The Arts and Humanities in Public Life 2000 post-conference publication

	Unsettling "Sensation": Arts Policy Lessons from the Brooklyn Museum of Art Controversy Edited by Lawrence Rothfield, Faculty Director, Cultural Policy Center. Rutgers University Press, 2001. Rutgers Series on The Public Life of the Arts.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Interests in "Sensation" [Read the intro below]
Lawrence Rothfield, Faculty Director, Cultural Policy Center

Part I. Mapping the Minefield
The Brooklyn Museum
Carol Becker, Dean of Faculty, School of the Art Institute

The Marriage of Art and Business
Richard Epstein, James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor in the Law School at the University of Chicago. His many books include Bargaining with the State (1993) and Principles For a Free Society: Reconciling Individual Liberty with the Common Good (1998).

Part II. Art and the First Amendment
Introduction: The Questions of Free Speech

"Mayor Giuliani's attempt to withdraw funding from the Brooklyn Museum of Art raises fundamental questions about the fate of freedom of artistic expression when the state helps pay for art. What is the authority of the government, consistent with the First Amendment, to withhold public funds from a private museum because the museum presents work that is deemed blasphemous, racist, sexist, anti-patriotic, or artistically "bad"? Does the First Amendment compel taxpayers to subsidize "art" they revile?"

Culture and the Constitution: A Guide for the Perplexed
Cass Sunstein, Karl N. Llewellyn Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of Chicago. He is the author of many articles and books, including Republic.com (2001), Free Markets and Social Justice (1997), and One Case At A Time (1999).

The False Promise of the First Amendment
David Strauss, Harry N. Wyatt Professor of Law at the University of Chicago. He is the author of a number of articles on freedom of expression and on constitutional interpretation, and he has argued 16 cases before the United States Supreme Court.

Reasons We Shouldn't Be Here: Things We Cannot Say
Stephen B. Presser, the Raoul Berger Professor of Legal History at Northwestern University Law School, and holds a joint appointment as Professor of Business Law in Northwestern University's Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Department of Management and Strategy. He is the author of Recapturing the Constitution: Race, Religion, and Abortion Reconsidered (1994), Piercing the Corporate Veil (1991, updated annually), and the senior co-author of Law and Jurisprudence in American History: Cases and Materials (4th Ed., 2000).

Who Should Pay (for the Arts and Culture)? Who Should Decide? And What Difference Should it Make?
J. Mark Schuster, Professor of Urban Cultural Policy at MIT. He is the author of The Geography of Participation in the Arts and Culture (2000) and The Audience for American Art Museums (1991); and co-author and co-editor of Preserving the Built Heritage: Tools for Implementation (1997) and Who's to Pay for the Arts? The International Search for Models of Arts Support (1989).

Part III. Art Off-Limits: Public Respect and the Reading of Art
Introduction: The Subjunctive Mood of Art

"The response to the "Sensation" show demonstrates that however postmodern we may be, we are still grappling with a quintessential modern problem: how to square our faith that art fosters respect with our equally strong faith that art challenges us to go beyond the given or conventional. When artistic experimentation violates the limits of propriety, it somehow displaces our sense of who we are. How should we understand and negotiate such "limits" in a world where divergent cultural values clash? Are there some "rules of respect" that might help us all to frame our judgments of such art? Or would such rules sanitize the very experience they were meant to enrich?"

An All Too Predictable Sensation
David A. Ross, the Director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Between 1991 and 1998 Ross was the Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art after directing Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art from 1982 through 1991. A specialist in new media, Ross has lectured in contemporary art at UC San Diego, The San Francisco Art Institute, Harvard University and Columbia University.

Sensational or Status Quo: Museums and Public Perception
Teri Edelstein, the principal of Teri J. Edelstein Associates, Museum Strategies. Previously director of several university museums, she served most recently as deputy director of The Art Institute of Chicago. Her publications include The Stage is All the World: The Theatrical Designs of Tanya Moiseiwitsch (1993) and Perspectives on Berthe Morisot (1990).

