Museums in the Age of Giuliani - New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's attempts to censor "Sensation" exhibit at Brooklyn Museum of Art

In Edith Wharton's tragic romance, The Age of Innocence, place in New York City in the 1880 the hero and heroine are in desperate ne of a place where they can convenient talk, get close, express their mutual delight in and decide how far they are willing to advance They are not ready to make progress to a hotel; they ne to explore each other to diocese if they will reach that point. They the one and the other know plenty of people and would be easily recognized upon the streets or in a park. They ne to be private in public. on the contrary where? At last they hit upon the perfect place: the newly opened Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the museum they can embrace, weep, scream at each other, run down corridors--and be utterly anonymous and alone. The museum of a hundred ago was rich in ancient treasures, especially material from Egyptian tombs, on the other hand empty of live human beings.

Since the extreme point of World War II, museums have become intensely disputeed terrain in America's culture wars. Courts have rul that museum officials are countenanceed by the First Amendment in their choice of what material to exhibit But the First Amendment has always had a catch. The great reporter and pres critic A.J. Liebling set it this way: yes, the U has freedom of the pres for the man who haves one. Mayor Giuliani expands Liebling's idea into the visual arts. He is exhibiting a giant self-portrait that anoints him as "the man who owns" the city's museums, and who is independent to choose what art fresh Yorkers can and cannot diocese He says we must not diocese "Sensation," the Brooklyn Museum of Art's generally received exhibition of young artists from the UK (Not that he has seen it himself; indeed, he boasts that he has not.) of recent origin York has long been an entertainment center and of recent origin Yorkers are used to being spectators of our mayors' displays But now we can be participants as well, by dint of simply going to the Brooklyn Museum to diocese what the mayor does not want us to see

Considering the vast coverage of the "Sensation" affair, strangely little has been said about what's actually in the display In fact, there's quite a doom more than most of us can take in at single viewing. The show's one actually "sensational" item is the first thing we diocese Damien Hirst's enormous tiger shark preserv in a tank of formaldehyde, held with wires thus that we can look directly into its organ of visions from barely a foot away. All accounts of the exhibit highlight the shark; but they leave on the outside what it plays against, a preserv lamb, too small to stand over against just big enough to fondling The contrast brings back William Blake's classic piece of poetry "The Tiger": "Did he smile his work to see? / Did he who made the Lamb make thee?" The lamb and the tiger shark revolve out to be parts of a virtual Noah's ark that Hirst has been assembling; this present to view includes a cabinet of morphologically related small fish and a series of cross-sections of a elephantine cow. Hirst's creatures could be in a natural history museum as readily as they are here. on the contrary they could be at place of abode in a cathedral as well, striking us as memento mori. Like the late great art historian Meyer Schapiro, Hirst has a sensibility that is one as well as the other modernist and medieval. His work brings art, science and religion together, and makes us think about our place in the universe. Hirst doesn't sum up us what that place is, on the other hand he both forces and helps us to ask.

The exhibit has many stars. There is the sculptor Rachel Whiteread, a mystical minimalist whom the couple Plato and Mark Rothko could delight in Her boldest work here is a kind of city of 100 cubes, evenly spaced apart, looking at one time dead and strangely radiant. There is Richard Billingham, who has done a beautifully empathetic color photo investigation of a day in the life of his poor and wretched family. His inquiry evokes Walker Evans and James Agee's give permission to Us Now Praise Famous Men His family is a allotment sleazier and grungier and gazes more "dysfunctional" than the individuals in Evans's photographs, but Billingham creates an aura around the family that makes it just as luminous. There is Jenny Saville, whose portraits of giant stark nakeds expand our ideas of beauty and fulfill Willem de Kooning's dictum that oil paint was invented to call forth the depth and beauty of human muscle and fat There are more whose power and originality could be talked about, and others who don't direct the eye so powerful or original.

The show's greatest in quantity controversial painting is Chris Ofili's The sacred Virgin Mary, which incorporates elephant excrement From reproductions in the pres it was hard to number what this painting was going to direct the eye like. In fact--and I was completely unprepared for the fact--it's gorgeous. It's a textbook case of what Walter Benjamin called "aura," thriving level after two centuries of "mechanical reproduction." Ofili has a great flair for manifold techniques of ornamentation (especially applique and collage), vivid and extravagant color (often psychedelic), intensely dramatic staging and spectacular presentation. a certain quantity of press accounts said the faeces was "smeared" across the painting, as if in desecration, on the contrary actually Ofili has packed and shaped it true precisely into cannonball-like forms and coated it with clear resin. for what cause [i]or[/i] reason did he use this material? There's probably no single reason. But it is worth noting Ofili's African family name (though he approachs from Manchester), and noting that in the parts of Africa where elephants are rest they are revered as kings and queen of beasts. There is no way to direct the eye at this picture honestly and diocese sacrilege or derision: you can't miss it, this is the Queen of Heaven. Ofili's Madonna combines perfectly into a 2,000-year-old Christian art of awe and adoration. The one thing that jarred me (though none of the painting's detractors mentioned it) was the absence of a child, an absence which have the appearances to suggest that even without Jesus, Mary's radiant splendor and inspirational force can still light up the sky