Thanks for your input, Vince. If you're ever in Brooklyn, we'll show you the town!

Now, let's have a look at the big bad picture (image below) and the Brooklyn Museum where it was shown in 1999.

Brooklyn was nicknamed the City of Churches, in the 19th century, and the Borough of Churches when it became part of NYC. Much of the populace is religious, and didn't utter a peep of protest when this exhibit was shown here in 1999 - just ex-mayor Giuliani, who sought to cut-off funding to the Brooklyn Museum, where the art was shown as part of a tour. At the time, humorist Paul Krassner (founder of the Realist and ā??Chicago 8 co-conspiratorā??) parodied Rudy (who has a slight lisp) on the radio (WBAI New York) with a dead-on Sylvester the Cat expression, "Sufferin' Succotash, itā??s filttttth!"


From Salon.com:

salon.com > Arts & Entertainment Oct. 2, 1999
URL: http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/1999/10/02/dung
True "Sensation"
The only offensive dung in New York's controversial art exhibit is the mayor's bullshit.
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By Daniel Kunitz

For the last week New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani has tried to convince us that he is deeply disturbed about the state of contemporary art and in particular the Brooklyn Museum of Art's mounting of "Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection." His credentials as an art critic would be more solid, however, if he had actually taken the trouble to see the exhibit. What set the temperamental mayor off this time was not black Catholic artist Chris Ofili's painting "The Holy Virgin Mary," but rather a photo of the work in the show's catalog. There is, of course, a world of difference between a photo of a painting and the painting itself. But Giuliani is more interested in scoring political points than in carefully considering what he has dismissed as "sick stuff."

Thank God this farce is now in the hands of the courts. As Floyd Abrams, chief legal counsel for the museum, has argued, once the city funds an art institution, any attempt by the mayor to dictate the contents of that institution amounts to censorship. By the way, the "Sensation" catalog clearly states that "the exhibition has received no city, state or federal funding." The museum itself "is supported in part by the City of New York" -- the taxpayers, not the mayor -- "for the maintenance, security and staffing of this City-owned building."

Had Giuliani actually paid a visit to the exhibit's Thursday night preview, he would have seen, in Ofili's "Virgin Mary" painting, a large, exuberantly decorative black Madonna, made sparkling by the addition of map pins, on a fluorescent yellow-orange ground. Its colors, shiny pins, and Mary's benign expression all combine to give the painting a celebratory air. True, cut-out rear views of buttocks with pussies peeping underneath surround the image of Mary -- these are meant to refer to the naked little putti of traditional religious art. Are painted versions of naked cherubic boys less offensive than photographs of parts of mature nude women? Is there only one way to paint a Madonna? And come to think of it, when are we going to see Giuliani's painting of the Virgin, since he said he could do it as well as Ofili?

Oh yes, I forgot the dung. By now we all should know that in Africa, where the dung idea came from, elephant droppings carry none of the horrible connotations that shit carries in New York. Before offending us all with his own bullshit, Giuliani might have troubled himself to learn about the sacred nature of pachyderms and their dung in other parts of the world. Once again, had Giuliani gone to see "Sensation," he would have come across another engaging Ofili canvas called "Afrodizzia." With its multi-hued, rhythmic swirls of paint and shiny pins, "Afrodizzia" features lots of little pictures of black men wearing afros. The painting also contains a number of elephant-dung clumps on which the names of black heroes like Miles Davis, Cassius Clay and Shaft are inscribed. Standing in front of this remarkably affecting, energetic painting, I found it hard to imagine that Ofili is really bashing blacks.
According to the mayor's dung-obsessed logic, Ofili is not only a Catholic basher, he's a racist too.
Breukelen advocaat Reviewed by Breukelen advocaat on . Get The Picture ? Get the Picture? By: Bill O'Reilly for BillOReilly.com Thursday, Feb 09, 2006 So here's my question, and it's a simple one because I am a simple man: The New York Times will not print any of those Danish political cartoons that mock Islamic violence, but it will publish a picture of Mary, the mother of Jesus, covered with dung. What's up with that? Here's what the Times wrote about the cartoons: "(We) and much of the rest of the nation's media have reported on the cartoons but Rating: 5