Offending Images
W. J. T. Mitchell, the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago, and Editor of Critical Inquiry. His recent books include Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (1994) and The Last Dinosaur Book: the Life and Times of a Cultural Icon (1998).

The Audience For "Sensation" and the Attitude of American Public Opinion
David Halle, Elisabeth Tiso, and Gihong Yi
David Halle is Professor of Sociology at UCLA and Director of the UCLA LeRoy Neiman Center for the Study of American Society and Culture. He is the author of Inside Culture: Art and Class in the American Home (1993) and editor of New York and Los Angeles: Politics, Society and Culture (forthcoming). Elisabeth Tiso graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1981, and later studied art history at Columbia and the City University of New York. She is currently a freelance art historian living and working in New York City. Gihong Yi is a Ph.D. student in sociology at University of California Los Angeles. His research interests are corporate networks, immigration, East Asian economic development and methodology.

Part IV: Shock Value: Market-Making for Controversial Art
Introduction: Shop Value

"We will examine the peculiar relations between public museums and the artists, dealers, and collectors who have an economic stake in exhibited art. How is one to understand the contradictory relations between an art that adopts an avant-garde posture of shock, and the museums, markets, and collectors that sustain and profit from it? If what is shocking varies from one national context to another, how do these differences translate into market value? What, if anything, should be done to ensure that the public good is served by the working of this complicated market?"

"Sensation" and The Ethics of Funding Exhibitions
James Cuno, the Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard University Art Museums and Professor of the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard.

Some Sensational Reflections
Gilbert S. Edelson, Esq., Administrative Vice President and Counsel of the Art Dealers Association of America.

Don't Shoot the Messenger: Why the Press and the Art World Get into So Much Trouble
András Szántó, Deputy Director of the National Arts Journalism Program, a fellowship program for arts and cultural journalists and academic research center at Columbia University. He earned a Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia with a dissertation examining recent transformations in the New York art world. Szántó has co-authored two books and has published numerous research reports, newspaper articles and magazine essays on arts, culture and politics.

Afterword
Kimerly Rorschach, the Dana Feitler Director of the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago.

Lawrence Rothfield
Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature
Faculty Director, Cultural Policy Center
University of Chicago
1050 E. 59^th Street
Chicago, IL 60637

From Unsettling "Sensation": Arts Policy Lessons from the Brooklyn Museum of Art Controversy

(Available from Rutgers University Press)

Introduction: The Interests in "Sensation"

On Sept. 22, 1999, New York’s Mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, strode into a press conference to publicly attack the Brooklyn Museum’s not-yet-opened show of Charles Saatchi’s collection of British artists. The Mayor’s threats ignited a firestorm of controversy that finally burned itself out six months later, when a settlement was reached in federal court that ended legal hostilities with the museum’s free speech rights affirmed and its funding saved, at least for the immediate future.

For many arts supporters and arts advocates, the entire episode seemed like a recurring nightmare. Once more, as with Mapplethorpe, Serrano, Finley, Wojnarowicz, cutting-edge art – in this case, Chris Ofili’s "The Virgin Mary" -- had provoked anger from the usual suspects: religious conservatives and their rightwing political representatives. And once again, the anger expressed itself in threats to cut public funding, First Amendment be damned.

For their part, religious conservatives also viewed the "Sensation" controversy as a sobering replay from the past. Once again, as with Mapplethorpe, Serrano, Finley, and Wojnarowicz, religious sensibilities had been trampled upon by the usual suspects: morally suspect artists promoted by elite liberals in the art world. And once again, efforts to withdraw public funding for patently offensive art had been thwarted by the ACLU, while those brave souls who objected to having to pay for such hateful speech were smeared as McCarthyist philistines.

