NY TIMES
The deputy mayor,
Joseph J. Lhota, never went to see the painting. Just hearing about it was enough.
The eight-foot-tall portrait of the Virgin Mary, a semi-abstract collage hanging at the
Brooklyn Museum, contained clumps of elephant dung and cutouts of female genitalia from pornographic magazines. Mr. Lhota, a Roman Catholic, was horrified. “As a concept,” he said in a recent interview, “it was offensive.”
In fall 1999, that personal revulsion turned into public policy. Overnight, he became the tip of an unbending Giuliani spear aimed at the museum, seeking to cajole, browbeat and threaten the 190-year-old organization into removing the work of art.
Now, as Mr. Lhota promotes himself as a moderate Republican candidate for mayor of New York with urban sensibilities that the national party lacks, his handling of the episode stands out as a deeply discordant moment, raising questions about how he would operate in a diverse city whose current mayor champions unpleasant speech from every quarter.
Arguing that public money should not be used for the desecration of religion, Mr. Lhota threatened the museum’s financing from the city, raised the specter of evicting it from its home in Prospect Heights and declared that, when assessing what art should be displayed to the public, the sensibility that really mattered to him was that of his 8-year-old daughter, Kathryn.
“You need a framework, mental architecture, to understand what you’re looking at so that you don’t go home at night and have nightmares,” he said then.
His actions, and those of his colleagues at City Hall, touched off an extraordinary showdown over free speech, respect for religion, and public financing of the arts that eventually entangled Congress, the Catholic Church — even Hillary Rodham Clinton, then the first lady.
The city lost the battle, but 14 years later, Mr. Lhota is unapologetic. “I don’t regret the tactics — at all,” he said.
He defended his conduct and the motivation behind it, even as he acknowledged that his legal reasoning was faulty. “I have a much clearer understanding of the First Amendment now,” he said.
Asked how, as mayor, he would respond to an art display that offended him, he replied: “Ask them nothing. Probably go see it. Enjoy it. Hope there is a ribbon cutting.”
Yet he still appears to be wrestling with the lessons of “Sensation,” as the museum exhibition was called. Mr. Lhota, a seasoned municipal deal maker, prefers to describe the ultimatums that the city issued, including the eviction threat, as routine strategies in a negotiation, not as a flash point in the battles over free speech that raged throughout Mayor
Rudolph W. Giuliani’s tenure.
Should Mr. Lhota become the Republican nominee for mayor, his Democratic opponent would most likely pounce on his role in the museum controversy, linking him to an administration that, in pursuit of a better-behaved New York, ran afoul of the First Amendment by seeking to block a rally for young black men in Harlem, cutting financing for an AIDS housing group that mocked City Hall and firing a police officer who criticized the department.
For many involved in the Brooklyn Museum debate, bitterness toward Mr. Lhota still lingers.
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City Hall’s rawest fury, however, was reserved for the “Holy Virgin Mary,” by the artist
Chris Ofili. Mr. Lhota, who had briefly considered becoming a priest, concedes that he did not see the artwork — or the rest of the “Sensation” exhibition — in person, despite living in Brooklyn Heights, about 10 minutes from the museum. He looked at pictures instead.
“The use of the dung, I thought, was gratuitous,” he said.
As Mr. Giuliani denounced the show before it opened as “sick stuff” and “Catholic-bashing,” a sentiment shared by many, Mr. Lhota quickly became the administration’s hands-on enforcer in the case, interviews and court records show. His blunt message to the museum’s chairman: Unless the “Holy Virgin Mary” was removed from the show, the city would cut off the museum’s financing, its $7 million-a-year lifeblood.
When the museum balked, Mr. Lhota searched for ways to prevent it from using taxpayer money for the exhibition. He scoured the museum’s century-old lease with the city, discovering what he believed was a violation of its agreement to use a city-owned building: “Sensation” planned to charge attendees $9.75 and restrict entry for children under 17, despite lease rules that required free admission for all.
When the directors voted to proceed with the show, Mr. Lhota, as the mayor’s representative on the board, cast the sole dissenting ballot. Outside of the museum’s lobby, he announced the city’s punishment: withholding the museum’s first payment of the year, a check for $500,000.
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Mr. Lhota -.... said he was looking for “leverage points” to force the museum’s hand. “It was,” he said, “as legitimate as any negotiation is.” New York’s cultural leaders saw it as something much graver: a warning that the Giuliani administration would wield city financing to punish any art that it disliked — “with no due process, no hearings, no place for the museum to argue its case before an impartial body,” said Alan J. Friedman, who ran the New York Hall of Science at the time.
Mr. Lhota, who said he had spent hours at the Accademia Gallery in Florence, Italy, and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris (and once audited an art history course at Georgetown), bristles at the suggestion that he advocated censorship, calling such discussion “noise.” In his mind, the entire affair was a dispute over a lease, escalated by the museum.
He still bemoans the “stubbornness” of the museum’s board. “They latched onto this and made it into an issue that it wasn’t,” he said.
Mr. Lhota detailed his feelings about the art, and his actions toward the museum, in a lengthy deposition, part of a lawsuit the museum filed against the city. ....under questioning, he made clear that the city had no set guidelines for determining which art was offensive. He said Michelangelo’s “David” would be acceptable for the museum, despite its depiction of male nudity, but Ron Mueck’s “Dead Dad,” a life-size statue of a naked dead man, would not.
When a federal judge, Nina Gershon, ruled in November 1999 that the city had violated the First Amendment, she cited Mr. Lhota’s testimony. It “reinforces the conclusion,” Judge Gershon wrote, “that it has never contemplated that the city or the mayor would have veto power over the museum’s decisions as to what to display.”
After its court defeat, the Giuliani administration reached a settlement that required it to restore financing to the museum and barred City Hall from any acts of revenge.
