Word: virginal
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...name is probably more apt than its director, Arnold Lehman, ever intended. "Sensation" was advertised as liable to "cause shock, vomiting, confusion, panic, euphoria and anxiety." Indeed, its contents--most controversial of which are sliced-up animals suspended in formaldehyde and Chris Ofili's painting of the Virgin Mary with a generous helping of dung on her bosom--are not for the knock-kneed...
...plain and sometimes ugly truth is that when this sort of work sticks its jaw out into the wider world, its jaw turns to glass. That is surely the case with the lightning rod of the show, Ofili's The Holy Virgin Mary (1996). The work, which has now been placed behind Plexiglas, with a velvet rope in front and a guard standing by to protect it from any angry viewers, is a perfectly competent rendering of a Christian icon--a central figure on a ground of gold. The drawing of an African Mary (Ofili is of Nigerian descent...
...another gallery sits Marcus Harvey's huge grisaille portrait of an English child abuser and murderer, Myra Hindley, whose image is composed of child-size handprints. Proving that local politics tends to make all art local, it is this work, rather than Ofili's Holy Virgin, that prompted an outcry in London, where "Sensation" first appeared two years ago at the Royal Academy of Arts. And yet, like Ofili's work, Myra is hardly an astonishment, looking like a wobbly send-up of a picture by the American painter Chuck Close. People in New York, ignorant of her crimes, will...
...been in forefront of coverage in 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 New York mayor Rudy "It's not art if I can do it" Guiliani has withdrawn funding from the Brooklyn Museum of Art exhibit "Sensation" because he's offended by a portrait of the Virgin Mary stained with elephant dung and surrounded by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...
...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 to celebrate, not desecrate, the Virgin Mary...