Manured Madonna

More Facts:

The exhibit had already been shown in London, where it had also created scandal and drawn record crowds, and Berlin.

A record 9,200 visitors turned out for the opening in New York, far outdistancing the previous record of 5,900 for the opening of a Monet exhibit in January 1998.

Other items in the exhibit are described as:

• a preserved pig carcass cut in half lengthwise
• a whole shark, also preserved in formaldehyde
• a bust of a man carved from nine pints of the artists' frozen blood
• a topless woman as the center of a "Last Supper" depiction
• a portrait of a mass-child-murderer made from children's handprints
• a cows head made out of live maggots
• a hand preserved in mercury, with apples
• a folded-over mattress with a water bucket, melons and a cucumber standing between a pair of oranges.
• multiply genitaled mannequins

The exhibit was one of the largest in the museum's history, and cost more than $1 million to put on. 20,000 live maggots, for example, had to be replaced weekly, and additional structural supports added to support the tank with the shark.

Religious groups protested at the museum; animal rights groups also protested (because of the pig, among other things, one supposes).

The city argued that the museum had violated its lease because unescorted children under 17 were going to be excluded from attending, breaking the city's open-to-the-public requirement. It also argued that a $9.75 admission fee was going to be charged, violating a requirement that entry be "free." And finally, it argued that the exhibit was actually for commercial, not non-profit, purposes; for which see the next paragraph.

The madonna and all other paintings in the exhibit are on loan from the collection of Charles Saatchi, a British advertising executive and premier art collector. The exhibit is also financially supported by Saatchi and by Christie's, an auction house that makes a business of selling works of art. It's reported that Christie's donated $50,000 for the exhibit (it's largest donation ever), Saatchi $160,000 (on condition of anonymity), and art dealers representing the artists on display at least $10,000. In return, Christie's in particular was given the right to hold parties--i.e., for potential bidders--in the exhibit for free, and items with Christie's logo were passed out at the exhibit's opening reception. Representatives of the city claim that the exhibit was a scam, intended to inflate the sales price of the works, and that a publicly funded museum should not engage in such "shock commercialization." One paper reported that after the exhibit closed in London, Saatchi auctioned off 128 pieces from his collection, many by the same artists represented in the exhibit. At least one museum had refused to show the exhibit because it all came from one collection, and several funding sources had declined to contribute because of worries about supporting Saatchi's profits. Some museums, such as the National Gallery in Washington, refuse donations from the art market to support display of privately owned works. Other museums, however, do put on such "private shows."

The museum's defense of its financing plan can be found at this site.

Saatchi is a political conservative who designed the ad campaign that launched Margaret Thatcher into power.

The audio tour for the exhibit was recorded by David Bowie. Bowie also pledged $75,000 to support the exhibit. A report has it that: "Soon after, [Bowie's] private, for-profit Internet company was given the right to display the "Sensation" exhibition on Bowie's personal Web site, -www.davidbowie.com, which sells art, clothing and memberships to Bowie's fan club. While Bowie's financial contribution has been kept in confidence by museum officials, traffic on the Bowie Web site has more than tripled."

The National Gallery of Australia--a prospective host for the exhibit in 2000--cancelled, citing ethical considerations raised by the Brooklyn museum's financing scheme.

After the city filed its eviction suit, the museum amended its lawsuit to claim that the mayor should pay damages personally violating its civil rights.

An art critic described the madonna in the following terms: ""Holy Virgin Mary," now behind protective glass as if it were Michelangelo's "Pieta," is a big semi-abstract collage, eight feet high and six feet wide, resting on two balls of resin-covered elephant dung with pins stuck into them spelling out the words Virgin and Mary. The Virgin, simply drawn, is black, in a flowing blue-gray robe, a flowerlike form, flat against a flat gold backdrop. Small cutouts of vaginas and buttocks from pornographic magazines are stuck to the picture to suggest putti. Another ball of dung is meant to be one of the Virgin's breasts. Like all of Ofili's collages, the work is colorful and glowing. The first impression it makes, before you decipher the little cutouts, is that it's cheerful, even sweet. Ofili uses lots of glitter and splashes of resin to give his surfaces a shimmer, like mosaic. His inspirations, it seems, include Byzantine art, Gustav Klimt, folk art and Op Art."

First Lady (and soon to be senatorial candidate) Hilary Clinton immediately went on record as denouncing the action of Mayor (and soon to be senatorial candidate) Rudolph Giuliani. "'Our feelings of being offended should not lead to the penalizing and shutting down of the entire museum,' Clinton said. Told of Clinton's comments at a press conference, Giuliani said: 'Well then, she agrees with using public funds to attack and bash the Catholic religion.' "

New York Cardinal John O'Connor declared in a sermon that the work is "an attack on religion itself and in a special way on the Catholic Church." A representative of the [Jewish] Orthodox Union similarly stated, "Displaying a religious symbol splattered with dung is deeply offensive and can hardly be said to have any redeeming social or artistic value. Today the offense is perpetrated against a Christian symbol. Tomorrow it might be a Jewish ritual item, and then of another faith."

Chris Ofili, artist of the work, commented: "I don't feel as though I have to defend it. The people who are attacking this painting are attacking their own interpretation, not mine. You never know what's going to offend people, and I don't feel it's my place to say any more." Ofili is a 31 year old British subject, a winner of a respected prize for young artists, Roman Catholic by religion and Nigerian by descent. Ofili explains his work thusly: "As an altar boy, I was confused by the idea of a holy Virgin Mary giving birth to a young boy," he said. "Now when I go to the National Gallery and see paintings of the Virgin Mary, I see how sexually charged they are. Mine is simply a hip-hop version." He also says: "'the paintings themselves are very delicate abstractions and I wanted to bring their beauty and decorativeness together with the ugliness" of the dung, so that people "can't ever really feel comfortable with it.'" Elephant dung is a common element of his work. "There's something incredibly simple but incredibly basic about it," Ofili said. "It attracts a multiple of meanings and interpretations."

The museum had been renting the building for 106 years.

The museum claims that the mayor's office had been thoroughly briefed about the exhibit, including the madonna, two months before it opened, and had raised no objections.

One author pointed out that the "physicality" of many of the works in the exhibit seemed to draw on the Catholic tradition of preserving parts of saints' bodies as relics.

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