Ross Weeks compressed these thoughts through the cyber-mist:

>So far as I can tell from a distance, the Brooklyn Museum invited the
>censorship as a way to promote its exhibit.  It did so in its own
>advertising and promotion -- by telling everyone within driving distance
>that it had a titillating and probably offense exhibit and then named it
>"Sensational."  Do museum professionals have in our Code of Ethics some
>"right" to act as flamboyant advance people for a circus?


Museums have every right to produce controversial exhibitions and market
them as such.  The human environment is full of provocative ideas from
artists, scientists, politicians, musicians, writers, preachers,
economists, and taxi drivers.  Thankfully!  One can hardly have a
provocative idea without it by definition being offensive to someone, and
let's hope this will always be the case in our culture.  Why shouldn't
museums embrace and celebrate the controversial in the same way they do
the historical and traditional?

Still, there is the more cynical view that the Brooklyn museum simply
manipulated its PR to grab center-stage in a controversy of its own
making -- for purely self-serving reasons.  I don't know if that is the
case, but even if it were it does not excuse an attempt to censor and to
violate the public trust by withdrawing its funding -- to blame the
victim for its own  rape, no matter how "titillating" it had behaved.



     _________________________________________________________________
     S t e p h e n    N o w l i n       Director, Williamson Gallery

     Vice President                     Producer, Art Center Online
     Art Center College of Design       www.artcenter.edu
     _________________________________________________________________

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