Wednesday, 4 April 2001
Aspiring artists hoping for exposure in New York need to take care. If your work risks causing offence to the city's mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, or a group of his friends about to be appointed to an official "decency commission", you may be chased out of town. Steer clear of all religious depictions.
Aspiring artists hoping for exposure in New York need to take care. If your work risks causing offence to the city's mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, or a group of his friends about to be appointed to an official "decency commission", you may be chased out of town. Steer clear of all religious depictions.
The creation of the commission is Mayor Giuliani's latest big idea in his battle to keep New York's museums on the moral straight and narrow. Or that is how he sees it. Civil liberties groups consider it an illegal assault on the free expression rights of artists. For them it is censorship.
Apparently, Mr Giuliani intends his commission to root out works of art from the city's 34 publicly supported cultural institutions that may cross the line into obscenity. But where does that line lie? If there should be such a line. The panel members are buddies and aides of the mayor, who leaves office at the end of this year.
Mr Giuliani first frothed about so-called obscene art in 1999, when the Brooklyn Museum of Art opened Sensation, a collection of Saatchi-owned works, which included a black Madonna spattered with elephant dung. Mr Giuliani suspended city funding and tried to have the museum evicted, until a judge stopped him. When the museum hung a photo-parody of the Last Supper with a nude black woman in the place of Jesus he called it "disgusting".
Barbara Handman, director of People for the American Way, said yesterday: "The mayor has dragged the city through one costly, losing battle after another, as he persists in his attempt to become chooser-in-chief and impose his choices on the rest of us."
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