It’s going to be quite something to see what the taxpayers of New York are going to make of the spectacle opening today at the Park Avenue Armory. It’s a work called “WS” by the artist Paul McCarthy, whom no less a blue nose than The New York Times calls a “demented imagineer.”
He has erected within the taxpayer-funded space what the armory’s promotional material calls “a massive, fantastical forest of towering trees with grotesque video projections of iconic characters playing out their own fairy tale drama in a replica of his childhood home.”
“This daring social commentary,” the armory boasts, “lampoons the American dream and its cherished icons, bombarding the viewer with a sensory overload of scatological, sexual, violent, and debaucherous imagery that boldly forces the viewer to acknowledge the twisted underside to saccharine idols in popular culture.” It calls the result a “visceral, very challenging, immersive experience.”
It’s a glory that artists can push the edges of the envelope. My concern here is with the taxpayers who are forced to provide funding. “WS” is so lurid that the Armory won’t let the taxpayers take their own children. It’s too much even for a 16-year-old taxpayer. For a taxpayer to take a child to this fantastical forest, the Armory warns, the taxpayer and child will each have to be over 17 years.
Where is the Honorable Rudolph Giuliani when we need him? He was the mayor who hit the ceiling when, in 1999, a show called “Sensation” went up at the Brooklyn Museum. It featured a painting of the Virgin Mary decorated with pornographic cuttings from magazines and splattered with elephant dung.
Giuliani was outraged, calling it “insulting to Catholics.” His outrage was shared by the leadership of the City Council. None of them wanted to outlaw the exhibition; Giuliani just didn’t want the taxpayers to have to fund it.
The archbishop of New York, John Cardinal O’Connor, said he was “saddened” by what appeared to be “an attack not only on our blessed mother” but also “on religion itself.” The Forward, which I was then editing, asked its readers to imagine how they’d feel were the museum to mount a mockery of a revered Jewish figure.
Eventually, a federal judge, Nina Gershon, forced the taxpayers to keep funding the museum. She accepted arguments to the effect that once the taxpayers began funding a public museum, they couldn’t stop just because they didn’t like what the museum was doing with their money.
One would think that the Brooklyn debacle would have put custodians of the public fisc on red alert when the Armory Space came asking for funding. It was designed precisely to provide an unconventional space for unconventional work that couldn’t be accommodated elsewhere.
Fair enough, particularly since so much of the money came from private sources, such as Elihu Rose of the Rose real-estate family. Tens of millions of dollars, however, were put in by taxpayers — not any specifically to “WS,” an Armory spokesman says, but to the space it’s in.
Some $30 million came from the Empire State Development Corp., $15 million from the city. This in years when millions of New Yorkers were scrambling to pay ever higher tax bills and were forced to scrimp at home.
There was a time and a place — Europe, say — where the patronage of the arts was paid by royalty. Royalty claimed its standing by divine right. America stood for different things. Its taxing power is subject to democracy, to approval by taxpayers and voters.
In the end, they will have the last word. Maybe the taxpayers will love the Armory spectacle to which they can’t take their children today. But what about those who don’t and are even deeply offended; why should they have to subsidize it? For my part, I’ve spent a whole career nursing the arts, but I’ve emerged against any kind of government funding of the arts — period.