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In 1999, The Holy Virgin Mary, a painting by Chris Ofili, was shown in an exhibition titled Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection (see fig 1) at the Brooklyn Museum of Art (BMA). Featuring an African-American Madonna, three pieces of elephant dung, and clippings of buttocks and vaginas from pornographic magazines, the artwork incited the mayor of New York City at the time, Rudy Giuliani, to attempt to take away the museum’s city funding and terminate its building’s city-owned lease. What the myriad voices and perspectives on the controversy tell us is that the issue of Sensation is not black and white. It gives us a chance to consider fundamental questions regarding the art museum’s purpose, the partnership between the arts and the state, and the extent of artists’ free speech in public arenas.Sensation’s OriginsBrooklyn was not the first to see Sensation. It was first exhibited two years earlier in 1997 at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in London. Containing approximately ninety works of art by forty-two artists that included mediums such as painting, sculpture, photography, and installations, the show’s London debut drew the highest attendance of any contemporary art exhibition in the last fifty years. There, Sensation also raised controversy, but not over The Holy Virgin Mary. Marcus Harvey’s 1995 acrylic on canvas, Myra, portrayed the murderer Myra Hindley, who killed five children between 1963 and 1965 (see figure 2). Composed of child handprints, the painting was based on a photograph of Hindley that often appeared in British newspapers around that time. As a result, it was easily recognizable and highly notorious, thus causing outcry over such a cold, emotionally detached treatment of the subject. In contrast with how the fight against the exhibit came from the city mayor in the United States, in England it was the people who protested the artwork on display. The Mothers Against Murder and Aggression picketed outside the Royal Academy along with Winnie Johnson, the mother of one of Hindley’s victims. Additionally, one man vandalized Myra with red and blue Indian ink and another threw four eggs at it, causing the museum to temporarily remove the painting for conservator inspection. One member of the academy even resigned in protest.No doubt the Brooklyn Museum, often in the shadow of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met) and the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in Manhattan, was attracted to the attention that the show would bring them. After seeing its success across the pond, the BMA’s director at the time, Arnold Lehman, negotiated to host the exhibition in Brooklyn from October 2nd, 1999 through January 9th, 2000. The museum played up the drama of the show by posting a brightly colored health warning in front of the exhibition’s galleries that read “The contents of this exhibition may cause shock, vomiting, confusion, panic, euphoria, and anxiety. If you suffer from high blood pressure, a nervous disorder, or palpitations, you should consult your doctor before viewing this exhibition.” What is interesting about the excitement that the BMA tried to incite is that it proves that they encouraged viewers to believe that they would be shocked by Sensation. The ironic twist in the shock that the museum sought was that it came true, but to an extreme extent that the BMA probably never expected.What Happened When Sensation Stormed BrooklynInterestingly, none of the funding for Sensation came directly from the city government. The $5.7 million that the city contributed for the fiscal year 2000 was intended for “maintenance, security, administration, curatorial, educational services and energy costs.” Nevertheless, on September 22nd, two weeks before Sensation was about to open, the commissioner of the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs warned Lehman that the city would rescind its funding to the museum unless the whole show was canceled. The next day during a press conference, Mayor Giuliani accused the BMA of violating their lease agreement with the city since Sensation was “inaccessible to schoolchildren,” presumably because of its mature content. He also charged the city funds were being used “‘to attack and bash the Catholic religion… These public funds are being used to aggressively bash the religious views of a significant number of people in this city and state and country. And the question is, can taxpayer dollars be used for this kind of disgusting, anti-religious—in some ways really aggressively anti-religious—kind of demonstration?” Through his rhetorical question, Giuliani reveals his views on the questions of the art museum’s purpose and the nature of its financial partnership with the government. In his view, when taxpayer dollars come into play, art museums must consider the sensibilities of all the taxpayers that fund them when it comes to deciding which artwork to exhibit. His emphatic language, while probably used for political gain, nonetheless gives the clear message that art museums should not be allowed to offend anyone, especially on the basis of religion. Lehman, in defense of the museum, argued both on the grounds of the museum’s purpose to serve a diverse population as well as the creative process of artists. Lehman wrote in a letter to museum supporters that “we want to establish the BMA as a primary art destination for every tourist and every resident in New York City, reflecting the ethnic, racial, national, religious, economic, and lifestyle diversity of our population…we must compete for new, expanded, and diverse audiences.” Sensation serves this goal, according to Lehman, because it addresses “the topical sociocultural