The Brooklyn Stink

Should that speck of elephant dung be moved up or down on the Holy Mother's breast? To the left or right of that pornographic snippet in the background? These are the kind of questions New Yorkers got to ask starting Oct. 2, when the Brooklyn Museum of Art opened the exhibit "Sensation" to the public.

The name is probably more apt than its director, Arnold Lehman, ever intended. "Sensation" was advertised as liable to "cause shock, vomiting, confusion, panic, euphoria and anxiety." Indeed, its contents--most controversial of which are sliced-up animals suspended in formaldehyde and Chris Ofili's painting of the Virgin Mary with a generous helping of dung on her bosom--are not for the knock-kneed.

But far greater than the aesthetic or moral shock of the exhibit may be its political repercussions. Here New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani has raised a stink of his own. The mayor cut the museums municipal funding of $7 million annually, citing his belief that public funding should not subsidize the establishment or desecration of religion.

Giuliani's position is simple enough, and right on the ball. But it masks a simmering brew of constitutional, moral and even religious questions. Sound a lot like "Piss Christ" or Robert Mapplethorpe all over again? The same issues boiled over then, and the same issues continue to define America's bitter culture war today. While it may be tempting, therefore, for those of us who support the mayor to just render due kudos and go home, perhaps we should take advantage of this fresh opportunity to explain why he was right--maybe even to propose a just accommodation of publicly funded speech and decency, artistic freedom and religious values.

Free speech will be at the core of the debate, since the museum filed its suit against the city on First Amendment grounds. But it shouldn't be. The First Amendment is indeed about the right of expression. But it is not about any chimerical right to have others subsidize that expression. As long as we keep this crucial distinction in mind, there should be no problem with the government insisting on certain criteria as a precondition of funding--those who find the stipulations stifling can seek money elsewhere and leave the matter at that.

Unfortunately, the Courts may not see it that way. In 1996, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a District decision gutting a statute that required the National Endowment for the Arts to respect "general standards of decency and respect" in its grant-awarding process. Implicit in such rulings is a reading of the First Amendment that goes something like this: whenever the state throws its weight behind a specific set of beliefs, it is establishing one worldview at the expense of another. And this the First Amendment explicitly prohibits it from doing. You don't have to support art, this peculiar interpretation of the Constitution counsels; but once you get in the game, moral criteria are illegitimate and only artistic considerations should apply.

Never mind that such a value-free reading of the establishment clause doesn't square with the historical record. The same House that passed the First Amendment also voted, by an overwhelming margin, to set aside a national day of thanksgiving and prayer. An injunction against establishment was thus never meant to imply that government could not encourage a healthy respect for religion. It meant only that the state could not establish a specific creed, as had been the case in England.

But even within a modern First Amendment framework, it still seems public funding could be withheld from any activity whose only purpose is the desecration, rather than the well-intentioned artistic presentation, of an alternative world view. After all, when government funds all manner of artistic visions equally and then steps back as they compete in the marketplace of ideas, it is merit that determines whatever establishment of truth ensues.

But when government subsidizes empty desecration, devoid of any intellectual or artistic value, the state itself is making that determination--and this is the very evil a neutral First Amendment was supposed to guard against. So proponents of the mayor can still support his tough stand on a painting that callously juxtaposed the scatological with the divine, right? So it seems. Until, that is, they learn that Chris Ofili is a Roman Catholic who uses elephant feces as a symbol of fertility. On what possible grounds can we then deny funding to his affirmative interpretation of Christianity?

Athough experiment might be of use. Imagine a canvas covered with swastikas. The artist insists the symbols are not meant as an attack on the Jews, but rather as the celebration of a Nazi industrial policy that achieved full employment while permitting women to stay home. Would we still not have every right to oppose the use of public funding in displaying such work? I believe we would.

Why? Because irrespective of an artists intentions, there are certain symbols and images so sanctified by history, so essential to a peoples self-definition, and so central to the way they conceive of themselves and relate to the Universe, that public funding of what might legitimately be perceived as their desecration is downright wrong. Neither is this tantamount to censorship--desecrate at will in your home, display to your hearts content in private galleries. But don't demand that others pay for your vision.

Where, then, do we draw the line? Public funding of desecration of religious symbols and sacred objects of singular significance is out, but what about art meaningfully representing subject matter that merely conflicts in a serious way with ones worldview? Should a born-again evangelical have to see his tax dollars spent on representations of homosexuality? How about Marcel Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase?" He might just fear hellfire and brimstone as punishment for underwriting any display of carnality. Heck, what about a fanatical tree-hugger--should his tax dollars help house murals depicting the brutal subjugation of the American West?

Perhaps the government should play no role in funding art. That, indeed, would be a neat solution. No delicate categories to demarcate, no slippery slopes to get tripped up on and none of the moral ambiguity. No Smithsonian perhaps, and no safeguarding of the nation's cultural heritage either; working class families might even have to pay discomfittingly higher ticket prices in private galleries.

But no, that's not really a satisfactory arrangement either. Government clearly has a compelling interest in making quality art accessible to those who might not otherwise be able to enjoy it, if for no other reason than that the maintenance of healthy civic institutions is more likely to be carried on successfully by citizens with refined sensibilities than by couch-potatoes. The difficulty in devising just funding guidelines is no excuse for giving up.

Frankly, however, holding the line at sacred representations and symbols of faith strikes me as tenable. Duchamp's artwork and Mapplethorpe's photography are not so much frontal attacks on another's worldview as independent assertions of other, potentially conflicting visions. Where conflicts of such a nature arise, Aristotle's advice to rely on democracy as the distiller of wisdom greater than that possessed by any single individual might perhaps be heeded. But democracy should not be able to marshal public funding in those cases of work either intended to, or reasonably construed as, desecrating the symbolic moorings of another's historical and cosmic identity. Mad props to Giuliani for recognizing that.

Bolek Z. Kabala is a first-year in Matthews Hall.