When did the media start hating artists? Was it in 1948, after Jackson Pollock hit his loose-limbed stride? Or 1848, when Gustave Courbet first exhibited his revolutionary socialist manifestos on canvas? Whatever date you choose, one thing is certain: By the time the Culture Wars heated up during the 1980s, brouhahas like the recent one at the Brooklyn Museum over a supposedly blasphemous painting already represented the victory of the real over the symbolic, the morphing of the modern art world into the postmodern media realm. In 1913, former president Theodore Roosevelt dissed Marcel Duchamp's "Nude Descending A Staircase" by likening it to a Navajo rug. But unlike New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's recent attack on the Brooklyn Museum canvas, he wasn't bashing the painting as a campaign strategy—and at least Roosevelt had actually seen the object of his disaffection.

Duchamp, of course, was French and helped bring to the United States not only avant-garde art, but the accompanying idea of cultural controversy, the succés de scandale. American artists had simply never been taken seriously enough to raise hackles. This didn't occur until the so-called "triumph" of American art after World War II, which suddenly thrust American art into the international limelight. (Ironically this wartime victory was achieved by the emigration of European avant-gardists to New York.) Beginning with Jackson Pollock, a sort of cultural schizophrenia began to develop. During the quarter-century after the war, artists continued to be regarded not only as tortured but saintly fools á la Vincent van Gogh, but also as the embodiment of the duplicitous tailor who fashioned the emperor's new clothes. In pop cultural terms, this is the distance between movies with traditional attitudes about artists like "Lust for Life" and those, like "Blow Up," that preached a newer art-gospel: Now artists could be young and sexy, and art could be fun (good-bye existential angst, hello recognizable imagery!). A few dealers and collectors even began to make money.

Ron Mueck's "Dead Dad," an eerily-lifelike miniature replica of the artist's father. (Brooklyn Museum of Art)

Perhaps it was the money that turned the tide of a feckless media against artists. By the mid-eighties, the burgeoning American art market did for artists what Watergate had done for politicians: It revealed the industry behind the idealistic rhetoric. Pop-culture-meisters were shocked (Shocked!) and made an abrupt about face: Hollywood kissed off romanticized bohemian integrity (Vincent van Gogh) and turned on artists with a vengeance. Beginning in the mid-eighties, art in films became a joke ("After Hours"), an accessory for the status conscious ("Wall Street" and "The Moderns"), a commodity subject to unscrupulous manipulation ("Legal Eagles") and an aphrodisiac ("9 1/2 Weeks.") Artists were similarly trivialized as narcissists in Martin Scorsese's "Life Lessons" segment of "New York Stories," Merchant/Ivory's "Slaves of New York," and the TNT biopic "Margaret Bourke-White."

But Hollywood's art bashing seemed almost subtle compared to television's. Morley Safer's emblematic "Yes—But Is It Art?" segment of "60 Minutes" on September 22, 1993 plumbed positively premodern depths. It coupled fifties-style, my-kid-could-have-painted-that-Pollock-style insults with preposterous assaults on artists like Cy Twombly (dubbed by Safer the creator of "scrawls done with the wrong end of a brush.") The segment's vilification of artists smacked of the Blacklisting of the fifties, the last time the credibility of artists as a group was attacked. Safer's targets included Robert Ryman, whose retrospective was about open that month at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Journalistic ethics obliged that Safer seek a comment from the show's curator, Rob Storr, but apparently ethics be damned. The "Yes—But Is It Art" segment proffered so venomous a view of today's art that mom director Glenn Lowery refused to let Safari's camera crew inside the museum to cover its Pollock retrospective in 1998, calling Safer's art reports "drive-by shootings."

Chris Olfili's controversial "Holy Virgin Mary" (Brooklyn Museum of Art)

This is also an accurate description of the media's unconscionably superficial approach to the arts in general. If you don't believe in the power of sound bytes, just ask Karen Finely, the performance artist and member of the so-called NEA 4 who was branded "the chocolate-smeared woman" for a work in which the debased condition of woman was vividly rendered. By this logic is the "Mona Lisa" an image of a busty babe on a wooden panel? Most of the contemporary artists under attack have seen their complex works reduced to a politician's inane one-liner. Artistic intention is typically passed over in favor of a work's title: Consider Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ," or "The Holy Virgin Mary," the work by painter Chris Ofili in the Brooklyn Museum's "Sensation" show that Mayor Giuliani charged with blasphemy. The blasphemous element? The Anglo-Nigerian-Roman Catholic artist's Black Madonna bears his signature elaborately wrapped, shellacked, and jeweled packets of elephant dung. Not exactly what a reasonable person—or a reasonable fact checker—would call "dung smeared," as it's been generally characterized. Or offensive in a Nigerian cultural context. Or blasphemous.

Why do the media refuse to treat art seriously? Visual art does require some specialized knowledge to be understood—but so do Serbian politics and leveraged buyouts. The biggest part of the problem may be the front-of-the-book/back-of-the-book structure that ghettoizes all arts coverage, whether news or reviews, in the back pages or special sections. But news is news, and the art(s) worlds are huge industries that demand far more sophisticated news coverage than they receive.