The "chilling inexorableness" of this latest confrontation, the staleness of the rhetoric from both sides, and the similarity of the denouement to that of previous controversies, all seemed to imply that what happened in Brooklyn was a non-event. Had those in the midst of the fray learned no new offensive or defensive strategies, either rhetorical or practical, in the past decade to move past stalemate? Had those who were not direct combatants learned nothing since 1989 to help bring the warring parties to the peace table? Was the history of arts controversy in America doomed to repeat itself?

The answer to this last question may well be "yes," if one accepts the pessimistic view that conservative attacks express a deeply-rooted and intractable American predisposition against state-sponsored art. But it may make better sense to take a more dialectical view of what seems, at first glance, to be simply more of the same. For if the history of arts controversies in America repeats itself in Brooklyn, it has done so there in classic Marxist fashion, first as tragedy and then as farce. Compared with the life-and-death struggles of the earlier controversies – in which the institutional survival of the NEA and the literal survival of people with AIDS were at stake – the "Sensation" controversy was strangely bloodless and bizarre. The cast of characters included David Bowie, aging-rocker-turned-cicerone for the exhibition’s audio tour (his arch voice-over included questions like "Is it art?"); Charles Saatchi, advertising mogul-turned-collector, whose desire to remain anonymous as a financial backer of the exhibition of his own collection did not preclude his brazen interference in the Brooklyn Museum’s curatorial efforts; Dennis Heiner, an iconoclast who vandalized the offending image with washable, slow-drying white paint that was immediately removed; a Mayor who professed himself shocked, shocked, to find such goings-on in a museum whose board included his Commissioner of Cultural Affairs, Schuyler Chapin; and a titillating marketing campaign by the museum that promised ticket-buyers the possibility of "shock, vomiting, confusion, panic, euphoria, anxiety." That neither the museum director nor the mayor had bothered to go see the exhibition prior to judging it "visually powerful and intellectually challenging" (Lehman) and "sick stuff" (Giuliani) only added to the postmodern sense of unreality surrounding the whole controversy, which Lewis Lapham likened to a piece of performance art.

Describing the "Sensation" controversy as farce-like may seem to only underscore its frustrating pointlessness, its failure to advance beyond the sorry spectacle of earlier controversies. As Marx noted, however, political farce is an essential prelude to real and effective political action. For Marx, of course, such action would be revolutionary. Readers of this volume, however, will probably be satisfied with something less grandiose, yet still material: policy analysis and recommendations that constructively anticipate controversy, recognize its potential impact, and provide a framework for managing it. The essays that follow offer a range of such policy assessments and advice.

In breaking down the Brooklyn controversy into distinct policy domains, each of which calls for several quite different kinds of expertise, this book marks a departure from the valuable books published in response to earlier controversies. If a more differentiated, analytical, and multi- (if not non-) partisan approach toward arts controversies is now emerging, I would suggest, this is in part because of the farcical quality of this latest round of cultural fisticuffs. For the first time, an arts controversy had arisen in which the various stakeholders – the museum itself, the Mayor, the Catholic League, the collector, and the media, as well as the public -- could be understood as acting primarily not out of ideological orientation or passions or commitments (with all the tragic irrationalities these imply), but out of the stuff that policy, like farce, is made of: intense but calculated, or at least calculable, interests.

Take the painter at the center of the controversy, Chris Ofili. Unlike artists caught up in previous controversies such as Robert Mapplethorpe, Karen Finley, or David Wojnarowicz, Ofili is no militant voicing a queer nation’s desire for inclusion in American political life. Even in Britain, he hardly stood out as a radical, even during the intense outcry over another "Sensation" artist’s portrait of a notorious child-killer. (Tellingly, the protest that did emerge in England against Ofili came from a disguntled artist, angered at Ofili’s winning the prestigious Turner Prize in 1999, who dumped a pile of dung on the steps of the Tate Gallery and implanted a placard in the heap that read "Modern Art is a Load of Bullshit.") Among artists whose work had drawn fire in America, Ofili had most in common with Andres Serrano, whose works over a long period deliberately aimed at provoking a response from the Catholic Church. Both artists had juxtaposed a Christian icon to bodily waste in their art. But while Serrano’s title, "Piss Christ", forced the recognition on viewers, Ofili’s title, "Virgin Mary," occluded it, and Ofili himself refused to be drawn into arguments about what his work meant politically.

