The Bush look

By Camille Paglia

Mar 9, 2001 | Read the story.

The most recent Brooklyn Art Museum controversy reminds me of a visit to Vancouver, British Columbia, several years ago in which I visited government-run and non-government-run art galleries.

The government gallery had a selection of the usual put-on "art," of which the current Brooklyn example seems to be an extreme example. So much pretense. It is as if the authors of the work are daring the curators to refuse to purchase, or refuse to display, their "works." Of course, in such places, the curators, too, don't have an identifiable public to please to make a living. By contrast, visits to private galleries, with works for sale, were delightful.

I was immediately reminded that the best solution to such provocations is to remove the government as intermediary between the artist and the public. When people have to pay their own money, whether to view a work or to purchase it, they are much more careful with where and how they employ their resources. I am sure that in such circumstances, the curators would quickly get the message, and in turn artists hoping to have their works displayed or offered for sale would too. No muss, no fuss. And no censorship.

-- James Mead

I feel you misfired in your -- Was it a defense of religious sentiment? An attack on those who would assail it? -- column. I don't care for this type of art, but I think you possibly misread the artists' targets of attack. The church is not merely a religious institution but a political one as well; it is in its political mode that its corruption is most apparent and it makes itself a target for these attacks.

Case in point, one you cited yourself: Mayor Giuliani. A religious institution would denounce his public cavorting with a mistress; a political one would not. The church then uses the "wounded feelings" of its least intelligent and thinnest-skinned adherents as a shield, never responding to the criticism of the rot at its core.

-- Al Mascitti, Hockessin, Del.

A black reader would like to comment on Renée Cox by posing the rhetorical question: Is there something so inherently meaningful about "blackness" as a condition (or even a material) that it can elevate a photograph of a naked woman titled "Eve" above the level of sophomoric corniness?

And don't let's profess that this is the very question that the "art" poses. I mean, puh-lease -- a kneeling nude male with a designer globe on his back titled "Atlas"? It seems to me that the artist's first job is to be smarter than the rest of us -- otherwise, how can we possibly be challenged by their groundbreaking assaults on our cozy mainstream assumptions? These photos are just dumb.

If the textural conflict between classical references (Christ, Greece) and double-marginality (black, female) are supposed to supply the dynamic in Cox's work, shouldn't she have troubled herself to do enough reading to mine a fresher vein of "classicism," at least? Grabbing from the same dusty icon box as adolescent Midwestern sonnet writers and Victorian aesthetes just makes Cox seem lazy and undereducated.

Shocking a poorly read but vaguely pious American public with this tripe is just shooting fish in a barrel; how would her stuff stand up against the work of a clever careerist like Hirst or an educated piss-artist like Jeff Koons at Documenta, for instance? A German wouldn't even bother stroking his or her chin in front of one of these photos.

What's the next shocker from Cox ... a black Santa?

-- S. Augustine, San Diego

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