New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has a habit of losing his cool over things he doesn’t like and then taking rash action. His plan to establish a commission to keep offensive art out of city-subsidized museums looks to be just the latest example.
The impulse is understandable, but it’s not likely to get him anywhere.
The target of his ire is a photograph by Renee Cox, which is currently on display at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. It re-creates the Last Supper, but with Jesus portrayed by a nude black woman (Cox herself). Giuliani denounced the piece as “outrageous,” “disgusting” and “anti-Catholic.” Not only that, but he said he was sick of seeing taxpayers forced to subsidize such blasphemy and vowed to appoint a panel to set “decency standards” for works displayed in museums that get public funds.
The effort is understandable and not entirely misguided. It’s one thing for believers to have to put up with art that strikes them as sacrilegious–and quite another for them to help pay for its propagation. If Cox wants to be free to infuriate the masses, maybe she shouldn’t expect the masses to underwrite her efforts.
But Giuliani’s effort is not a good bet to succeed. For one thing, as some New Yorkers have noted, a married man whose mistress receives city police protection is not in the best position to preach against public subsidies to immorality.
More pertinent, he has a lousy record in legal battles over free speech issues. In a previous dispute with the Brooklyn Art Museum, the mayor took offense at a painting of the Virgin Mary smeared with elephant dung, cut off city funding to the museum, and tried to evict it from a city-owned building. The city not only lost the suit but ended up agreeing to pay a $5.8 million settlement.
The mayor, however, takes heart from a 1998 U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding a congressional mandate that the National Endowment for the Arts take into consideration “general standards of decency” when awarding grants to artists. But there’s less there than meets the eye. A majority of the justices said the provision was essentially hortatory and couldn’t be used to penalize “disfavored viewpoints”–which sounds like exactly what Giuliani would like to do.
If the mayor and many taxpayers don’t want to subsidize obnoxious art, their only real alternative is choosing not to subsidize any art. Every time a brouhaha erupts between politicians offended by controversial art and artists who seek out controversy, that option sounds more appealing.
