Weinberg discusses the politics of modern art

Sensation, an avant-garde exhibit by young British artists at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, lived up to its name when New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani declared it "sick stuff" and threatened to deny funding to the established museum two weeks ago. The object of his scorn: a painting by Nigerian artist Chris Ofili, "The Holy Virgin Mary," which features a now-infamous piece of elephant dung over the icon's left breast and cut-out female buttocks from pornographic magazines on either side.

Is it art or simply artistic posturing? The Herald sat down with history of art Professor Jonathan Weinberg, an expert on modern art and its critics and an artist himself—Slifka Center will exhibit his paintings of synagogues starting in November—to find out what is really at stake.

Weinberg sensed a political motive behind Giuliani's paternalism. "I feel that it has more to do with the senatorial elections and a need to respond to the conservative wing of the Republican Party than it does with his personal feelings about art," he said. But the scandal may have unexpected results for the mayor. "By shouting his rage and talking about withholding money, Giuliani makes the work seem that much more powerful than it would without his particular criticism."

COURTESY JONATHAN WEINBERG Weinberg believes that shows like 'Sensation' have civic value.

Indeed, Weinberg pointed out, Giuliani's response to the Brooklyn show might even be appropriate. "There is a certain sense in which you could argue that Giuliani is a better audience than those who respond, `Oh no, there's nothing problematic, nothing disturbing about the work of art,'" he said. "Often, to defend works of art from such attacks, critics try to make them part of a tradition. When [Robert] Mapplethorpe's works were brought up in Cincinnati at a trial, art historians thought they had to talk about them in terms of their beautiful form, lights, shadows. What they weren't talking about was that they were showing homosexual acts that might be disturbing. Once you declare that something is a work of art, it becomes safe. You could argue that those who defend works of art from censorship do their own work of censoring them."

Giuliani's real error, according to Weinberg, is his attempt to deny a general public the ability to make up its own mind about the show. "The way that you decide that you don't like what the Brooklyn Museum is doing is not by withholding money, but by not going to the Museum, or picketing the Museum, or writing a letter to the Museum. You don't shut down the Museum because of one exhibition."

Scandals are an inevitable part of modern art, and may even be an expectation of the avant-garde, Weinberg said. Yet, while such scandals often create enormous publicity for one particular artist or museum, they can have a harmful ripple effect. "There certainly is a lot of hype in telling people that they're going to vomit if they see a show. What we don't see are the acts of censorship that occur because of these scandals."

Weinberg also found it problematic that Sensation only features work by one collector—the advertising mogul Saatchi. "The marketplace is infused too much into what museums should be doing, which is selecting the best works of a particular time or meaning," he said. "To me, that's the real scandal of this show."

For Weinberg, the exhibit indicates a trend towards the corporate packaging of art. "Do you know that one of the major sponsors of contemporary art in the United States is Philip Morris?" he asked. "Philip Morris in general has emphasized issues around the Bill of Rights, because they want to associate the freedom to have whatever kind of art you want with the freedom to smoke. Corporations are often important sponsors of contemporary art, to associate the idea that they are cutting-edge with the idea that art is cutting-edge."

Despite the collection's limited scope, Weinberg believed that shows like Sensation serve an invaluable civic function. "It's important to test the limits of our so-called tolerance. Are you really welcoming indifference, can you accept things that you don't agree with?"

Weinberg felt that the idea that shows like Sensation are elitist or unapproachable is false. "A lot of works in this show are in fact looking for an audience," he said. They seize on the reality that modern art is often pleasingly disconcerting for us. "If you go to the Museum of Modern Art, you'll find that people are even comfortable in disliking the work. This is, for good or bad, the art of our time, and even when we're saying we don't get it, there is a certain kind of familiarity to not getting it that we enjoy."

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