That Saatchi himself became as much a lightning rod as Ofili, again marks a departure from earlier arts controversies, in which debates focused on the meaning of the artists’ works rather than the motives of their patrons. As a collector, Saatchi might in an earlier era have been spared interrogation, his collection taken as a reflection of personal taste, his financial support as generosity making possible the showing of what he loved. But such motivations were difficult to apply to a collector who seemed also to be a speculator in the art market, not merely feeding an appetite for art but investing in artists, and in some cases liquidating his portfolio with devastating effects for the careers of the artists involved.

Like the artist and his backer, the institution responsible for bringing controversial art to the public was not engaged in a political crusade, or even an aesthetic one. The Brooklyn Museum was honorably candid in articulating its own motivations – which were, above all, material: to increase the museum’s visibility, attendance, and membership. "We want to establish the BMA," Director Arnold Lehman wrote,

While Lehman went on to claim that the "Sensation" show was meant to speak "to the topical sociocultural issues, expressed through art, that drive our daily lives," his phrasing made clear that these issues were raised as a means to a marketing end, not as an end in themselves. In earlier controversies, self-described "activists for public art and community" such as Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center Director Dennis Barrie might have understood "diversity" as a goal, something to be brought to the consciousness of audiences through the art of a Mapplethorpe. For the Brooklyn Museum, in contrast, diversity was a demographic feature of the audience it sought to reach.

A similar shift occurred in the way that conservative opponents of immoral art understood their task. Rather than framing their objections as concerns about "family values," as Protestant fundamentalists such as Reverend Donald Wildmon and the Christian Coalition had done in the early 1990s, Catholics spurred by William Donohue, President of the Catholic League, attacked Ofili’s painting as an affront to their religion. Speaking as a defender of the faith rather than a religious zealot, Donohue could claim to be the protector of the interests of Catholics, interests much more narrowly defined but also as a consequence more easily translatable into political action. Because he represented an institutionally unified constituency, rather than a coalition, Donahue had the ear of elected officials in a direct way that Wildmon and other fundamentalist firebrands simply did not, and he used this direct access to bring straight to the Mayor his group’s views of "Sensation," views the Mayor promptly acted on.

The Mayor’s action itself reflected the general shift from ideology to interest that distinguished the Brooklyn Museum controversy from previous ones. When Cincinnati officials were driven to act against the Mapplethorpe exhibition, they attempted to make offensiveness a criminal offense; when Congress took its turn in 1989, it tried to force grantees to swear that they would not be obscene on government time; and when black aldermen in Chicago objected to a depiction of revered Mayor Harold Washington in drag, they stormed the School of the Art Institute to "arrest" the painting. Mayor Giuliani’s actions were more prudent and calculated: temporary impoundment of operating funds, along with threats to withdraw funding and evict the museum from city-owned land. As a former prosecutor, Giuliani surely knew that the courts were highly unlikely to allow him to punish the museum in this way, but as a savvy politician he just as surely knew that making such threats was an effective political gesture.

For all these various stakeholders, then, an arts controversy that in an earlier incarnation might have been driven by passions (moral, aesthetic, political) was reduced, as it were, to a more rationalized conflict of interests and interest groups. Thanks to this rationalization, policy experts can more easily model how interests take shape, interrelate, converge, or balance each other. It is easier as well to chart the possible ways in which controversies can play out, and to help policymakers understand what can and cannot be done to control the outcome.

