Island
Living 50: Giuliani as Comstock
by A. D.
Coleman |
|
Once again I’m
coming back from Europe -- this time from a stint
in Swizerland and Austria, on a flight from Paris
to Newark, finding myself seated, improbably, next
to two other Staten Islanders, Cristina and her
mother Alida, from Tottenville, who appear to have
survived three and half weeks of up-close-and-personal
mother-daugher and extended-family time together
in Italy without noticeable scarring. The trip marked
Alida’s first return to her birthplace, Casino,
since leaving there in 1963, and Cristina’s
first trip abroad ever. Aside from manifesting a
distinct Italian volatility, they display no signs
of having been corrupted by the supposedly looser
morals of the Mediterranean culture from which our
local Puritans continue to insist we need their
protection.
Which leads
me to think about our pathetic and desperate lame-duck
mayor, Rudy Giuliani, and his increasingly bizarre
fulminations during this final phase of his term
in office. I can’t deny that Rudy’s been
good to Staten Island. Free rides for all on the
ferry! Free transfer to and from Manhattan public
transportation for Islanders using island buses
and the S.I.R.T! Closing the dump! And for that
I’m grateful. But his obsession with what he
calls “decency” marks him for the small-town,
narrow-minded little prig he is; and that, in itself,
makes him unfit to occupy the mayoral chair in a
world-class city that generates billions of dollars
in revenue annually through the traffic in art and
culture that flows through it.
This city’s
facing all kinds of crises -- rampant racial tension,
drastic economic disparities, and the collapse of
the school system, to name just three. All of these
problems have become aggravated during his tenure.
Yet Hizzoner has managed to prioritize victimless
crime and thought crime as his primary quality-of-life
issue. By now, Mayor Rudy has squandered hundreds
of thousands if not millions of our tax dollars
on his various ludicrous campaigns to rid our fair
city of what he personally considers to constitute
smut, indecency, pornography, or otherwise “offensive”
sexually explicit material and activity. This has
involved everything from attacks on adult bookstores
and strip clubs (an effort that’s borne mixed
results at best) to blitzkriegs on cultural institutions
-- specifically the Brooklyn Museum of Art.
Hizzoner has
somehow determined that the BMA’s presentation
of "The Holy Virgin Mary," a painting
of a madonna by by British artist Chris Ofili (in
1999’s “Sensations” group show there)
and Jamiacan artist Renee Cox’s nude photographic
self-portrait as Christ, "Yo Mama's Last Supper"
(in this year’s group show “Committed
to the Image: Contemporary Black Photographers")
is not just anti-Christian but, specifically, “anti-Catholic.”
(He’s never made it clear just why he thinks
these works single out Catholics among Christians,
but then making things clear hasn’t been Giuliani’s
forte in the pale waning moon of his tenure.) It’s
probably worth noting that both these artists are
people of color.
Most recently,
as the grand finale, we have his creation of a “Decency
Panel” to weigh such matters. Exactly what
functions the just-born New York City Cultural Affairs
Advisory Commission serves, and what power it wields,
if any, remains murky. The 15 men and five women
appointed to it on April 3 of this year will, according
to the Mayor's office, "assess the extent to
which, consistent with the Constitution, public
funding for the arts should differ from private
funding for the arts." Sounds unnervingly vague
to me, especially its assumed imperative that the
two forms of funding “should” differ to
some unspecified “extent.”
So far as I
can determine, this body constitutes the city’s
first formally established entity concerned with
“decency” since the heyday of the now-infamous
New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, founded
in 1873 by the late, unlamented Anthony Comstock
-- one of those dreadful prudes who’s worked
hard over the centuries to give censorship its deservedly
bad name (and himself become a synonym for it).
Comstock headed the NYSSV until his death in 1915;
his successor as Executive Secretary of the organization,
John Saxton Sumner, ran it until the onset of World
War II, when it withered away.
From a historical
standpoint, the mayor’s new commission represents
a revival of that appalling book-burning operation,
notorious for assisting in the confiscation and
destruction of vast amounts of countless classics
of contemporary and historical literature (Comstock
alone claimed credit for 160 tons’ worth of
“obscenity”) and the prosecution of the
kitsch painting "September Morn." They
difffer mainly in that the Society for the Suppression
of Vice was a citizens’ vigilante outfit and
not an official government agency -- though it operated
with government sanction and cooperation (state
law endowed this organization with statutory power
to uncover violations of the anti-obscenity statutes
known as the Comstock Laws). By making his commission
an organ of the city government, Giuliani has actually
gone a step further than either Comstock or Sumner
could have dared to hope.
Who would connect
themselves with such an unsavory enterprise nowadays?
To their credit, two well-known but utterly mediocre
artists, Leroy Nieman and Peter Max, turned down
Rudy’s invitation to join this group. (That
didn’t raise my opinion of their art, but it
did increase my respect for them as fellow citizens.)
Indeed, the only artists Hizzoner has been able
to dig up who are willing to lend their names to
this fiasco are the illustrator and portrait painter
Constance Del Vecchio Maltese (wife of State Senator
Serphin R. Maltese, chairman of the Queens County
Republican Committee and a founder of the state
Conservative Party); Diana Kan, a Chinese-American
painter; and John Howard Sanden, who paints commissioned
portraits of chief executives of major companies.
All of them,
to be charitable, are utter nonentities in the world
of contemporary art. No one else on the committee
has even those tenuous credentials in art; instead,
we get Kay M. Pesile of the Pesile Financial Group
(and a Trustee of the City University of New York);
Curtis Sliwa, radio personality and founder of the
Guardian Angels; and Lester Wallman, a partner in
Wallman Gasman & McKnight, LLP, and a member
of the superannuated National Arts Club. Daniel
S. Connolly, Special Counsel at the New York City
Law Department, will serve as Executive Director
of the Commission. Exactly the folks I’m sure
we all want deciding what’s good for us in
matters of art.
Which brings
me back to Alida and Cristina, my fellow travelers
from Staten Island on the long flight home from
Paris in late June. I’ve no idea where they
stand politically. They may well not agree with
me on any of this. But they’ve now been to
Italy, and -- if they went to the museums -- they
saw paintings (like Michaelangelo’s) showing
Jesus, Mary, St. John, St. Peter, and the entire
heavenly host stark naked. They probably saw others
in which Christ was represented by a baby sheep.
Even though they come from Tottenville, the other
end of the island (and, say some, the other end
of the world), they didn’t strike me as women
who shocked as easily as our mayor obviously does,
or who needed Rudy and his smarmy little posse to
protect their virtue or tell them what’s right
and wrong in the world of art.
And I’m
willing to bet that the rest of the city’s
diverse population can get along just fine in its
ongoing confrontation with the international world
of art without the santimonious, paternalistic interference
of Papa Rudy. The new Decency Commission is a travesty.
Whichever mayoral candidate pledges to dissolve
this silly panel as one of his or her first acts
in office will have a serious claim to my vote come
fall.
(To be
continued.)
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©
Copyright 2001 by A. D. Coleman. All rights reserved.
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