Bashing Art Becomes Giuliani Hallmark

by Alexander Cockburn

Last year, Giuliani put the Brooklyn Museum on the map with his denunciation of the "Sensation" exhibition, which featured various calculated affronts to polite taste, including a Madonna reposing on elephant dung. Now, New York's latter-day Savonarola is ensuring success for the Whitney's upcoming biennial exhibit.

The museum commissioned a piece from the artist Hans Haacke, who has been installing six dustbins from which reverberate the noise of storm-trooper boots on the march. Above the bins hang signs displaying the First Amendment and various remarks apropos the "Sensation" fracas from Giuliani, Jesse Helms, Pat Buchanan and Pat Robertson. My personal favorite is a particularly thoughtful one from Mayor Rudy: "I would ask people to step back and think about civilization. Civilization has been about trying to find the right place to put excrement, not on the walls of museums."

Having learned from the Brooklyn Museum affray that no politician ever loses ground in the opinion polls by attacking modern art, Giuliani is playing a good game. First, he's said magnanimously that since in the case of the Whitney, taxpayers' money isn't involved, he won't raise a stink about inappropriate use of funds. (This is nonsense. The Whitney is a tax-exempt foundation, which means that the taxpayers have to make up for all the deductions the Whitney's donors make when they write off their contributions. The same goes for the Whitney's real estate taxes.)

Having discarded the misuse-of-tax-money tactic, Giuliani adroitly raised the stakes, declaring gravely that "there is an issue here about demeaning the whole historical and contemporary importance of the Holocaust. When people misuse descriptions like that, in essence, they do a grave injustice to the people who suffered in the Holocaust, and to the reality of what the Holocaust was all about"; thus, somehow, conflating his own injuries at the hands of Haacke with the sufferings of the Jewish people. Maybe he'd already consulted with Abe Foxman, national director of the Anti Defamation League. Hardly had the mayor played the H-card, before Foxman himself released a letter to the Whitney, similarly charging its leadership with trivializing the Holocaust.

Since then, the row has been bubbling along nicely. Marylou Whitney, widow of Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, has withdrawn her financial support for the museum, declaring her only worry to be that her deed will make Haacke into a martyr, and prompt people to "line up six blocks to see this trash." Other members of the Whitney/Vanderbilt clan have rallied in support of the museum.

We should be grateful once again to Giuliani for perceiving that there's not really much staying power to a fight purely about the merits of Haacke's installation. On the other hand, the issue of trivilization or exploitation of the Holocaust has got some heft to it. The posture of people like Foxman seems to devolve to one of copyright, and historical or intellectual property, to the effect that the Holocaust belongs to Jews, and efforts by Gypsies, homosexuals, black Americans and Native Americans to borrow the H logo are impermissible.

People tend to get nervous around these charges of "exploiting" the Holocaust. They worry that, somehow, they'll get hit with charges that they are insensitive to the killing of 6 million Jews. All the same, there's barely a day in which the memory of the Holocaust of European Jewry at the hands of the Nazis doesn't get exploited, either for good or bad reasons, mostly bad.

Probably since we're a lawyer-driven country, the whole matter will end up in a restraint-of-trade hearing before the Federal Trade Commission, or the antitrust section of the U.S. Justice Department, but why should Jews have a monopoly on the H word? Wouldn't the 6 million have wanted the example of their fate to be evoked as a terrible admonition to the genocidal or Nazi impulse, wherever it might erupt? This was presumably Haacke's point, a valid one, in my opinion.

I live in a valley here on California's North Coast where, in the mid-19th century, there were 1,200 Mattole Indians. Now, there are none, and the extermination was so successful that not a word of the Mattole language survives to allow us to know what Indian word for Holocaust the Mattoles were using to describe the process of their own extinction. At least the Jewish Holocaust left survivors who reported their sufferings.

How does it "trivialize" the Holocaust to remind visitors to the Whitney that the Nazis loathed most art and all free expression, and that one should always be vigilant against such haters? Like the row about Joerg Haider, it's useful to have ongoing scrutiny about who exactly is or is not a Nazi, and what you have to do these days to merit the N-word. As with the H-word, it's one of the few ways to start up a vigorous discussion about public morals.