issues, expressed through art, that drive our daily lives.” Lehman also defended the artistic and sometimes peculiar mind, positing that artists “look at the world differently from you and me.” Their “antennas” for perceiving the world “may not be receiving the same things we receive, but they receive important messages…they should be, I believe, the primary protected species of the human race.” In contrast with Giuliani, Lehman argues that art museums are refuge for the minds of unique artists to live freely, expressing all thoughts through whatever form they choose. They should also serve a diverse public, serving people who prefer a traditional Virgin Mary as well as those who don’t. Despite his unique thoughts, Lehman’s words did not move anyone from the legal battle that would ensue. After Giuliani’s press conference, he threatened to withdraw funding, terminate the lease, replace the museum’s board of trustees, and take possession of the BMA building unless they canceled the exhibition. All of this might have been avoided, had the secret discussions between Robert S. Rubin, the chairman of the board of trustees, and Michael D. Hess, the city’s corporation counsel, been successful. At the time, the museum offered to put a few works in a special room within the exhibition and to remove The Holy Virgin Mary completely. It also offered to devote some of the show’s proceeds to arts education. Both Giuliani and Rubin agreed to this deal, but Rubin still had to communicate it to the rest of the board and to Lehman. Someone at City Hall told the press they had already sealed the deal, which, along with Hess’s apparently condescending attitude at his meeting with the board, persuaded them to refuse any concessions to the city. On September 28th, the BMA sued the city and the mayor, seeking “declaratory and injunctive relief” to stop the city from violating the museum’s rights under the First and Fourteenth Amendments and “punishing” it for continuing to show Sensation. On September 30th, the city retaliated by suing to terminate the museum’s lease in the New York State Supreme Court. On November 1st, U.S. District Judge Nina Gershon sided with the museum and granted them a preliminary injunction against the city to prevent it from withholding its monthly payment of its pledged funding for the year. She pointed out that since the BMA displayed reverential works of the Virgin Mary, “just as it would be wrong to suggest that the museum was illegally ‘endorsing religion by showing these works, there can equally be no suggestion that the museum is violating the [U.S. Constitution] by showing Mr. Ofili’s.” The city appealed the injunction, which meant the museum would have to prove that it would suffer “irreparable harm” if it lost its government funding. Luckily for the museum, however, the city dropped its appeal and agreed to restore funds. The museum, in turn, dropped its lawsuit and claim for legal fees.Audience reactionSociologists David Halle, Elisabeth Tiso, and Gihong Yi found from analyses of visitor survey data that the vast majority of those who saw Sensation were not offended by it and, in fact, thoroughly enjoyed it. While Halle, Tiso, and Yi acknowledge that the press coverage of the show probably caused the audience to be self-selected (because those who thought they would be offended stayed away from the exhibition), they argued that “this is precisely the point of showing such works in bounded institutions such as museums, which people must make a special effort to attend…Displaying items in a bounded institution is a reasonable compromise between allowing the freedom that culture needs to flourish and requiring the courtesy that certain groups—ethnic, racial, or religious—should not feel openly insulted in full public view.” Tables 1 through 3 show the various data collected from exit polls at the Sensation show in the museum. The poll was conducted by the UCLA LeRoy Neiman Center for the Study of American Society and Culture, with a sample size of 860 people and an unusually high 85%+ response rate. Unsurprisingly due to the audience’s self-selection, it was disproportionately Democrat and without religious affiliation compared to the rest of the United States at that time. What is most interesting about the data is that of the people who did find the exhibition offensive, Ofili’s painting was one of the least offensive works among the most provocative ones in Sensation. While only 4.6% of the audience found The Holy Virgin Mary to be “very offensive,” 10.8% of the audience found the Chapman Brothers’ sculpture Zygotic Acceleration, biogenetic d-sublimated libidinal model just as offensive, a more than double percentage increase (see figure 3). Tables 4 through 6 show data collected nationwide by the Center for Survey Research and Analysis at the University of Connecticut between September 29th and October 3rd, 1999, around the time the exhibit opened. The data measured the public attitude on government support of the arts and whether they should ban possibly offensive works from public institutions or open public spaces by political party affiliation. While Democrats and Republicans generally disagree about government arts funding, with Democrats supporting it and Republicans opposing it, they both do not support banning possibly offensive works in institutions. When it comes to more open public spaces, such as in the street and in parks, members of both parties tend to support banning offensive works displayed in these places. Halle, Tiso, and Yi speculate that this is because “the public seems to draw a reasonable distinction between what can be said in such institutions and what can be said in far more open public settings such as streets and billboards along highways.” Since one would have to go out of