As matters have become clearer, however, the complexity of policy issues in arts controversies has become more, not less, evident. The First Amendment issues discussed in the first section of this volume, for example, appear less stark, and more technical, than had previously been assumed. It is now clear that government can control artistic speech not merely by defunding or protecting offensive speech tout court, but by exercising a range of options. As Cass Sunstein shows, government can do more than just censor or pull funding to penalize art it doesn’t like. It may seek to control art by regulating the subjects art may treat, the viewpoints artists may offer of a subject, or even the form or genre that artists are allowed to work in, with each of these efforts more or less likely to stand up to constitutional scrutiny. Government may also simply decline to fund at all, if public opinion does not support arts funding. It is this last prospect that makes most First Amendment victories Pyrrhic ones, according to David Strauss. Politicians may choose to lose in court in order to erode long-term public support for the arts. But the most radical option open to government may be the one that Stephen Presser suggests, and which Mark Schuster argues is already on the horizon: the option of redefining the relation between government and grantees as a partnership, with all the accountability such arrangements impose on recipients of funding. Since this is more and more the reality in practice, at least with regard to museums, holding the line against further encroachment of such mechanisms of arts funding may be the next mission of free-speech advocates.

If the arts funding system is evolving in ways that will fundamentally change the terrain on which First Amendment questions will be engaged, the public served by the arts is evolving as well, changing the terrain on which questions are engaged about how museums should manage controversy. Even without the government looking over their shoulders, museums have always pursued exhibition and education policies meant to affirm standards -- of excellence, beauty, taste, decency, or representativeness – shared by the American public. But the notion of a unified public itself, always a myth, has over the past several decades given way to a more nuanced recognition that America contains multitudes of cultural communities, each with its own distinctive mores, sense of impropriety, and demand for respect.

In the first phase of this evolution, museums found themselves between a rock and a hard place. For those privileged communities whose standards had previously stood unchallenged as public ones, efforts by museums to respond to other sensitivities were seen as abandonments of all standards whatsoever. Already in the 1960’s, critics like Hilton Kramer and John Canaday complained bitterly that Metropolitan Museum’s groundbreaking "Harlem on My Mind" exhibition "includes no art" and represented a "politicalizing" of the museum. Versions of this argument would re-emerge more virulently in the late 1980’s with the declaration of cultural war by conservatives, who seemed willing to destroy museums in order to save them from going over to the cultural enemy. Yet even as they were being charged with offending the dominant culture, museums also were charged with offending the emergent groups they were trying to serve. The Harlem show, for instance, earned it criticism as the view of outsiders, for implying that there is homogeneity within the black community, and for its failure to adequately represent the relationship between blacks and whites. Even an institution as progressive as the School of the Art Institute of Chicago found itself accused of racist insensitivity in the 1988 fracas over the Harold Washington painting.

Reflecting on that controversy shortly afterwards, Carol Becker decried the absence of "built-in avenues of trust and negotiation between the Art Institute and the community, which could have been employed to de-escalate the event." Since then, building such avenues has become easier. As the new century begins, cultural pluralism has become a more or less settled fact, and communities themselves have become more organized, coherent, and adept at representing their interests. Thanks to surveys like the one conducted by David Halle summarized in this volume, even the tastes of hybrid demographic groups are now beginning to be mapped, with surprising and potentially useful findings (who knew Asians would like "Sensation" less than Caucasians, or that Republicans are just as opposed to the government banning art in public museums as are Democrats?). Unfortunately, museums and museum associations have not yet made use of such policy tools to develop carefully thought-through guidelines about how negotiations with communities should be framed, or about how community perspectives should be incorporated into a museum’s institutional structure. As first steps in this direction, Teri Edelstein urges museums to more fully diversify not just their offerings but their own policy-making bodies, including trustees, and David Ross recommends proactive measures to educate boards, communities, and the media about museum activities in general.