Lately museums have (rightly) been put on the defensive for their ownership of artworks looted by the Nazis, or illegally excavated in archaeological digs. They continue to regularly suppress stories about physical attacks on works of art that would supposedly embarrass their institutions—that is, their well-connected, art-collecting boards of trustees. The potential for conflict of interest in such situations is painfully obvious, or should be. Is it surprising, then, that The New York Times has rarely addressed such issues at the Metropolitan Museum, where former Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, recently resigned as Chairman of the Board of Trustees?

In fact, the Times worked hard on the hometown "Sensation" story, producing far more extensive reporting about it than any previous Culture Wars subject. (An editor friend remarked to me "they're crusading for a Pulitzer on this one.") A slew of reporters covered infighting among museum directors (some of whom are dependent on city funding) and outright lying on the parts of Metropolitan Museum director Philippe de Montebello and MoMA director Glenn Lowry to obscure their failures to protest the mayor's action in a timely manner. The paper has also covered the case of the Cuban Museum in Miami which was shuttered for political reasons. But the Times' two naïve front-page stories by arts-neophyte reporters about the Brooklyn Museum's financing of "Sensation," that cited alleged ethical irregularities in the identity of the exhibition's corporate sponsor, Christie's, and in the museum's showing of a private collection at a public institution, seemed unaware of the fact that both are relatively common practices at American museums.

Robert Atkins speaking at Brooklyn Museum of Art rally.

Unfortunately, press coverage rarely included community support for the Brooklyn Museum, including a large New York Civil Liberties Union-organized event on the steps of the museum the night before the show opened. It featured thousands of demonstrators and more than four dozen speakers including former NEA chair Jane Alexander, actress Susan Sarandon, politicians, artists and writers, including myself. (You can watch my speech in RealVideo.) Only the Daily News paid much attention to polls; a yes-or-no question from Crain's New York Business had respondents "support[ing] the Brooklyn Museum in its current confrontation with the mayor" by a majority of 95% to 5%. And no media outlet I'm aware of examined the context of expansion-minded museums operating in a climate of reduced public funding—a climate that virtually ensures ever more commercially oriented, rather than intellectually adventurous, exhibitions. Another element that should have been considered as part of this story—not merely fodder for the editorial and op-ed pages—is the Mayor's demagogic history of First Amendment assaults. When Federal Judge Nina Gershon ruled against the city on November 1 on clear-cut constitutional grounds, Giuliani promptly promised a taxpayer-funded appeal. The city has won only two of more than 20 such suits (the number seems to rise weekly) it has filed.

But apart from the media's hostility to artists, the biggest problem is the ubiquity of censorship almost everywhere and the paucity of coverage it tends to generate. Consider two rather everyday instances that have recently crossed my desk. In September the Canada Council, Canada's federal arts agency, was forced to defend its decision to fund "Monstrance," an exhibition by artist Diana Thorneycroft in Winnipeg, which was paid for with $15,000 in public money. Dead bunnies— purchased at a grocery store—were the issue in this work about decay, although a Catholic viewer also charged that the show's title was itself offensive.

A similar situation in Hartford, Connecticut resulted in a panel discussion on November 12th in which government funding of the arts was discussed. The panel was catalyzed by the cancellation of a show at the city's Pump House Gallery of work by Tanya Batura, a ceramic artist who makes bowls or flatware with abstracted phallic designs. Real Art Ways, an alternative space, took on the cancelled exhibition so that the people of Hartford might be brought "into the conversation," according to RAW Executive Director Will K. Wilkins. He went on to observe that "none of the officials who have objected have seen the artist's work." Coming after the Brooklyn Museum debacle, one phrase comes to mind: 'Copy Cat Crime'. The cancellation of the "Sensation" exhibition at Australia's National Gallery in Canberra the last week of November, brings a similar phrase to mind.

A couple more related stories did prompt the teensiest bit of media attention toward the end of the year: One was the premature closing of a long-planned show at the Detroit Institute of the Arts of assemblages by artist Jef J. Bourgeau, one of which coupled a toy Jesus and a condom. Director Graham J. Beal, just two months at his job, insisted that "the museum is always selecting works of art, and selection is not censorship." (The ACLU, which is representing Bourgeau in his case against the museum, disagrees.) The other was a physical attack on Chris Ofili's "Holy Virgin Mary" by a retired teacher named Dennis Heiner who, echoing the Mayor, termed Ofili's work "blasphemous."

This is one crime the garrulous mayor chose not to deplore—or the freedom-of-the-press-loving media to abhor. If the mainstream media does ever rise above its hostility to art, perhaps then it will be able to connect the dots between freedoms of the press and expression.

For a history of censorship in the Arts visit The File Room.

AS THE MEDIA WATCH THE WORLD, WE WATCH THE MEDIA.

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