Display A Disservice To Public Art Funding Trash Discredits Art Museum Curators Need To Use Better Judgment

Chris Ofili’s repugnant painting of a black Madonna splattered with cutout penises, breasts and elephant dung makes a statement, all right: The effete snobs of the U.S. art world are anti-religious bigots who believe they have a right to waste $1 million in public money to underwrite blasphemy.

An artist has a constitutional right in this country to throw any brand of manure at any religious symbol, frame it and try to sell it.

And a museum or gallery has a right to display it. But no loopy museum director has a right to receive a government subsidy to show so-called art that defiles a symbol revered by Catholics worldwide.

New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani spoke for many, and not just Catholics, when he condemned The Brooklyn Museum of Art for abetting hate speech by displaying Ofili’s work. Imagine the outcry from the usual suspects now defending the museum if it had elected instead to feature works that mustered the same contempt for the Star of David. Or the Torah.

(Interestingly, the American Civil Liberties Union hasn’t said a peep about this publicly financed display of a religious symbol.) Almost as bad as the anti-religious prejudice here is the damage this offensive display does to public funding of the arts. Already, Republican presidential candidate Elizabeth Dole has called for abolishing the National Endowment for the Arts, which funds worthwhile arts programs, including many for schoolchildren, and had nothing to do with the obnoxious Brooklyn show. New York taxpayers paid for it.

Columnist Camille Paglia - a liberal Democrat, atheist and art educator - said the Brooklyn museum’s insensitivity to people of faith “simply poisons the cultural atmosphere and ensures popular hostility to art and artists.” Writes Paglia: “The mission of museums must be to evangelize for art, to demonstrate art’s higher meanings and continuing relevance to a mass audience that will otherwise be consumed in the blood-and-guts literalism of slasher films and shoot’em-up action-adventures.”

Paglia goes on to say “no self-respecting avant-garde artist should be on the government dole.”

It’s hard to imagine van Gogh with his nose in the public trough. Of course, anyone with elephant turds on the brain cares more about the money an art hubbub attracts than self-respect.