Holy pornography! There’s naked ladies in that window.
The intersection be tween art and smut, where nudity devolves into in-your-face, nihilistic commercialism, has been located. It sits on the Lower East Side, a formerly Jewish, Irish and Hispanic precinct that’s been invaded of late by Asians, yuppies, art-world hipsters, and — if you listen to longtime resident David DeJesus — pure filth.
From the picture window of Allegra LaViola Gallery on East Broadway, visible to yeshiva boys and Chinese toddlers on the street, is a canvas depicting a cartoonish, naked lady sitting spread-eagled. Next to it is a sketch containing vulgar words best left in the bathroom.
“Imagine if you had a daughter!” DeJesus declared inside the gallery to anyone who’d listen.
The exhibit, titled “Pornucopia,” incensed DeJesus with a painting depicting three unclad women, one of them, inexplicably, nursing a baby. All are hanging on to a stripper pole. It’s called “Three Graces,” though grace is the last sensibility these slovenly and crudely drawn creatures evoke.
“Art is art,” he said. “It’s freedom. It’s America. But there is a line, and the line runs through this stripper pole. What is this image saying to young girls? That money is everything!”
The clash between the gallery and the ‘hood has been painted as a battle between the forces of modernity and the prudishness of the nearby Hasidic community, some of whose members have complained to police. But yesterday, families who’ve lived in the nabe for decades joined their Jewish neighbors to slam a show they feel exploits an enclave that’s fought back from years of high crime, only to emerge as a playground for slumming, rich dilettantes.
The gallery sits across the street from a playground, down the block from a Jewish Orthodox boys school, and many rungs down the moral ladder from an area in which family values are still revered.
“It’s very disgusting,” said Nadia Checy, who is African-American, promising to “check out” the exhibit for herself.
At Desserts NYC, a nearby pastry shop that caters to the artsy crowd, worker Patrick Nersesian defended the show. “We love it,” he said. “It’s not bringing in slimeballs and perverts. People are not going to the show to masturbate.” But even he acknowledged its mercenary nature.
The gallery’s owner, he said, “is struggling with the rent, trying to get press.” He praised a series of paintings depicting gay prostitutes performing oral sex. “They show what a hustler has to go through to make his 20 bucks. We could have a Starbucks there! Would you like that?”
The contretemps began when Rabbi Shmuel Spiegel, of the Mesivtha Tifereth Jerusalem yeshiva, asked the gallery to shield the worst images from the street with a curtain. The response: “It’s not against the law.” He called the cops. Nothing happened.
“This is not a religious concern,” the rabbi protested, “I’m not trying to have the show closed down.
“I was born in this neighborhood. In this beautiful, multicultural neighborhood. You have to respect each other.”
The gallery was busy yesterday, with a crowd that included a few sweaty-looking men drawn by the promised obscene content. Owner Allegra LaViola, 30, was thrilled.
“The Orthodox community has been outraged by the possibility that their children are being corrupted by these nudes,” she said. But LaViola declined to move racy pictures from the front of the gallery to the back, because “the works in the back are even more graphic.” Children, she said, are warned away from the exhibit by a sign in the window. But “I can’t ban them.”
Is there room in this city for traditional values and so-called art?
The exhibit, scheduled to close at the end of the week, is being extended.
You can’t argue with success. Or pornography.
NO NURSERY RHYME OR REASON
Most kids at age 4 can sing their ABCs. Lucia Imprescia has been limited to a lifetime vocabulary of “You want fries with that?” All because her wackadoodle mom sent her to an Upper East Side nursery school that failed to produce the precocious brat she ordered.
“It is no secret that for many Manhattan parents, getting a child into the Ivy League starts in nursery school,” mom Nicole Imprescia actually put in a Manhattan Supreme Court suit against York Avenue Preschool. “Studies have shown entry into a good nursery school guarantees more income than entry into an average school.”
The mom said her tyke was not drilled to take tests that determine which toddlers get into posh elementary schools and which ones wind up obese in hair nets. The poor kid was also forced to play with 2- and 3-year olds, when she should have been splitting the atom or something. Mom wants her $19,000 back.
But with a young kid already deemed permanently defective, there’s nothing for an ambitious mother to do. Experiment on your next kid.
Bus rides look like a gamble
Several gamblers who escaped with minor injuries in Saturday’s horrific bus crash that cost 15 people their lives were back within hours, traveling with the same Chinatown bus company, World Wide Tours, to the Mohegan Sun casino — believing such carnage couldn’t happen again.
“When a bomb goes off, it doesn’t go off again in the same spot,” Theodore Radulescu of The Bronx told The Post.
He was partly right. Another Chinatown bus company, Super Luxury Tours, crashed on the Jersey Turnpike Monday night, killing the driver and a passenger.
It’s no accident that Ophadell Williams, who drove the doomed World Wide bus, was a convicted killer and thief who procured two drivers licenses, one with an alias. This didn’t prevent him from operating what amounted to a giant coffin, containing 32 sleepy and trusting captives. Now, Gov. Cuomo wants to know how this happened.
Good question.
Madness on parade
What if the India Day Parade, Sikh Day Parade, Muslim Day Parade, Pakistan Independence Day Parade and Philippine Independence Day Parade all ended, with merriment, in your front yard?
That’s happening in the increasingly residential Flatiron District, where these parades and more wind up in Madison Square Park. Residents want cops to force the marches to end somewhere else. Complainers, predictably, are being accused of racism.
Can’t we find a nice commercial district for the festivities? Maybe not. They’re all taken by the fried-dough stands of those endless street fairs.
Forces of nature
The horrors overtaking Japan have left me frightened and humbled. An earthquake and tsunami. A nuclear crisis. The most powerful force in the universe has no face, no politics, no reason. Mother Nature took on a country whose people believed they were prepared. And she won’t be stopped.