No Longer in Eye of Beholder, N.Y. Art in Eye of Storm

By JOHN J. GOLDMAN

April 7, 2001 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

NEW YORK — It’s the second battle of Brooklyn, a reprise of the war between Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and one of New York’s leading cultural institutions.

The fighting flared this week after the mayor named members to a new committee whose mandate is to recommend decency standards for exhibitions in museums receiving city funds. Charges and counter-charges are as thick as the dots on a pointillist painting.

Critics of the mayor expressed fears the panel could have a chilling effect on free expression.

Some went further, scoffing at the group’s composition, which includes Giuliani’s divorce lawyer, several lesser-known artists, political supporters of the mayor and Curtis Sliwa, founder of the Guardian Angels, an organization dedicated to safer streets and subways.

The controversy is an outgrowth of the mayor’s struggle in 1999 with the Brooklyn Museum of Art over its display of a painting of the Virgin Mary decorated with elephant dung as part of its exhibit “Sensation: Young British Artists From the Saatchi Collection.”

Giuliani, who charged that the work was anti-Catholic, lost a court battle when he sought to withhold city funds from the museum.

‘Yo Mama’ Prompts Mayor to Name Panel

The mayor’s new anger centers on another of the museum’s exhibits, a color photo titled “Yo Mama’s Last Supper,” which depicts Jesus as a nude woman. “I think what they did is disgusting, it’s outrageous,” Giuliani said.

The photo, which is on display through this month, prompted the mayor to establish the Cultural Affairs Advisory Commission, the decency panel charged with devising standards for New York museums that receive local tax dollars.

The mayor has stressed that taxpayers should not help fund art that attacks religion, race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation.

But critics see the move as a threat to the freedom of expression, guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.

“It’s round two,” said Floyd Abrams, a 1st Amendment attorney who successfully defended the Brooklyn museum in the first dispute.

“The mayor is significantly limited to how he can fight, and he is subject to consent decrees, which were the basis of ending the last Brooklyn museum case,” Abrams said Friday. “The mayor may not treat the Brooklyn museum differently from any other museum.”

The lawyer said that, while Giuliani may be “piqued” at the Brooklyn museum, any action he takes must affect all museums.

“What the mayor has asked this decency commission to look into is essentially whether there is some way that the city can defund or stop funding museums that offer art that the mayor or the commission find offensive,” Abrams said. “And that is precisely what the 1st Amendment forbids.”

Even before the commission’s members were named Tuesday, the Association of Art Museums, representing 175 museum directors in the United States, Canada and Mexico, strongly criticized the concept.

Calling the 1st Amendment the “cornerstone of American democracy,” the group said museum directors are “committed to ensuring that our institutions remain open to a wide range of ideas and artistic expressions.”

The creation of the panel also worried Ellen Liman, former head of the New York City Advisory Commission for Cultural Affairs under former Mayor David N. Dinkins, whom Giuliani defeated to become New York’s chief executive.

“Intelligent cultural institutions do self-searching and self-policing,” she said. “It’s the wrong message for the mayor of a leading cultural capital where these institutions are an important economic engine. . . . It has a very chilling effect.”

Lawyer Redefines Issue at Hand

Raoul F. Felder, a lawyer appointed to the group by Giuliani, said critics have obscured the real questions involved.

“The critics struck first, and they defined the issues,” Felder said. “The issues they defined are censorship and arbitrary determining of what is art and what is not art.

“That is not the issue at all,” said Felder, who is handling the mayor’s divorce. “The issue is whether public money should be spent on something that a large portion of the public finds personally revolting.

” . . . The commission has to address at what point does the civil government say too many of our citizens find this offensive and we cannot responsibly donate the money,” he added.

Panel Members: Who and Why?

Felder charged that both shows at the Brooklyn museum “picked on Catholics.”

“If they can do this to Catholics, they can do this to other people,” he said. “It’s a legitimate debate.”

Felder added that too many people were concentrating on the fact that he is representing Giuliani in divorce litigation.

“I was on the mayor’s art commission before,” he said, explaining that that group was dormant for three years. “I was here before this happened.”

The choice of Sliwa was designed to add a different perspective to the panel, Felder said. “I know the difference between a Michelob and a Michelangelo,” Sliwa joked during an interview this week. The Guardian Angels founder, who also is a radio talk show host, charged that political correctness reigns in New York City.

“If you say something against a group, if you vandalize a statue in front of a church with dung, you are arrested for a hate crime,” Sliwa said. “ . . . Do that and put it in an art gallery at taxpayers’ expense, they are prepared to give you an award and fete you as a creative artist.”

Administrators at the Brooklyn Museum of Art have kept a low profile in the controversy and have not commented on the mayor’s panel.

“The mayor has been very clear. Let’s get the recommendations in so he can at least assess them,” Sliwa said. “He is on borrowed time. He is a lame duck mayor.”

Under term limits, Giuliani can not seek a third term.

“What the mayor wants to do is get a debate going,” Felder said. “Maybe you get a consensus. Maybe you don’t. But it is a legitimate public issue.”