his or her way in order to visit a display inside a building, and can therefore make the choice to not visit it, he or she can easily avoid offense. But in an open public space, one cannot avoid such offensive material, which the public believes makes it more important for people to be sensitive about what they display in those spaces. Overall, while the public may disagree on government arts funding in the first place, they do agree that it is generally wrong to ban potentially offensive forms of expression available inside public institutions. Nina Gershon, the federal district judge that ruled in favor of the BMA on the basis of the First Amendment, made the decision the general public also would have made. Whether her ruling actually complies with the spirit of the First Amendment, however, was a topic for debate among law professors and constitutional scholars. Legal opinions on the verdictWhile the public generally sided with Gershon that the First Amendment barred the city from penalizing the BMA for refusing to remove offensive artwork, others disagreed with this application of the Constitution. David R. Strauss, a University of Chicago law professor, believes that using the First Amendment to successfully stop governments from censoring the arts that they fund will actually lower government funding of the arts in the long term. “The more effective First Amendments are in court” in favor of art institutions, Strauss explains, “the more government spending on the arts is likely to be cut, and cut in ways the First Amendment cannot prevent.” This will happen, Strauss posits, because as governments realize that they have such little power in deciding on what their arts funding is spent, they simply will not fund the arts in the first place. Strauss predicts the government will take this action because it has no obligation to fund the arts. When it does choose to fund the arts, it can be as selective and discriminatory as it pleases: “the government is entitled to draw distinctions when it funds speech that it would never be allowed to draw when it punishes people. The government can choose to fund theater but not ballet; it can choose to sponsor a troupe that performs only Shakespeare, while refusing to fund other theater companies.” Although this selectivity might seem discriminatory and unfair, it is legally acceptable, according to Strauss. And this selectivity directly allows for New York City to fund certain types of artwork while not funding others. Stephen B. Presser, a self-described “provincial law professor” from Northwestern University, generally agrees with Strauss but for different reasons. He contends that Giuliani’s actions against the BMA neither violated the First Amendment nor the Fourteenth Amendment as the museum alleged. Focusing on the original intent of the Bill of Rights to prove that the BMA and Gershon used them improperly, Presser thinks that it is improper for the Fourteenth Amendment, which applies to the federal government, to also apply to state and local governments.Presser also believes that the framers of the Constitution had specific ideas about how the government should promote the arts in a way that would allow it to be more selective than Gershon’s ruling allowed. “Culture exists to improve aesthetics, virtue, and morals,” says Presser, “and if some art instead encourages decadence and corruption, perhaps those concerned with the preservation of culture, or at least civic virtue, ought to be free from the obligation of supporting that art. It is for this reason, I think, that the First Amendment has never been held to protect obscenity.” Because culture’s purpose is to promote the common good, Presser argues, governments should be allowed to discourage art that they believe hinders that good. He cites the Supreme Court case Rust v. Sullivan, which ruled that it was acceptable for the federal government to prohibit doctors from counseling patients about abortion, as supporting the idea that the government can allow institutions on one side of an issue to present their view while disallowing speech from institutions on the other side if they receive government funding.Additionally, Presser argues that New York City had further rights to censor the BMA because these parties are in a partnership, therefore giving each of them equal authority to dissolve the partnership should they decide to: “If the mayor and the Brooklyn Museum are jointly engaged in the same endeavor [i.e. in a partnership], I don’t see any reason why Mayor Giuliani shouldn’t be free to threaten to end the partnership, on the theory that the purpose of the joint venture is being jeopardized by the course the museum has chosen to take.” Presser’s partnership argument is similar to a business transaction: if a business is providing a service to a customer, either party can cancel the transaction if they no longer wish to be a part of it. Giuliani was simply ending a transaction. David A. Ross, in contrast to Strauss and Presser, thinks that Giuliani’s claims were ridiculous, highly dubious about the offensiveness of Ofili’s “fine and strangely beautiful painting.” To him, it is no more inflammatory to Catholics than thousands of other artworks shown in publicly supported museums. Even if it was offensive, however, Ross argues that the city’s agreement with the BMA did not allow for the city to take away any art it dislikes on the museum’s walls. If it had this authority, it would be harmful to the public: “The Brooklyn Museum of Art’s administration has not pledged in its contract with the city to present an art-museum program that satisfies the aesthetic disposition of the city’s mayor. The trustees and director of the museum serve the public good by running an art museum intended to serve as broad a set