Word: giuliani
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...rest of the nation debated a decade ago whether taxpayers should fund controversial art, but in the capital of crude, few people consider rude art a problem. Last week, however, an aide showed Giuliani a New York Daily News article with the headline GALLERY OF HORROR. Previewing Sensation, an exhibit set to open at the Brooklyn Museum of Art this Saturday, the article warned of installations containing animals pickled in formaldehyde and graphic sculptures of people with genitalia where their faces should...
...Holy Virgin Mary, a 1996 collage by Chris Ofili, an award-winning British artist who uses elephant feces in his work. "The idea of having so-called works of art in which people are throwing elephant dung at a picture of the Virgin Mary is sick," said Giuliani. He announced that the city would cut its funding to the museum--about $7 million this year, or a third of the museum's budget--unless Sensation was canceled...
Including the mayor, though he did have a look at the exhibition's catalog. It can't convey all the nuances Ofili intends with excrement, though Giuliani might be mollified if he knew that the artist affixes clumps of dung to just about everything, including Absolut vodka bottles and images of James Brown. It can be hard to take this sort of art seriously--it seems designed only to shock, after all--but it is easy to demonize. For his part, Ofili wasn't talking; his London gallery issued a statement saying that as a Roman Catholic, he wanted...
...Giuliani, who is likely to run for Senate against Hillary Rodham Clinton, saw an opportunity. "He knows many people are uncomfortable with taxpayers subsidizing upper-middle-class decadence," says Fred Siegel, professor of U.S. history at New York City's Cooper Union. To subject this move by Giuliani to crass political analysis is to see brilliance; he won't win the artsy crowd anyway. Upstate voters, as well as the Roman Catholics across the state who often form a bloc of swing voters, will see him as protecting basic values. And Clinton must defend the art or keep quiet. Wisely...
...would Giuliani really harm an important cultural institution that serves an otherwise art-starved neighborhood? Sure. By week's end, staff members were uttering his favorite words: "No negotiation." It's unclear, however, whether the mayor actually has the legal authority to refuse a check to an entity promised one in the budget he signed. The case will doubtless end up in court. There are constitutional issues too: the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the government cannot penalize artists solely because their work is disagreeable...