Art?
By Jennifer King
kingfish@ucnsb.net
Featured Rightgrrl December 1998
October 6, 1999

A recent flap up in New York serves to illustrate beautifully, once again, the abject hypocrisy of liberals. Mayor Rudy Giuliani has started to withdraw all city funding for the Brooklyn Museum of Art. This funding battle is due to the Museum's insistence upon staging a planned exhibit titled, "Sensation: British Artists from the Saatchi Collection." This lovely and tasteful display includes bisected animals suspended in tanks of formaldehyde; a sympathetic depiction of a notorious convicted child murderer and a portrait of the Virgin Mary splattered with elephant dung and decorated with pictures of sexual organs clipped from pornographic magazines.

That someone would consider any of the above "art" just goes to show how far art has fallen since the art world decided to shock rather than edify the bourgeousie.

However, predictably, the liberal coteries have sprung up with the "First Amendment" mantra and have issued dire predictions about censorship and impending theocracy. Hillary Clinton has now chimed in on the side of the dung.

Apparently, it is once again open season on Christians. Would liberals expect Orthodox Jews to support funding for an exhibit featuring Holocaust corpses decorated with Nazi swastikas? How would they react to an "artist" who displayed a bloodstained AIDS quilt or a favorable exhibit on the KKK and lynching?

In current American culture, every micro-group is continually and militantly offended about every perceived past or present grievance and apologies are demanded for the slightest infraction. Except for Christians, who are expected to not only tolerate vicious attacks upon their religion, but who are expected to fund them as well.

The arts community has argued that taxpayer funding is necessary in order to enlighten the masses who might otherwise be deprived. Hogwash. Private patrons subsidized great artists for centuries. Furthermore, the NEA itself practices selective censorship when it awards funding to one project over another. Increasingly, they seem to favor the blasphemous and the obscene.

Artists should be subject to the rules of the free market. Art that is pleasing to the average citizen will be patronized whereas art that is deemed offensive will not. One suspects that the shock "artists" know this, which is why they fight it so vehemently.

This article copyright © 1999 by Jennifer King and may not be reproduced in any form without the express written consent of its author. All rights reserved.