Giuliani Is Right About This One

I don’t know about you, but I have problems accepting as an art critic a guy who prances across my television screen on “Saturday Night Live” wearing a Marilyn Monroe wig, high heels, lipstick, fake eyelashes and falsies.

Then again, New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani (the man who once dressed in drag for “SNL”) does seem to have a point here.

The issue is an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. This show has been in the works for months but the mayor’s two representatives on the museum board apparently failed to alert him before he blew a gasket over its content.

It’s an exhibit titled, “Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection.” That’s precisely what it has become - a sensation - largely because of one piece.

At issue is a work by London artist Chris Ofili called “The Holy Virgin Mary.” I’ve seen only a small, printed, color image of it but it looks like no other representation of the Virgin Mary that I’ve seen.

The work’s most disturbing components are about 120 photos of bare female behinds and lacquered clumps of elephant manure that adorn the image.

Whatever point the artist is trying to make seems obscure but he has a definite thing for elephant manure. Some people use it for gardening; Ofili uses it for most of his works of, ahem, art.

This exhibit attracted a surging mob of people when it went on display in London two years ago. About 300,000 art lovers trekked through it. It’s partly funded by an art collector and businessman named Charles Saatchi, who wants to use representations of these works to decorate a new chain of restaurants called Sensation.

Giuliani is unimpressed with most of the other works in the exhibit, which apparently consists largely of the sort of oddball, avant-garde self-indulgences that pass for visual art in hopelessly hip circles.

But Giuliani is so openly furious over the “Holy Virgin Mary” that he threatened to withhold millions in city money from the museum and to throw it out of the city-owned building it occupies.

This position has touched off the usual howl from extreme civil libertarians who 1, despise Giuliani just on general principles and 2, cling to the conviction that artists should enjoy unfettered access to public funds even when their art deeply offends the people who pay the bills.

Nobody can seriously imagine the American Civil Liberties Union arguing against mayoral outrage over artwork glorifying Nazi principles or denigrating Jews, African-Americans, Latinos or gays. If the mayor ranted about public funds going to display stuff that trashed what are thought of as oppressed groups, my guess is that the civil libertarians would sit mute.

But art insulting to Christian believers, especially Catholics, who hold a special reverence for the Virgin Mary? That’s fine. A strong strain of anti-Catholicism runs through the self-styled intelligentsia. It’s that abortion business, I guess.

A vast difference exists between a public official with police powers proclaiming that art can’t be displayed privately and a public official saying “Not on public property with the tax dollars entrusted to my care.” The first is censorship. The second might well be politics - Giuliani is considering a run for the U.S. Senate, after all. But it also can be legitimate public policy. The museum gets public money to present “art for all.” That’s what it proclaims on the banner across the building’s face.

From all reports, the “Holy Virgin Mary” is not a work you would want to show the kiddies. And it would bring bitter, just tears to the eyes of your sweet old Aunt Mary Ellen, the nun.

Ultimately, the First Amendment doesn’t require public funding to display art that directly diminishes anybody’s religious faith.

Giuliani is right on this one.