ART, FOR CHRISSAKES!

Recently, New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani got his Armani drawers in a wad over an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art that had as a featured attraction a picture by painter Chris Ofili of a black Virgin Mary smeared with what was claimed to be elephant dung. Another controversial exhibit contained animals cut into sections and displayed in tanks of formaldehyde. You can only wonder if they're selling postcards of this in the museum gift shop. "Oh, look, hon, Aunt Sara sent us a card from the Brooklyn Museum OH MY GOD!"

Rudy immediately saddled his high horse and rode against what he called "Catholic-bashing" by threatening to cut off city funding for the Museum. The inevitable shouting matches ensued, with artists and civil libertarians denouncing "censorship" and Giuliani piously intoning that he was defending the rights of Catholics, who are apparently some sort of oppressed minority in New York City. And of course, everyone recalled the famous spectacle of Jesse Helms inveighing against the National Endowment of the Arts, a miniscule fraction of whose already relatively small budget went to fund a photograph of a crucifix in urine.

Proponents of public funding for the arts point out that such funding has a long tradition dating back to the Renaissance, when powerful overlords like the Borgias and the Medicis funded artists like Leonardo Da Vinci and Michaelangelo. The major difference is that the Borgias didn't grant or withhold public funding for the arts to score points with a political constituency. In fact, they weren't much known for sucking up to the voters at all. If they wanted to make a political point, they'd just invite an enemy over to dinner and serve up a tasty dish of Auntie Lucrezia's Mushroom Surprise.

But in the modern political landscape art becomes a football, an easy thing to pick up and run with whenever some politician needs to bolster his poll numbers among conservatives. Decisions about art get put into the hands of the sort of people who probably think that paintings of dogs playing poker are pretty cool. (Okay, I confess, I do too, but at least I ADMIT I'm a peasant.)

Let's get real. This isn't about "public money being used to demean Catholics." In fact, this isn't really about public money at all. While the Museum itself is funded by the city, the exhibit in question is being underwritten by British advertising tycoon Charles Saatchi, whose most prominent advertising client was Margaret Thatcher. (So much for "liberal cultural elites"). And if you really want to follow this principle that public funds shouldn't be used to pay for things that people find offensive, then a lot of Mets fans have some tax money coming back for any public funding of Yankee Stadium.

No, Giuliani's target isn't a picture of the Virgin Mary smeared with elephant dung. He's after another, much more prosaic female icon: Hillary Clinton, Rudy's rival for the New York Senate who has spoken in support of the Brooklyn Museum. Giuliani, no doubt rubbing his hands with glee at this opening, replied: "Well, then she agrees with using public funds to attack and bash the Catholic religion." While I'm sure the 100-yard feces toss is not an unknown event in the game of New York politics, it seems that the dung Giuliani is slinging is from a more common domestic animal.

Politicians aren't the only ones grandstanding here, of course. If you don't think publicity has anything to do with this whole brouhaha, you have only to look at the title of the exhibit: "Sensation". And it's working. People are flocking to see the dung in question while listening to rock star David Bowie intone in his taped visitors' guide: "On a damp day its rich, earthy scent wafts elusively around [Mr. Ofili's] works." Yeah, I'll bet.

Unfortunately, the problem with art that results from this sort of ethos is not that it's offensive, it's that most of it is just stupid. For example, one "installation" in the exhibit features a banana and two oranges arranged on a bed in a suggestive way next to a pair of melons and a bucket strategically placed to emulate, shall we say, certain parts of the female body. Har-dee-har-har. Frankly, this is the sort of subtle irony one expects from Beavis and Butt-head. Unfortunately, discussion of the art as art gets lost in the din of political debate.

The wretched excess produced by artists trying to create "Sensation" is just as bad as the wretched blandness that people fear will be produced if Rudy and Jesse had their way. You have to wonder if the solution isn't just to ditch public funding of the arts, not because somebody might get offended, but because art is just too important to be left to politicians and provocateurs.