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Giuliani: Art Critic
It’s time to add art critic to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s other hobbies, which
lately have included acting the parts of environmental scientist, entomologist
and public health expert. It seems the Malathion Mayor is concerned that an
art exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum is as much of a threat to the minds and souls
of New Yorkers as the mosquitoes he’s been attacking with poison gas are to
our bodies.
The Mayor’s claim that, "It offends me...You don't have a right to a government
subsidy for desecrating somebody else's religion and therefore we'll do everything
we can to remove funding for the Brooklyn Museum until the director comes to
his senses”, is classic Giuliani. His comments are galvanizing the New York
art establishment into comparing him to Senator Jesse Helms, a comparison New
York’s street artists have been making for the past six years.
Like many Giuliani pronouncements this one is both misinformed on the law and
disingenuous as to the facts. The Museum of Modern Art, for which the Mayor
personally arranged a $65 million dollar gift from the taxpayers of New York
City last year, not only shows controversial and for some, very offensive art,
but also insists on proudly displaying paintings stolen from Europe’s Jews by
the Nazis. Yet remarkably, the Mayor hasn’t suggested cutting their funding.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which gets millions from NYC taxpayers and
sits on City owned land, also has works of art that might offend certain viewers.
William A. Donohue, the president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil
Rights and alleged instigator of Rudy’s latest tantrum could find many of the
works in their collection inappropriate. Will that museum have to fear losing
its funding next? Not likely. Many of the Mayor’s top campaign contributors
and personal friends in the real estate industry sit on the Met’s board of directors,
unlike the less glamorous, but far superior, Brooklyn Museum.
The Mayor claims that the museum’s policy of not allowing children under 17
admission to this show without a parent or guardian violates its lease with
the City. This is the same Mayor who routinely helps promote exclusive corporate
events in NY City’s public parks and uses the NYPD as private security guards
to prevent anyone without corporate approval from entering.
While it’s tempting to interpret this latest episode of Giuliani misconstruing
the First Amendment as an updated attack on artists’ rights, the reality is
that this is simply a clever diversion invented by the Mayor’s ever resourceful
staff. The museum story pushed both the Malathion spraying controversy and the
Pay to Play in the Parks, elimination of freedom of assembly public relations
fiasco right off the front pages, just as both issues were becoming extremely
embarrassing for Giuliani.
Representing himself as a defender of religious freedom, the Catholic Church
and public decency certainly won’t alienate the people that still support him,
most of whom have only recently gotten around to accepting impressionism as
art. In fact, this story is playing in New York City very differently than in
the rest of the state and nation, where paintings of the Madonna splattered
with Elephant dung are unlikely to be considered art in the first place, let
alone constitutionally protected art.
It’s interesting to note that some of the same museum directors, curators and
art experts that are now up in arms about the Mayor’s threat to cut the Brooklyn
Museum’s funding, are still directly involved in attempts to eliminate street
artists, who, in spite of winning the fullest level of First Amendment protection
in 1996 are still under constant attack. Just recently, in a detailed petition
to the Mayor’s Street Vendor Review Panel, the Museum of Modern Art renewed
it’s efforts to have street artists arrested and their works confiscated on
53rd Street.
This is the same museum that recently challenged the Manhattan D.A.’s right
to seize artworks stolen from Jews by the Nazis, citing a NY State law which
completely blocks any seizure of art works. Tell that to the hundreds of artists
who stood by helplessly while the Mayor’s vendor squad confiscated and destroyed
thousands of original paintings, prints, sculptures and photographs right outside
the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim
while those museums did nothing to help.
Whatever terrible things Mayor Giuliani is, stupid is not one of them. Whenever
things are going wrong he can be counted on to come up with a controversy that
gets people in a tizzy while conveniently distracting then from more substantial
issues. Rather than ruining this controversial art show, offending
Giuliani is going to guarantee the artists and the Brooklyn Museum itself great
success. In his unique way, the Mayor is the best press agent an artist or art
museum could ever have.
If Giuliani really wanted to stop people from seeing this show, rather than
threatening to cut their funding all he’d have to do is schedule daily Malathion
sprayings over the Brooklyn Museum. Now that would be a censorship technique
even Hitler hadn’t thought of.
Robert Lederman
“Mayor Giuliani vowed to block city funding to the Brooklyn Museum yesterday
because of a shocking new exhibit - including a Virgin Mary covered in elephant
dung - he branded "sick stuff." After reading news reports about the upcoming
exhibit, "Sensation," Giuliani went on the warpath, threatening to pull $7.2
million that the museum gets from the city - about one-third of its budget.”