of public interests as professionally possible.” Concurring with Lehman, Ross points out that since the museum serves a diverse public, it should not cater to the needs of only one specific segment of that public. Ross also gives the mayor’s intent and the money at stake as reasons for which Giuliani’s actions were inappropriate. It was nothing more than a vehicle for Giuliani’s political agenda, Ross asserts, in his appeal to New York’s Catholics to steer them away from Hilary Clinton, who was running against him at the time for the Senate race. This opinion is reflected in Giuliani’s statement to the press that “if I get the opportunity to vote sometime in the United States Senate, I would vote very, very differently from my opponent on the issue of whether public funds should be used to desecrate people’s religion.”Art Critics Reaction Neither the practicing law community nor the art world was unified in its feelings towards Sensation. Perhaps the most surprising response was the lack thereof from New York City’s major art institutions, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met) and the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA). Neither museum came out in strong support for the BMA. The director of the Met at the time, Philippe de Montebello, even opposed Sensation, and shamed others for not speaking out against the exhibit for the sake of the status quo: “I have seen the exhibition and I think the emperor has no clothes...what remains terribly disturbing to me is that so many people, serious and sensitive individuals, are so cowed by the art establishment that they do not speak out and express their dislike for works that they find either repulsive or unaesthetic or both.”Art Historian Linda Nochlin, on the other hand, while admitting that the works were disturbing, also argued for precedents to unsettling artwork and the fact that no one is forced to see the show: “Yes. Some of the works are shocking both in form and content...but hardly more shocking--and in my opinion considerably more original--than many of the titillating nudes by Balthus or Lucien Freud, both of whom have been certified as important by major retrospectives at Montebello’s own museum. And, after all, is it really so terrible to shock on the taxpayer’s money when the shock resides solely in the realm of representation? No one is being beaten up at the Brooklyn Museum...In fact no one is being forced to see the show at all.”ConclusionIt is fascinating how art has a unique power among forms of expression to upset and shock us. It sounds like Nazi Germany to argue for the banning of certain books in public libraries; yet, many people do not find it so extreme to consider prohibiting certain, potentially offensive artworks from being shown at public art museums. Although the BMA ended up the victor in its battle against New York City, some would argue that it may have lost the war in procuring greater funding for the arts. While controversial art certainly increases attendance and membership, for the funders of the museum it may cause a damaged reputation or loss of trust and support from the public. And what future museums can learn from Sensation is also complicated and up for debate. What can be said, however, is that art, especially works that explore taboo or sensitive subjects, can have a powerful effect on viewers, something that museums should carefully consider when they include such works in an exhibition.Figure 1. Chris Ofili, The Holy Virgin Mary, Collection of Charles SaatchiFigure 2. Marcus Harvey, Myra, 1995, Collection of Charles Saatchi, London.Figure 3. Jake Chapman, Zygotic Acceleration, Biogenetic, De-Sublimated Libidinal Model, Collection of Charles Saatchi, London.left34163000BibliographyAlberge, Dalya. "Attacks Force Hindley Portrait to Be Removed." The Times (London), September 19, 1997, Home news.?Barstow, David. "Art Museum Trustees Say City Hall Pushed Them Too Hard." New York Times, October 10, 1999.Edelson, Gilbert S., “Some Sensational Reflections”, in Unsettling “Sensation”: Arts-Policy Lessons from the Brooklyn Museum of Art Controversy, 171-180.???Fraser, Andrea. "A 'Sensation' Chronicle." Social Text 19, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 127-56.??Halle, David. Crossroads: Art and Religion in American Life. Edited by Alberta Arthurs and Glenn Wallach. New York: New Press, 2001.Halle, David, Tiso, Elisabeth, and Yi, Gihong, “The Attitude of the Audience for ‘Sensation’”, in Unsettling “Sensation”: Arts-Policy Lessons from the Brooklyn Museum of Art Controversy, 134-152.Presser, Stephen B., “Reasons We Shouldn’t Be Here: Things We Cannot Say”, in Unsettling “Sensation: Arts-Policy Lessons from the Brooklyn Museum of Art Controversy, 52-71.Ross, David A., “An All Too Predictable Sensation”, in Unsettling “Sensation: Arts-Policy Lessons from the Brooklyn Museum of Art Controversy, 96-103.Rothfield, Lawrence, “Introduction: The Interests in Sensation”, in Rothfield, Unsettling “Sensation”: Arts-Policy Lessons from the Brooklyn Museum of Art Controversy, 1-11.??Rothfield, Lawrence, ed. Unsettling "Sensation." New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001.?"Sensations: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection." Kalamazoo Valley Community College. Accessed April 29, 2014.Strauss, David A. “The False Promise of the First Amendment”, in Unsettling “Sensation: Arts-Policy Lessons from the Brooklyn Museum of Art Controversy, 44-51.??Vosburgh, Robert. "Government Subsidies of Controversial Art: Dung, the Virgin Mary, and Rudy Giuliani." Temple Political and Civil Rights Law Review, Fall 2001, 1-25.??Washington Times (Washington, D.C.). "Sense and 'Sensation.'" April 3, 2000. ................
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