NEW YORK ART: IT HURTS
How can one begin to make sense of the current controversy swirling around NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani's confrontation with the Brooklyn Museum of Art's Sensation show?
On the surface, there are echoes of Anglican-Catholic warfare which can be heard beneath the sophisticated murmurs about freedom of expression. Significantly, ACLU strategist Norman Siegel announced his battle plan to defend the British art show against Mayor Guiliani from the pulpit of an Episcopal church in Manhattan.
All lined up are the great and the good of New York City: a combined phalanx of art critics, columnists and editorialists of the New York Times (which has run more front page stories about the Sensation exhibit than it did about the extermination of the Jews during World War II), the former chief of Wall Street's Lehman Brothers (who chairs the Brooklyn Museum of Art Board), First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams (of Pentagon Papers fame), the ACLU, and PEN American Center -- the sponsor of a full-page ad in the New York Times signed by over 100 cultural celebrities, National Book Awardees, Pulitzer prizewinners and MacArthur geniuses like John Ashberry, William Baldwin, Joan Bingham, Spalding Gray, Elizabeth Hardwick, Kathryn Harrison, Steve Martin, Tim Robbins, James Truman, William Styron, Calvin Trillin, Derek Walcott, and Robert Wilson, among others -- and the directors of New York City art galleries, museums and cultural institutions.
The message from what author Nicholas Lemann calls the Episcopacy in his new book on the history of the SAT was encoded in the New York Times ad: zero-tolerance for dissenters. In the words writers and artists who read the newspaper of record can understand: no one who publicly defends the Mayor will have lunch in this town again. Forget about getting a play produced, a picture sold, or a book contract , not to mention an invitation to the Hamptons, Martha�s Vineyard, or Nantucket next summer.
So effective has this social pressure been that even the Mayor�s own blue-blooded Cultural Affairs Commissioner, Schuyler Chapin (former head of the Mayor�s beloved Metropolitan Opera) felt pressured to issue a letter calling for the city to fund the Brooklyn Museum of Art.
There is a fear of seeming like a country bumpkin by agreeing with the Mayor that the show at the Brooklyn Museum of Art--for which the galleries were cleared of European masterworks--is �vile� and �disgusting.� Luckily, there are Englishmen in Britain who are up to the challenge of interpreting art critically, and their account offers support to the Mayor rather than his opponents.
While it may seem surpising to those unfamiliar with the art world that the establishment has lined up so monolithically and unthinkingly behind the Sensation exhibit, it would come as no surprise to readers of Matthew Collings� brilliant new book on the New York Art world: IT HURTS .
As a journalist and practicing painter who makes art documentaries for British television, Collings has spent years getting inside the art business and figuring out what makes it tick.
He has indeed figured out what makes the New York art world tick.
What makes it tick, according to Collings, is a simple formula which serves as a chapter heading:
�Be Stupid and Rude.�
Collings explains the appeal of sex and sensation to the contemporary New York arts consumers as �our general tolerance of excess, and our expecation to be appalled all the time by things we see in art. Which proves how decadent we are.� For example: Collings visits photographer Andres Serrano in his apartment, where they discuss the Sensation exhibit in London and the picture of child murder Myra Hindley. Collings recalls that Serrano�s publicity photo of �a woman pissing in a man�s mouth� had to be recalled from a Rotterdam exhibition after protests (although the exhibit drew 90,000 people). And from the chapter I learned for the first time that Serrano had worked in the advertising industry for a decade as an art director prior to achieving fame as a controversial photographer.
�He should know what gets people going, I thought.,� notes Collings wryly.
Collings details Serrano�s apartment looking �as if he�s got the devil to do his decorating,� and the photographer himself as �a bit kinky and evil, but serene as well, more spiritual than any priest, even though he�s sucked the blood of 10,000 humans.�
Likewise, Collings calls Karen Finley�s telephone number for �the hottest phone sex line in America� and quotes her monologue verbatim.
He calls his next chapter in IT HURTS �the sickos.� It details an attempt to get into a live sex exhibition at the Jack Tilton Gallery featuring a �scary prostitute or stripper�, foiled by a line several blocks long.
Instead, Collings goes to a show featuring young American artists, whom he finds �transparently derivative of young British artists like Chris Ofili...� (whose Holy Virgin Mary is the focus of the Sensation sensation).
It is ironic, says Collings, that while Americans once influenced the English art scene, now the current flows the other way, with Americans imitating the British. It seems a shame, for Collings truly admires Clement Greenberg and the Abstract Expressionists who are now out of favor.
He even makes a pilgrimmage to Marfa, Texas to see Donald Judd�s collection. (Judd was a favorite of critic Hilton Kramer, who recently called the Sensation exhibit �porno� in a BBC interview with Jane Hughes.)
Collings ends his tour of the New York art scene, reminiscent in a way of Dante�s descent into Hell -- as written in the style of Andy Warhol from the perspective of Tom Wolfe -- with a plea: �Oh please let it all mean something.�
He asks, �Do artists really mean it?�
�Or are they just playing or acting or parodying or mimicking, for some reason that only they, or their small circle of friends, know?� And in a way, the final question posed by Matthew Collings in his masterly IT HURTS is what the Sensation sensation is all about. Does Mayor Giuliani mean it? Do the Brooklyn Museum of Art directors mean it? Do the Episcopocracy and the Catholic heirarchy mean it? Do the journalists, writers, and artists?
Or are they just playing or acting. . . for some reason that only they, or their small circle of friends, know?
