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.
Rudy Giuliani's official portrait
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.
Brooklyn Museum of Art, courtesy Wikipedia
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 sanctimonious, 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.
(First of two parts.)
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