Island
Living 51: The "Decency" Squad
by A. D.
Coleman |
|
Face it: even
for his staunchest supporters, Rudy Giuliani’s
unstable behavior over the past two years has become
increasingly embarrassing. Let’s leave aside
his doctrinal, knee-jerk support for any behavior
toward citizens of color by any New York City policeman,
no matter how lethal, excessive, or otherwise irresponsible.
Let’s ignore even his public love affair as
an undivorced Catholic, his peculiar sense of propriety
and protocol in regard to Gracie Mansion as a taxpayer-funded
site for his complex private life, and his unmitigatedly
vengeful treatment of his wife, the actress Donna
Hanover. Let’s ascribe all that to his perennially
reactionary politics amplified by his mid-life confrontation
with a dreaded disease and his own mortality. Let’s
look instead at what he’s decided to prioritize
over the past several years as his intellectual
legacy in one of the great art and culture centers
of the world: his benighted determination to impose
on the culturally diverse population of this sprawling
metropolis his own personal standards for what he
likes to refer to as “decency.”
Giuliani claims
that he empowered his newly constituted New York
City Cultural Affairs Advisory Commission -- discussed
at greater length in my previous column -- specifically
to engage the following question: “[W]hether
taxpayers should be required to subsidize artistic
expression that undermines or assaults their deeply
held personal and religious beliefs." Given
the ridiculous pittance of city tax revenues devoted
to the arts under his administration, the question
resonates with absurdity. However, on principle
that’s not a wrong issue to debate, so long
as it’s done both intelligently and with genuine
ecumenism.
The underlying
problem with seeking some course of action based
on that dialogue, however, lies in the fact that
Gotham’s population is not homogeneous but
extremely heterogeneous, a fact that, amazingly,
seems to come as news to Hizzoner. New York comprises
such a diversity of microcultures that the “deeply
held personal and religious beliefs” collected
in these five boroughs often absolutely contradict
each other, sometimes amicably or uncontroversially
but often actively and contestually, even abrasively.
The only realistic thing to “do about it”
is to hope for periods of peaceful coexistence while
encouraging people of conflicting “personal
and religious beliefs” to work out their disputes
among themselves and in the pulpits and on debating
stages and the soapboxes in the parks and the radio
talk shows and the editorial pages.
In such a context,
there’s no way to support the arts with municipal
funds without requiring all taxpayers to subsidize
some artistic expression that “undermines or
assaults their beliefs.” After all, to take
up just one pertinent example, our museums are filled
with vigorously pro-Christian art -- by Leonardo
Da Vinci and that crowd, among others -- supported
by the tax dollars of countless Jews, Muslims, Buddhists,
and many more of other faiths (not to mention atheists)
who could certainly argue that this work offends
them. Not only is this art overwhelmingly and uncritically
enthusiastic about Christianity, after all, but
much of it attacks and denigrates other belief systems.
Exactly how does the mayor think a tax-paying New
York citizen of the Islamic persuasion feels when
viewing a painting at the Metropolitan Museum of
Art celebrating as heroic the slaughter of Arabs
during the Crusades and glorifying those rapacious
Christian invasions of the Middle East?
After all, even
the Pope recently apologized for Catholicism’s
various wars against other faiths and campaigns
of forced conversion -- which certainly have given
millions of people around the world centuries of
ample reason to harbor anti-Christian and anti-Catholic
sentiments. Now, should the city government require
the Met to take that insultingly anti-Muslim painting
down on pain of losing city arts funding? Should
the city instead increase support of the Met’s
acquisitions budget with funds earmarked for purchase
of some contrary Middle Eastern art depicting the
European invaders as villains? Or should our elected
and appointed officials simply concentrate on doing
the jobs we pay them to do, and stay out of the
art-criticism and thought-policing and religious-friction-assuaging
business entirely?
Presumably,
any rigorously even-handed discussion would look
at those aspects of the matter also. But Giuliani,
who nowadays lacks anything even remotely resembling
intellectual integrity, certainly has no intention
of directing his commission to raise such thorny
issues. Instead, the mayor has indicated that the
commission has a mandate to establish “decency
standards” to govern public funding for the
arts in New York City, and -- though he’s included
representatives of some other faiths on the panel
(with Hinduism and Buddhism notable by their absence)
-- he’s made it clear that his own goal is
to defend not just primarily Christians but specifically
Catholics. Not coincidentally, that’s his own
faith. So much for any impartial “assessment.”
Given that the U.S. District Court rebuked the mayor
severely for his previous censorious attack on the
Brooklyn Museum of Art, reprimanded him for illegally
withholding its funding, and intimated that he neither
respected nor understood the First Amendment, one
can only ask if the U.S. Constitution and the constitutions
of the city and state of New York even permit the
formation of so archaic and benighted an entity
as this “Decency Panel.”
This seems especially
weird behavior on the mayor’s part because
Giuliani himself has pretensions as an artist. I
refer specifically to his brief foray into my professional
territory, photography, in the form of the one-man
show of his work that he engineered at the Leica
Gallery in Manhattan’s NoHo district in May-June
1998. Not that there was anything at all shocking
about the mayor’s pleasant but utterly undistinguished
snaps of city life; but you’d think that --
especially as he’s imminently facing a dramatic
career move -- Giuliani would want to keep his options
open by not making himself utterly ridiculous in
creative and intellectual circles through seeking
to impose his private morality on this city’s
millions of residents.
As with his
earlier attacks on street artists -- also slapped
down as fundamentally undemocratic by the courts
-- these demagogic tirades and ill-conceived punitive
ventures don’t change the law; they just squander
precious time, media attention, municipal energy,
and money that could better be expended on truly
urgent issues. And make no mistake about, this “Decency
Commission” will cost us. Its members may serve
as unpaid volunteers, but the tasks involved in
maintaining the commission -- filing, typing, transcribing,
keeping minutes, sending faxes and press releases,
phone calls, organizing press conferences, plus
transportation costs, lunches for the meetings,
and such -- will require city funding.
Because I find
comstockery morally objectionable, I don’t
think that taxpayers should have to fund it -- especially
when, as in the present case, it springs not from
some widespread demand on the part of the electorate
but from the mayor’s own initiative. I think
the costs of censorship campaigns that do not result
from requests by at least a majority of the electorate,
expressed through ballot referendums, should have
to come out of the pockets of the small handful
would-be censors themselves. Make Giuliani and the
well-heeled corporate honchos and court painters
of his commission pay for the running costs of this
pet project of theirs, instead of burdening the
voters with that expense, and watch how fast our
mean-spirited little bully-boy shuts his trap and
how promptly his underqualified team disbands.
I hasten to
assure you that, so far as I can tell, none of this
recent hoohah has persuaded the world to think less
of New York City as a -- perhaps the -- center
of the international art world, one whose activities
(regardless of how one views them) bring in billions
of dollars in revenue annually to New York in trade
and cultural tourism. But it’s impossible to
imagine the mayor of any of the world’s other
major art centers -- Paris, Berlin, Venice, Madrid,
Sao Paolo -- indulging himself or herself in such
know-nothing hissy fits. These sour episodes have
simply made Rudy Giuliani look like the vindictive,
close-minded, uneducated little jerk he is. Poetic
justice, as it were . . . but a whining conclusion
to a mayoralty that increasingly seems less intent
on going down in history than in going down in flames,
defining itself as a throwback to the late nineteenth
century at the outset of the twenty-first.
(Second of two parts.)
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©
Copyright 2001 by A. D. Coleman. All rights reserved.
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