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Leaving Art to Critics, Not Mayors
January 14, 2002
By JOYCE PURNICK
CYNICS may think the Jewish Museum waited until Rudolph W.
Giuliani was safely out of City Hall before opening a
provocative exhibit that looks at the growing artistic use
of symbols from the Nazi era.
Yes, once again, works of art are sure to tax the tolerance
of another New York religious community, given the subject
matter, though the exhibit coming in March to the Jewish
Museum, on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, is scholarly and
placed firmly in context.
But don't expect a repeat of the dust-up surrounding
"Sensation," the 1999 exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art
that precipitated a cultural commotion. Mayor Michael R.
Bloomberg said just yesterday: "I am opposed to government
censorship of any kind. I don't think the government should
be in the business of telling museums what is art or what
they should exhibit."
Nor is it just the change in mayors that will spare us. Mr.
Giuliani's own "decency commission" has given his museum
morality a decent burial.
The commission was created by the former mayor to recommend
standards for museums that receive city money. The portrait
of the Virgin Mary dotted with elephant dung, part of the
"Sensation" exhibit, so infuriated him that he withheld the
museum's city subsidy.
A judge overruled him. Hence, the naming of the mayoral
commission and a subcommittee to write the new rules,
headed by Leonard Garment, the prominent Washington lawyer
who had worked on a similar Congressional report about the
National Endowment for the Arts in 1990.
As that report did, this one rejects government censorship
as, if nothing else, legally impractical: "The Supreme
Court has made it quite clear that content-based standards
for government-funded culture will not pass constitutional
muster if those standards discriminate among works and
activities based solely on concepts such as decency or
offensiveness."
Efforts to get around Supreme Court decisions would doom
the city to perpetual litigation and "bureaucratic
nightmares," Mr. Garment writes.
The city could withdraw its financing and let cultural
institutions fend for themselves, but that is wholly
unrealistic. That leaves the report's recommendation that
institutions and the city take into consideration the
"general standards of decency, civility and respect for the
diverse belief and values of New Yorkers." It also
recommends regular city reviews of whether institutions are
fulfilling their missions, and it chided the Brooklyn
Museum, saying it "compromised its independence" with the
"Sensation" exhibit, through excessive collaboration with
commercial interests.
Floyd Abrams, the Brooklyn Museum's First Amendment lawyer
in its litigation with the city, applauded the report as "a
tribute to the First Amendment and informed public
opinion." He added that he would be troubled if the report
opened the door even a crack to letting city officials get
involved in deciding which pieces of art get government
money and which do not.
Mr. Garment said that was not the report's intent, but in
any case, we will never know how it might have been
implemented, because the report does not officially exist.
Which is a peculiar concept, given its ragged path.
Last summer, the Giuliani administration asked Mr. Garment
to make his draft harsher. He declined, and then, without
his knowledge, another subcommittee member drafted a stern
code of ethics. It was legally flawed and went nowhere, and
then came the events of September.
SIX days before Mr. Giuliani left office, Daniel Connolly,
a former city lawyer who is now with Mr. Giuliani's new
consulting firm, sent Mr. Garment an e-mail message saying
that the mayor would not have the time to focus on the
report and referred vaguely to its publication "next year."
But Mr. Bloomberg's communications director, William
Cunningham, said, "I don't think I'm going to ask the mayor
to read a report we have no interest in."
As for the Jewish Museum, while it receives significantly
less city money than the Brooklyn Museum does, it does get
some. But Mr. Bloomberg is not in a punitive mood: If you
don't like a museum exhibit, "don't go to see it," he said
yesterday. "And that is going to be my strategy: I do not
plan to go to the Jewish Museum to see this particular
exhibit."
In a way that is a shame. Despite its controversial
reputation, reported and maybe partially created by the
press, the coming exhibit is also likely to attract
thoughtful commentary, and is clearly meant to be
revealing, not sensationalistic. For instance, it includes
busts of Josef Mengele with comments by some who knew him,
and gas canisters with designer labels that the curator,
Norman Kleeblatt, said were intended to show how something
glamorous can be made out of something poisonous.
Then again, perhaps it's preferable that the mayor stay
away. Museums are hardly immune to criticism, but we are
learning that the best critics are not elected ones.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/14/nyregion/14MATT.html?ex=1012077761&ei=1&en=cbd842d6cb0026ed
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