A Shock Grows In Brooklyn

Arnold Lehman, director of the Brooklyn Museum, was recalling his last meeting with New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. It took place in July at City Hall, where the two bantered about baseball--Giuliani's a well-known Yankees fan, while Lehman has never stopped cheering the Dodgers--and discussed capital improvements for the city-owned museum building. "It was a wonderful meeting," said Lehman wistfully. "The mayor asked great questions. He was funny."

But the two men haven't been laughing--or even talking--since the mayor blew up three weeks ago over the controversial exhibition, "Sensation: Young British Artists From the Saatchi Collection." Giuliani threatened to cut all city funding to the museum--$7 million a year, about one third of its operating budget--unless the show was canceled. The mayor was especially outraged by "The Holy Virgin Mary," a painting by Chris Ofili, who used, among other materials, elephant dung. "This is sick stuff," Giuliani said.

Lehman had been hoping to make a splash with this exhibition, but the uproar was much more than he'd bargained for. Negotiations between the museum and the city quickly broke down, and the museum filed a suit in federal court on First Amendment grounds. The city countered with a suit of its own. All the front-page publicity drummed up even bigger crowds than expected, for both the show's gala preview and the opening to the public last Saturday. Supporters and opponents of the exhibition held rallies at the museum. The museum installed metal detectors and put a Plexiglas shield in front of the by-now infamous Virgin Mary painting. Battlelines were drawn.

To the world beyond the Hudson River, the escalating flap may have seemed like just the latest chapter in the culture wars that began in 1989 over the work of Robert Mapplethorpe and a photograph by Andres Serrano called "Piss Christ." But this was New York, the company town of the avant-garde: to the art world, it was as if the mayor of Detroit decided to ban cars inside the city limits. The clash went beyond the classic debate over how--or even whether--the government should fund the arts: everyone involved seemed to have something else at stake. The mayor was looking to appeal to upstate voters in his New York Senate race, the museum needed a hit show to put itself on the map and the city's other cultural institutions were looking for a way to show solidarity without giving Giuliani an excuse to cut off their city subsidies. And of course, there was Charles Saatchi, the reclusive British adman and collector whose art works were on display. The mayor's office charged that he only stood to gain from the scandal, which will inevitably increase the value of his collection.

Two years ago when Lehman returned to his native Brooklyn to take over the museum, after 18 years running the Baltimore Museum of Art, he had a mission. The museum had become a sleepy institution, with drastically flagging attendance figures. Lehman needed to make it vital to an increasingly diverse community, including nearly 5,000 artists who now live in Brooklyn, refugees of high Manhattan rents. In London on business, Lehman happened to catch the "Sensation" show at the Royal Academy. It was creating a furor, and there were lines around the block. "You had young kids with green hair, and you had the charming older ladies," he recalls. "People were truly enthralled." Lehman admits he wants to attract a big audience, but he was equally impressed by the show. "I knew a lot of these artists' work," he says. And much of the art was indeed sensational, starting with Damien Hirst's carcasses of a cow or pig, sliced to reveal the innards, suspended in tanks of formaldehyde.

Lehman negotiated to bring "Sensation" to Brooklyn and ordered up a buzz-seeking ad campaign that included a mock health warning: "The contents of this exhibition may cause shock, vomiting, confusion, panic, euphoria and anxiety." Then the day that Hurricane Floyd blew through New York City, the mayor began to whip up his own tempest. A reporter brought "The Holy Virgin Mary" painting in the upcoming show to the mayor's attention. Days later, at a press conference, Giuliani blasted the show. "You don't have a right to government subsidy for desecrating somebody else's religion," he said. A Roman Catholic, the mayor says he has no problem making enemies in the art world (though it must have hurt when he was booed at the Metropolitan Opera last week, since opera is one art form he adores). "I represent a lot of people other than the elite of the city," he told NEWSWEEK. Although no one knows what the upstate New York voters that Giuliani may be courting think about his stand, polls showed that both New York City residents and a nationwide sample were against shutting down the exhibition.