Brooklyn Bums.

• Author: Hazlett, Thomas W.
• Position: Argument against public aid to art - Brief Article

Welfare reform for artists

The New York Daily News--which touts itself as "the eyes, the ears, the honest voice" of the Big Apple--is very concerned about censorship. So when Mayor Rudolph Giuliani declared he would withdraw funding for the Brooklyn Museum of Art for rolling out the shocking "Sensation," a show featuring a portrait of the Virgin Mary decorated with clumps of elephant emissions, they explained it thusly: "SOUR ON RUDY: Poll Shows Most N.Y.ers Back Museum."

"They should be able to display whatever they want," the News quoted one city resident as saying. Giuliani "has no right to censor it, it's just art. One man's sense of art is another man's garbage." "It's like a preacher in a church," said another random New Yorker. "If you don't like what the preacher's saying, you can get up and leave."

Well, not this church. This friendly congregation takes its tithe right out of your paycheck, without so much as a mumbled benediction.

Why is it so difficult to explain the intrinsic link between censorship and subsidy? The News poll found that 58 percent of New York City residents believe no city official--not the mayor, not city councilmen--should have the power to cut off funding for offensive art projects. But the very essence of art funding is to selectively enhance some work to the exclusion of others. That's a reality dictated by economic scarcity. To say yes to dung artist Chris Ofili is to say no to street performer "bOINk." And when it's city cash flowing, it's city officials--through their appointed loyalists and budgetary controls--who ultimately make the call.

The Village Voice crowd, so vocal in support of the Brooklyn Museum's claim on the working man's taxes, embarrasses itself. The Voice's editor defended "Sensation," claiming that the dung was itself inoffensive and that the show was a paean to the "sacred and the profane." All right, we'll go with that on the mid-term.

But the very exercise--explaining High Art to the unwashed--was as phony as a Village Voice personal ad (so I hear). The liberals were only pretending to defend the work as genuinely Catholic. After all, they're not "viewpoint neutral," to use the legal phraseology. They don't lobby for public funding for born-again Impressionists from the Bible Belt.

Indeed, at "Sensation," what's the Virgin Mary doing with government subsidies? Surely it was only the dung that enabled this modern masterpiece to pass the church/state smell test. Otherwise, it would...