-NY Post 9/23/99 MAYOR MOUNTS HOLY WAR AGAINST 'SICK' EXHIBIT
"Last time I checked, I'm the Mayor, and I don't find closing down access to
a public museum consistent with the use of taxpayer dollars," Giuliani said.”
NY Times 9/24/99 Giuliani Threatens to Evict Museum Over Art Exhibit
“Mayor Rudolph W. Guiliani pledged Thursday that the city would contribute
$65 million over the next three years to help pay for a major expansion project
at the Museum of Modern Art...Facing its huge price tag, trustees from the museum's
expansion committee, including David Rockefeller, the real estate developer
Jerry Speyer and Donald Marron, the chairman of PaineWebber Inc., approached
City Hall. Mr. Rockefeller, whose mother, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, was a founder
of the Modern, said the city money was "the financial cornerstone" of the expansion.
Of the remaining $585 million the museum must raise, he said that about $200
million had been pledged by "the family and trustees." Then he quickly added
a qualifier: "When I say family, I mean the museum family, not my family." NY
TIMES 4/24/98 MOMA to Get $65 Million for Expansion
“Elizabeth Freedman, an attorney speaking on behalf of the N.Y.C. Corporation
Counsel's office [Mayor Giuliani’s 680 lawyers], explained the City's anti-art
position. "Visual art...does not express ideas", Ms. Friedman said, "and as
such is not entitled to First Amendment protection." 2/24/97 radio interview
WNYC's syndicated business news show, "Marketplace"
"An exhibition of paintings is not as communicative as speech, literature or
live entertainment, and the artists' constitutional interest is thus minimal."
-Giuliani appeal brief arguing against street artists having First Amendment
protection, Giuliani v Lederman et al and Giuliani v Bery et al, filed with
the U.S. Supreme Court 2/24/97. “Parallel to the training of the body a struggle
against the poisoning of the soul must begin. Our whole public life today is
like a hothouse for sexual ideas and simulations. Just look at the bill of fare
served up in our movies, vaudeville and theaters, and you will hardly be able
to deny that this is not the right kind of food, particularly for the youth...
Theater, art, literature, cinema, press, posters, and window displays must be
cleansed of all manifestations of our rotting world and placed in the service
of a moral, political, and cultural idea. -Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
“U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White and Customs agents stepped into an international
art debate and slapped a seizure warrant upon the Museum of Modern Art for a
Viennese painting purportedly plundered by the Nazis. On Tuesday, New York's
highest court blocked an attempt by Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau
to keep two Egon Schiele paintings from being returned to the Leopold Foundation,
an Austrian government-financed foundation based in Vienna...On Tuesday, New
York's State Court of Appeals ruled against Morgenthau and concluded that a
state law blocks seizure of the artwork for virtually any reason. But within
hours of that decision, U.S. Customs agents and White's office said in a statement
it served a seizure warrant upon MOMA for the "Portrait of Wally" because they
had reason cause to believe it was stolen. Under federal law, government can
not only seize property but keep it if it later is proved to be imported into
the United States in violation of law.” Newsday 9/23/99, MOMA Hit With
Seizure Warrant
“An exhibit of the mayor's photographs opened today at a downtown Manhattan
gallery, displaying 23 of his color and black-and-white pictures taken over
the last two years. Panning the exhibit altogether were the sidewalk protesters,
who are fighting a city requirement that they need permits to sell artwork in
parks and in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Since his first day in
office, Giuliani has been waging a war on artists and artists' rights," said
painter and printmaker Robert Lederman. "He's doing this show purely to change
his image, posing as an artist in the arts capital of the world." 5/9/98 Washington
Post
“A Manhattan federal judge has ruled that artist and activist Robert Lederman
can go ahead with a suit alleging that the New York City Police violated his
constitutional rights by arresting him for protesting the police department’s
crackdown on street artists. Southern District Judge Denny Chin said that Mr.
Lederman who heads the organization Artists’ Response To Illegal State Tactics
(A.R.T.I.S.T.) had raised a factual issue concerning his allegations that the
police made the arrests in a bid to chill his First Amendment rights. The judge
also found that Mr. Lederman had shown that the city may have had an informal
policy to drive the artists out of the SoHo community.” -NY Law Journal
3/26/99, “Artists’ Suit Against Police May Proceed”
"I read the polls and I understand political sentiment, and my strength is
actually outside the City of New York." — Mayor Rudy Giuliani, on his chances
of being elected senator, Newsday, 4/19/99
Robert Lederman, President of A.R.T.I.S.T.
(Artists’ Response To Illegal State Tactics)
ARTISTpres@aol.com (718) 369-2111
http://www.openair.org/alerts/artist/nyc.html
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