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"Sensation" and lack of sensation | page 1, 2, 3
How ironic that Jane Alexander rejoined her actor friends on the barricades last week to support the Brooklyn Museum, since in "American Canvas," her valedictory report as she left the NEA chairmanship two years ago, she sharply criticized the elitism separating American artists from the communities they should serve. The Brooklyn show is a perfect example of the improper diversion of public monies -- in this case to aggrandize a single British collector, an obnoxious advertising executive of dubious taste. At the end of the 20th century, when popular culture has triumphed, the mission of museums must be to evangelize for art, to demonstrate art's higher meanings and continuing relevance to a mass audience that will otherwise be consumed in the blood-and-guts literalism of slasher films and shoot'em-up action-adventures. The Brooklyn show illustrates the utter bankruptcy and sterility of the avant-garde, which collapsed 30 years ago and is now desperately grasping at straws to get a reaction, even of disgust, from an indifferent public. Great works of art, like the monumental "Laocoön" (with its giant serpent strangling the agonized Trojan priest and his two sons), can be made out of Hellenistic sensationalism -- coincidentally a focus of my advanced seminar in aesthetics this semester at the University of the Arts. But the most lurid works in the Brooklyn show are pure kitsch. If I want to see carcasses or body parts floating in formaldehyde, I'll go to the Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia -- a spectacular and grisly 19th century medical collection that I recommend to everyone. Contemporary art, with its postmodernist gimmicks, is so divorced from science that Damien Hirst's high-school-project rot-and-fly cycle strikes some museum-goers as a profound revelation. (Wow, nature exists! Rise and shine, Manhattan!) We're back to Fellini's "La Dolce Vita," which four decades ago showed the cul de sac of modern intellectualism in scenes where chic partygoers raptly listen to nature sounds on a tape recorder and where an erudite, angst-dazed father murders his children in their beds. Let's get past this adolescent wallowing in slack "oppositional" art. The Romantic era of "subversive" gestures is over. As I have consistently maintained since my 1991 defense of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in Tikkun (where I derided his sentimentalizing liberal supporters), no self-respecting avant-garde artist should be on the government dole. Free speech protections in the United States do not extend to financial support of "cutting-edge" new art by taxpayers. Commissioned projects -- whether by the Pharaohs, the Medicis, the popes or the French kings -- always require the artist's subordination to the values and publicity needs of the patron. And I'm just as sick of "Catholic-bashing" as Giuliani himself. I may be an atheist, but I was raised in Italian Catholicism, and it remains my native culture. I resent the double standard that protects Jewish and African-American symbols and icons but allows Catholicism to be routinely trashed by supercilious liberals and ranting gay activists. Missing from media accounts was that this Brooklyn Museum flap disastrously broke in the midst of a furor over the alleged anti-Semitism of the Irish Catholic presidential wannabe Pat Buchanan. That a Jewish collector and a Jewish museum director had no compunction about selecting a parodic image of the Madonna from the whole of Chris Ofili's dung-bedecked oeuvre shows either stupidity or malice. The Brooklyn show has fomented hatreds in this country -- as witnessed by the placard of a defaced Star of David carried, according to the New York Post, by a demonstrator outside the museum on opening day. Is this the destructive train of thought that the contemporary arts want to foster? As I wrote last year in the progressive London magazine Index on Censorship, culture has shifted as we approach the millennium. Through "over-repetition and feeble imitation," I asserted, transgression and subversion have lost their once-potent charge: "We should be concerned now not with defiling and defaming traditional beliefs but in reconstructing out of the nihilistic ruins left by modernism and post-structuralism some enlightened new system of affirmative spiritual and political values." I oppose Mayor Giuliani's arbitrary and needlessly inflammatory use of city power to intimidate and harass an arts institution, but I applaud the position he has taken against an arrogant, pretentious, parasitic arts establishment that has made a mockery of art and injured its reputation in the eyes of the nation at large. The Brooklyn Museum has turned itself into Madame Tussaud's Wax Works -- a collegiate carnival and tinny video game for desensitized poseurs who fiddle while Rome burns. Retired U.S. Army Maj. Richard Rail writes to ask my view of the ongoing controversy
about literary critic and Palestinian spokesman Edward Said, whom the September issue of Commentary accused of fabricating details of his childhood and adolescence in Jerusalem. Rail observes that "today's Left seems even more dishonest than the old Left of Stalin's day" and that it is "increasingly comprised of those who force fit 'reality' to their ideology, inventing and lying as they go."
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