Sensation: The Madonna, The Mayor, The Media, and the First Amendment

by Arnold Lehman

Death and bomb threats over an art exhibition! A major battle with the mayor of New York City and the New York Times! Looking back, Arnold Lehman, director of the Brooklyn Museum, and his colleagues were not prepared for what was to happen. No one could have anticipated that Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection would become the biggest art story in the history of art history. It has taken him two decades to fully absorb and clearly reflect on what happened at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999–2000. The intense controversy swept the exhibition, the museum, and Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary painting to international attention for six months. While 175,000 people saw the exhibition and millions read and heard about it daily, they never knew of the threats and challenges that kept the museum staff awake at night. Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who never saw the painting, focused his rage at The Holy Virgin Mary; rescinded the museum’s municipal funding to force it to close the exhibition; and attempted to evict it from its hundred-year-old landmark. The city’s most conservative media and ultra-religious groups inflamed the conflict. SENSATION, selected from controversial collector Charles Saatchi’s contemporary British art collection, was first shown at London’s Royal Academy in 1997, to an outcry over the portrait of child murderer Myra Hindley. Its opening at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999 drew tabloid headlines such as “B’klyn gallery of horror―Gruesome museum show,” and “Butchered animals, a dung-smeared Mary and giant genitalia.” The New York Times accused the museum of wrongdoing in high-profile but often false and inaccurate investigative reports, most dismissed earlier by the court. In a story as gripping as a fictional thriller, the mayor and city eventually settled with the museum, awarding it a permanent injunction, the restoration of city money, and substantial funds for its new entrance.

240 pages, Hardcover

Published October 12, 2021

Reviews

[Marc Lichtman]

"The polarization in the 'culture war' declared by Buchanan and other ultrarightists takes many forms: chauvinist anti-foreigner agitation, racist assaults on affirmative action, vulgar attacks on women's social equality, half-hidden but virulent outbursts of Jew-hatred, fearful prejudice against homosexuals.… These are not movements about art or culture; they are not movements about schools or education. Those just provide some of the words that emotional energy is invested in. It is a reactionary, demagogic, petty-bourgeois social and political movement, one that over time becomes increasingly brutal and murderous in its methods.…"—Jack Barnes in Capitalism's World Disorder: Working-Class Politics at the Millennium, published in 1999, around 8 months before the “Sensation” exhibit. It was quoted at the beginning of an editorial “Defend freedom of expression” in the socialist newsweekly the ‘Militant’ dated October 18, 1999.

While we communists have a very critical attitude to how art is funded in the US, unlike the New York ‘Times,’ we didn’t undermine the defense of freedom of expression by criticizing the Brooklyn Museum for acting like every other museum in capitalist America. We participated in the rally called by the New York Civil Liberties Union to defend the museum (I was there personally) and ran several articles in the ‘Militant.’

A review in ‘Artnews’ complained that “A large portion of the book is dedicated to fiercely rebutting reporting by the Times’s David Barstow, whose name is invoked by Lehman nearly 200 times in the span of less than 250 pages.” In my opinion, the Times deserved the bashing they got, although unlike Lehman I wasn’t surprised.

The New York 'Times' is a paper that (despite their proclaimed opposition to the embargo) continually lies about the Cuban Revolution and those in the US who defend it. In July 2021 the Times ran a photo claiming to be an anti-government demonstration in Cuba. The 'Militant' ran the photo with a caption explaining, “In fact, it was a march in Havana in support of the revolution! In the baseball cap behind the Cuban flag is Gerardo Hernández, a well-known leader of the Committees in Defense of the Revolution and one of the Cuban 5, who spent 16 years in prison in the U.S., framed up for his work helping to stop terrorist attacks on Cuba.”

Despite all the attacks, Lehman continued at the Brooklyn Museum until deciding to retire in 2017, at age 70. Then he wrote this book. The museum continued through and past his tenure to have controversial exhibits, and the new entrance, completed with money that Giuliani tried to deny was completed in 2004. I happen to like it a lot.

Pathfinder Press went through a similar experience with the mural on their building facing the Westside Highway in New York, unveiled November 19, 1989. The New York Post carried a headline “Off the wall—that’s where it belongs.” About a month later ultra-rightists defaced the mural with five paint bombs. It was rapidly repaired by artists, and the building had to be defended every night after that by volunteers until 1996, when the mural had to be covered in order to repair the wall of the building. (For the Story of the Pathfinder Mural, see 'U.S. Imperialism Has Lost the Cold War,' "About the Cover").

The fact of the completed mural, and its impact, caught the right wing by surprise, and they were never able to effectively respond. Many revolutionary and communist leaders whose writings and speeches are published and distributed by Pathfinder, were portrayed on the mural, which was painted on the six-story south wall of the Pathfinder Building in lower Manhattan. The mural was a joint endeavor of communist workers and youth and of artists from around the world who volunteered their talent and their time, and who in addition helped raise the funds to purchase paint, erect scaffolding, and cover other costs. The November 19, 1989, dedication drew some four hundred participants: artists, supporters of the Cuban revolution and of the antiapartheid struggle in South Africa, students, and workers—including unionists on strike against Eastern Airlines and United Mine Workers members supporting the hard-fought strike against Pittston coal company.

Giuliani also badly miscalculated: 175,000 people visited Sensation, with many becoming members of the Museum. And he didn’t run for Senate in 2000 as he had planned. In February 2001 another exhibit at the museum “Committed to the Image: Contemporary Black Photographers” briefly ignited a new tabloid frenzy.

Today, often it is liberals who are preventing freedom of expression, with such bizarre concepts as “cultural appropriation.” There is no culture without appropriation! And totally unrepresentative groups claiming to represent “People of Color” are trying to establish themselves as censors who have the right to decide what “white people” are allowed to do, or if anyone is allowed to so anything without their approval. There is no progressive form of censorship.

For a good place to start with socialism and art, read the Trotsky compilation ‘Art and Revolution’ and ‘Socialism and Man in Cuba’ by Ernesto Che Guevara.

[Alex Nagler]

I'm not saying that Rudy Giuliani has always been a shitty little power hungry creep, but I'm not not saying that.