Rudy Giuliani's official portrait
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?
Rudy Giuliani's signature
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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