Goes to the "Sensation" exhibit
Brunner, Kira
NO ONE COULD walk into the now infamous "Sensation" exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art (BMA), without having been over saturated by media hype. An unmediated look at the show has became...
...At BMA, the curators thought it necessary to place a card next to the looming portrait made up of what looked like hundreds of child-size hand prints that asked, "Do you think that this should be one of the most controversial paintings in the exhibit...
...But this created a schism within the museum...
...Was Christie's funding the show in order to make a bundle at auction...
...Were the roughly seven thousand people coming for art or for swing dancing...
...The most exiting moments of "Sensation" were found not in the museum but in call-in radio shows, and in the New Yorker and the Nation...
...NO ONE COULD walk into the now infamous "Sensation" exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art (BMA), without having been over saturated by media hype...
...she was pro museum, anti-elephant dung...
...Otherwise it falls into the trap of becoming just one more thing that isn't worth our notice...
...Art Critics had proclaimed it a commentary on African art...
...The sculpture was supposed to be a life size representation of Goya's "Disasters of War...
...What was most extraordinary about "Sensation" is that it became a public conversation...
...Instead, it looks like a relic from a traveling carnival's haunted house...
...Zoo Doo" elephant dung fertilizer was sold at the gift shop next to the post cards and art books...
...One of the "Sensation" artists, Damien Hirst, was quoted in the New Yorker as saying, "A lot of people think art's weird and stupid, I want to get to those people, get them to come in and go 'Arrrgh...
...As the weeks went by, suspense grew...
...Art fills a space that nothing else does...
...An unmediated look at the show has became impossible...
...Would the mayor evict the museum from its city-owned home and cut off all city subsidies...
...The show may not have been successful as art, but it was successful as a good scream...
...there are gallery talks, artist discussions, films...
...It does seem that the BMA has been trying over the last year to increase attendance by undertaking a number of controversial strategies to get people into their galleries...
...And outside, gated behind police barricades, looking like their own installation piece, outraged Christians chanted, "Stop hate crimes against the Virgin Mary...
...Instead, the controversy orbited around Marcus Harvey's oversized portrait of the infamous child murderer Myra Hindley, whose crimes had repulsed and fascinated the British public...
...as if to announce their disappointment that it wasn't...
...What would become of the unionized museum employees...
...But if elephant dung and pornographic butterflies had deflowered the Virgin, her innocence, thanks to the controversy, is now safely under the protection of two security guards and a wall of bulletproof glass...
...museums should not be closed down by politicians up for big elections...
...The first Saturday of every month is free...
...It goes without saying that this space should be held open...
...Some have argued that "Sensation" was little more then a stunt to lure more people out to Brooklyn...
...Interestingly, the two most controversial images on both sides of the Atlantic were icons, one religious, one cultural...
...The museum was saturated with controversy: DISSENT / Winter 2000 n 7 COMMENTS & OPINIONS there were journalists waving press passes to get past the hour-long lines, there was bewilderment on the faces of those who had probably never been to BMA before...
...Art has the wonderful and uncanny ability to demand that we pay attention to things we would not otherwise notice, but it should not do this only by provoking outrage, discomfort, and shock...
...Forcing these unworldly moments where we find ourselves confronting our own obscurities is clever...
...She has been reinstated to her original iconic status, with a twenty-first century twist...
...Consider "Great Deeds Against the Dead," a piece by the Chapman brothers—a jumble of chopped up bloody plastic bodies hanging from a tree...
...The controversy ignited when New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani denounced Chris Ofili's painting "The Holy Virgin Mary"—a portrait of a black Virgin Mary with one breast made of elephant dung surrounded by delicate butterfly-shaped pornographic pictures—as nothing more then Catholic bashing...
...But there are only so many rooms of existential gimmicks that one can walk through before they begin to lose their weight...
...Klan BRUNNER is an assistant editor of Dissent...
...Hillary Clinton was no exception...
...British museum goers had denounced it as American pop art repackaged and shipped back to the states to be sold anew...
...It felt as if we, the spectators, were making better art...
...And surely its ability to draw a crowd is undeniable...
...Oddly enough, when "Sensation" opened at the Royal Academy in London in 1997 the Ofili painting didn't cause much sensation...
...We the public focused our concern, our attention, and pages and pages of magazine and newspaper articles on our own quandaries about religion, power, censorship, government, free speech, and the nature of art...
...In October, 1998 the museum began a series called "First Saturdays...
...Countless articles, op-ed pieces, and commentaries had been written on all sides...
...It provoked a lot of serious thinking...
...The museum began packing them in...
...More than the art itself, it was the fever of information and opinion surrounding it that made the exhibit worth seeing...
...If "Sensation" is meant to be shocking, it works...
...8 n DISSENT / Winter 2000...
...Turning war into kitsch is clever...
...The Chapmans," the cue card read, "have said they want to entrap the viewer into laughter...
...What offended so many people in the British context was ignored in the American...
...By the time I walked through the doors, the mayor of New York had already condemned the exhibit as "sick stuff...
...and in the evening a tremendous dance party...
...Would the union representing the museum workers take action...
...In fact, it was the buzz in the air, not the art, that agitated the museum goers to think...
...Would the Catholic League for Civil and Religious Rights shut it down...
Vol. 47 • January 2000 • No. 1
