendment right to blaspheme, ridicule people of faith, denigrate their beliefs and culture and otherwise commit sacrilege. I wouldn't want to live in a country where they didn't have the freedom to do so.
And, yes, as long as funding of the arts is recognized as legitimate government function, Ms. Cox should not be singled out among the art community as one who is less deserving of public funding than the next guy. Whether or not government should be in the business of funding art at all is another debate, which is unrelated to the First Amendment. It becomes a constitutional issue only if the defunding of art is selective.
That is why I disagree with the mayor. A committee to screen offensive art runs contrary to firmly entrenched notions of free speech. The city should avoid constitutional issues altogether by eliminating funding to all the museums in New York. The free market demand for art is such that government subsidization is no longer necessary.
In previous columns, I have been a strong advocate of viewpoint neutrality in the allocation of public funds and resources for promoting objectionable speech.
And I still am. I am not suggesting the government stop funding art because of people like Ms. Cox, although she has certainly succeeded in making funding less palatable to many people, but because the time has come when the art world has to recognize that it no longer needs government support.
But, even if that time has not yet come, the idea of viewpoint neutrality is completely foreign to the leftist-dominated arts and croissant crowd. Imagine you spent years painting an awe-inspiring icon of the Blessed Virgin without any feces, urine, pus, blood, nudity or anything else that would detract from the viewer's visual and spiritual experience. Then you took your work to the curator of the Brooklyn Museum.
You would be laughed out of the building.
And if, by some miracle, they decided to show it, the ACLU would probably get an injunction to remove it from public display on the grounds that the taxpayer-funded museum might be promoting Christianity. Sure, the great religious works of old are grandfathered into public museums, but there is absolutely no room for religious works in the modern art world.
Put a picture of the Virgin Mary on public display and, in the eyes of the left, you're nothing more than a hatemonger imposing his values on others. Fling some crap on it and all of a sudden you're a bold, visionary artist on his way to the top.
What a difference a little fecal matter makes.
