Mayor Rudolph Giuliani Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Censoring Art

One of the most high-profile art censorship sagas of recent times is explored in a new book by Arnold Lehman out next month, titled Awareness: The Madonna, the Mayor, the Media, and the First Amendment. The former Brooklyn Museum director dives into the furore around the 1999 exhibition Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection, which took place at the New York museum while he was at the captain. The evidence had get-go opened at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1997 where it had too fatigued protests and made headlines.

In New York, Chris Ofili's painting The Holy Virgin Mary (1996)—depicting a black Madonna amidst porn mag cut-outs and elephant dung—was at the middle of the storm. In response to the painting, which he called anti-Catholic, New York'due south so-mayor Rudy Giuliani sought to cut the museum'due south funding and adios it from its metropolis-owned building. "It has taken Lehman two decades to fully absorb and reflect on events, and this book… is his very personal business relationship of what happened," says the publisher in a argument. In the extract beneath, Lehman describes presenting the controversial works in Sensation to Giuliani and his cohorts at New York City Hall.

Sensation: The Madonna, the Mayor, the Media, and the Beginning Amendment by Arnold Lehman

Extract from Sensation: The Madonna, the Mayor, the Media, and the Beginning Amendment

Maybe most surprising to me at the time, and certainly in hindsight, was the "Bastille Mean solar day meeting," as I called it, with the mayor, in City Hall on July 14, 1999, a meeting that both our board chair, Bob Rubin, and I had requested on a number of occasions simply with no response until we received a phone call a week before. With mayor Giuliani were DCA [Section of Cultural Diplomacy] commissioner Schuyler Chapin, deputy mayors Joseph Lhota and Randy Levine, and budget director Robert Harding. The mayor's office had earlier that week indicated that we would have 15 minutes to present our capital letter funding request of $20m for Brooklyn Museum'south new front end entrance. While the urban center had been providing operating funds for many decades to cultural organisations that were part of the CIGs—the Cultural Institutions Group, 33 organisations operating in city-owned buildings or on urban center-owned land, based on a formulaic annual resource allotment—capital funding was a hit-or-miss process most ofttimes dependent on political advancement from the civic president, city council, mayor or some combination of those.

After a pleasant welcome, and before getting to talk well-nigh the museum's pressing need for its proposed capital letter projection, the mayor, Bob and I talked near Brooklyn, where both the mayor and I were born, and exchanged friendly jibes virtually his Yankees versus the Mets. I then used the first part of our slide presentation to show the major need for the new entrance equally well as the highly engaging designs by our team of renowned Japanese builder Arata Isozaki and greatly respected New York architect James Polshek.

[…]

I concluded my presentation with slides from Sensation, starting with Damien Hirst's The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living—a ferocious shark encased in hundreds of gallons of formaldehyde. This immediately got the attending of anybody in the room and gave me the opportunity to talk almost the exhibition generally, the necessary ticketed admission fees and, most chiefly, its provocative nature. I showed one prototype later on some other of what we had understood to exist the about controversial works in the exhibition as reported from the Royal Academy and the media. I prefaced this part of my presentation by proverb that the RA'due south distinguished Exhibitions Secretary for two decades, Norman Rosenthal, had personally selected the works for the Sensation exhibition from the premier contemporary art collection in Great Britain, that of Charles Saatchi.

Installation view of Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection at the Brooklyn Museum. The show opened in October 1999 and included works past artists such as Damien Hirst, Marcus Harvey and Sarah Lucas Photo: Brooklyn Museum

Once more thinking that I would prepare Giuliani for what might happen, I went on to say that in the months before the exhibition opened to the public in London, in that location were already attacks in the British press and by Royal Academicians on the controversial nature of the works to exist shown and that—trying to brand the connection as clear as possible to the mayor—Rosenthal had been quoted in the U.k. Times in February 1997 [saying] that "such works were equally shocking, difficult, and idea-provoking every bit Goya's Disasters of War and Picasso's Guernica had been in their day" and that "fine art is proficient when it perplexes us." As I was quoting Rosenthal, I immediately idea that I might have overestimated the fine art-historical cognition of the mayor and his lieutenants!

[…]

As the meeting was ending, Mayor Giuliani shook hands with Bob Rubin, patted me on the back, and told Deputy Mayor Randy Levine to "give them what they want—they're good guys." With that said, I was already cyberbanking that $xx meg in city capital funding for the museum's new archway!

That was the last time I spoke with Rudy Giuliani.

[….]

However, on Wednesday morning, September 22, I answered a call from Schuyler to my office. After a few moments of nervous but cordial chitchat, he abruptly announced that he was delivering "a message from Mayor Giuliani that unless the museum immediately cancelled the Sensation exhibition, the city would terminate all funding for the BMA." I was incredulous that he had agreed to deliver this preposterous message and remained silent on the phone. Schuyler asked nervously, "Arnold? Arnold, are you there?" I held my atmosphere and spoke coolly, with great deliberation: "I'yard here, Schuyler. But where are you in this ultimatum? Where are you in all of this? What about freedom of expression?"

"I'm merely the messenger. I'yard just the messenger," Schuyler responded even more nervously. With my vocalism raised but still under control (which, thinking about it after, amazed me), I responded, "Just you're the damn commissioner of cultural affairs for the city of New York! You have to take a stand up!" He hung upwardly the telephone. An hour after, he called once again to tell me that the mayor'southward position had not changed. I asked if he had spoken to Giuliani, but he didn't answer. I asked if he was going to practise something about this destructiveness on the part of the mayor?

"Like what?" he asked.

"Similar quit," I replied.

Schuyler said something I couldn't make out, seeming nigh to whimper in response to my now nigh shouted proposition. This time, I hung up. Within minutes, Giuliani appeared for a City Hall printing conference, seemingly timed straight to Schuyler'southward second alarm. The New York Times reported that one of the mayor's aides had prompted a CBS reporter at the conference, Mary Gay Taylor, to ask a question virtually recent press coverage of Sensation. Giuliani jumped in with a clearly apposite reply denouncing the museum: "You lot don't accept a right to government subsidy for desecrating somebody else'southward religion… and, therefore we will do everything that we tin to remove funding for the Brooklyn Museum until the director comes to his senses and realises that if you lot are a government-subsidised enterprise, then you can't do things that desecrate the well-nigh personal and securely held views of people in social club." Needless to say, Giuliani's bulletin "until the managing director comes to his senses" rang louder in my ears than had I been standing in the belfry of London'due south Big Ben.

• Sensation: The Madonna, the Mayor, the Media, and the First Amendment, Arnold Lehman, Merrell Publishers , 248pp, £25 (hb), published ii September

winnerforme1940.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2021/08/12/extract-or-how-mayor-rudy-giuliani-went-from-patting-on-the-back-to-trying-to-pull-the-plug-on-sensation-show