Word: dungeness
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Outraged by one work in the exhibition, Chris Ofili's black madonna festooned with elephant dung, Rudolph Giuliani, New York City mayor and all-but-declared U.S. Senate candidate, refused to pay the October installment of the city's $7 million subsidy to the museum. The city further claimed that the institution, in league with Christie's auction house, a sponsor of the show and the seller of $2.6 million of Saatchi's art last year, was knowingly trying to raise the value of Saatchi's collection. It then filed suit to throw the museum--one of the finest...
...feeling in the line. You might pass right by were it not for Ofili's strategy to shove the voltage up by adorning it with a pattern of cutouts from porn mags of women's crotches and then adding to the rhythm of the work with clumps of elephant dung. Interpretations reach too glibly for the symbolism of this Virgin in a cloud of sex parts as an emblem of the sacred's overcoming the profane, of the elephant manure as an African symbol of regeneration that adds luster to the Madonna's beneficence...
...both Massachusetts and New York without much good reason. New York mayor Rudy "It's not art if I can do it" Guiliani has withdrawn funding from the Brooklyn Museum of Art exhibit "Sensation" because he's offended by a portrait of the Virgin Mary stained with elephant dung and surrounded by a collage of fragments from porn magazines. The First Amendment isn't as important as the Mayor's attempts to impress Catholic voters and dictate what art ought to look like...
...mayor was appalled, most of all by The Holy Virgin Mary, a 1996 collage by Chris Ofili, an award-winning British artist who uses elephant feces in his work. "The idea of having so-called works of art in which people are throwing elephant dung at a picture of the Virgin Mary is sick," said Giuliani. He announced that the city would cut its funding to the museum--about $7 million this year, or a third of the museum's budget--unless Sensation was canceled...
Including the mayor, though he did have a look at the exhibition's catalog. It can't convey all the nuances Ofili intends with excrement, though Giuliani might be mollified if he knew that the artist affixes clumps of dung to just about everything, including Absolut vodka bottles and images of James Brown. It can be hard to take this sort of art seriously--it seems designed only to shock, after all--but it is easy to demonize. For his part, Ofili wasn't talking; his London gallery issued a statement saying that as a Roman Catholic, he wanted...