Showtime.

• Author: Freund, Charles Paul
• Position: Public funding of questionable art shows

Public art as a source of private profit

By now, everyone must be bored with the avant garde art establishment and its recurrent trick of trying to revolt people by combining the atelier with the bathroom, the slaughterhouse, or the morgue. It turned that trick yet again in October, when the Brooklyn Museum of New York warned that the art in its notorious "Sensation" exhibit might cause "vomiting" and "confusion," in just the way Hollywood schlockmeisters used to "warn" people that some lousy horror movie could scare them "to death," promising in their ads to pay for the funerals. Of course, the museum didn't mean its lurid warning any more seriously than did the makers of The Screaming Skull: It was just another showtime.

The only real difference between Hollywood and the art establishment, at least in cases like "Sensation," is that while movie audiences aren't forced to underwrite theaters that show lousy movies, everyone is taxed to support art museums on the theory that art shows, however cynically produced, are a source of general enlightenment. But the result is that the art world becomes best known for its most cynical (or, at best, its most marginal) work - filled with bowel movements, urine, bloodletting, animal carcasses, etc. - because that is the source of all the shouting over what kind of artwork should be supported by taxes. Under those circumstances, general enlightenment gives way to general contempt. If anyone set out to undermine the power and meaning of creative expression, they could devise no better system than by joining art financially to a republic whose cultural role is otherwise limited to a guarantee of free speech.

The one really noteworthy aspect of "Sensation" was that, this time, the cynicism behind this show bled through its First Amendment posturing. Even the New York art world seemed bored with the exhibit and embarrassed by the controversy. And no wonder: The show's centerpiece, as it emerged from snowballing publicity, was nothing more interesting than a piece of X-rated religious kitsch. If that's the best that enlightened private arts patronage teamed with esteemed public museums has to offer, then it's no surprise that everybody has become stupefied.

True, some people played their roles as they have been established in a long run of similar "shock" performances. Mayor Rudy Guiliani, perhaps sensing political opportunity, thundered righteously over what he called "sick stuff," in particular a work called The Holy Virgin Mary. As everybody now knows, that work depicts its subject with the use of elephant shit and little photos of bare human asses clipped from porno magazines. Guiliani moved to withhold the museum's subsidy and even to evict it from its city-owned premises.

Editorialists at The New York Times thundered in return about state censorship. The museum sued; the mayor threatened to countersue. Crowds lined up outside the Brooklyn museum, with patrons offering reporters such cliches as, "Art is supposed to be provocative." Meanwhile, Chris Ofili, the manufacturer...