W.J.T. Mitchell cautions us, however, that such measures can only go so far, given the nonverbal nature of images. Because pictures don’t directly say anything, yet seem to be saying something, spectators are driven to project statements onto them. At the very least, then, museums need to think more carefully about the psychological mechanisms motivating outrage at controversial art, if only to gauge the power of the forces with which they are grappling.

But even if museums could avoid or de-escalate controversies, doing so might be bad policy. Indeed, in a democracy, one might argue, the aim of publicly funded art should be to generate dissent purposefully, to bring the moment to its crisis, to redirect or bring to the surface issues in need of escalation. As Mitchell puts it, "demonstrations in front of museums are a sign of a healthy state of affairs, not a regrettable anomaly that should be averted by fine-tuned policies." It is not clear whether museum policies could be devised to go even further, seeking to deliberately incite (rather than avert) a reaction they control and channel its energy towards productive dialogue. What is clear is that absent careful crisis-management thinking before the fact about the array of interests and sensibilities within the public, the very communities that should be drawn into discussion will either reject it altogether or enter it enraged.

No crisis-management plan to defend First Amendment rights or sooth offended sensibilities, however, could have prepared the Brooklyn Museum for the unanticipated assaults on its funding arrangements for "Sensation". With the publication of a front-page exposé in the New York Times darkly reporting that, "far more than has been previously disclosed, the ''Sensation'' exhibition . . . has been financed by companies and individuals with a direct commercial interest in the works of the British artists in the show," a new front had been opened in the culture wars. At issue were not conflicts of taste or rights, but conflicts of interest. For those upset by the revelations about the museum’s quid-pro-quo deals with donors, what was really at stake in Brooklyn was divorced from any question about the morality or immorality symbolized in the art, or even the aesthetic quality of the art itself, but what James Cuno in this volume calls "the principle of disinterested inquiry" guiding the museum, which Cuno more or less equates with "the interests of the public." One might share the museum’s taste or agenda, then, while decrying its interestedness. As details about the financing and commercial tie-ins for the exhibition leaked out, the museum began to look, Cuno writes, like "a ‘hired hand’ for private interests, if not an ‘interested party’ itself."

Where conflict of interest is an issue, as all lawyers know, the appearance of conflict of interest also will surface as a problem. Hence it was unsurprising that the charges in the press against the museum included not only selling out to commercial interests, but deceiving, covering up the truth about the extent and nature of its dealings with misinformation and disinformation. As András Szántó points out, the best way to counter such charges is to adopt a policy of full disclosure. Even if Brooklyn had welcomed journalists into its boardrooms, of course, the increasing pressures of 24-hour news cycles, pack journalism, ignorance about the arts, and the crushing need to keep "on story" might still have driven coverage. But in the absence of such a policy, Szántó shows, journalists are free to indulge in the worst tendencies of their profession, substituting outrage for analysis, a quick verdict for research into "what kind of lending practices are customary in arranging museum shows, what sort of individuals foot the bill, how curators work with private patrons in mounting exhibitions, and how museum shows influence the art market."

Not that such research would necessarily reveal a scandal-free picture, or even a clear one. As Gilbert Edelson of the Art Dealers Association of America reveals, in a paper that left even some art-world professionals at the conference stunned, museums have shown important artworks even though collectors were offering them for sale at the time of the exhibition; museums have taken commissions on sales of works they exhibit; and some museums have directly sold not just the original craftworks and prints commissioned for their gift shops, but artworks from their walls. What’s more, such practices may be perfectly justifiable under certain conditions. Edelson’s lesson is that a one-size-fits-all policy towards the market is probably a bad idea.

As the essays in this volume make clear, however, thanks to the interests so baldly revealed in the Brooklyn Museum controversy, museums can go beyond ad hoc, case-by-case reasoning, not only about their commercial dealings, but also about their dealings with the public and the state. The more transparent the interests, the easier it will be to formulate sensible policies regarding the rights, responsibilities, and reputation of America’s museums.