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This review of collector Charles Saatchi’s cheekily-titled My Name Is Charles Saatchi and I Am an Artoholic in More Intelligent Life led me to discover that it is now ten years to the month since Saatchi’s Sensation exhibition, which Saatchi apparently surmises to be the most lavish success of his career, opened in the Brooklyn Museum. If you’ll remember, this was the show that included Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, already a notorious piece by 1999, and one that caused a huge fracas stateside but not in Europe: Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary. A painting of a black Mary spackled with resined elephant poo and surrounded by cherubs made from clippings out of porno mags, the piece seems like suspiciously intentional in its America-baiting, a crock pot meal served up in the faces of culture warriors with all the right ingredients lovingly mixed in.
I don’t remember how I felt about the controversy at the time exactly, but I think I was fascinated and a little confused about why it made Americans so enraged in such a genuine, emotional way. Then-mayor Rudy Giuliani threatened to cut off the museum’s $7 million annual government subsidy, hilariously fulminating, “There’s nothing in the First Amendment that supports horrible and disgusting projects!”
I don’t think Ofili ever copped to making the work for antagonistic purposes. I’ve always been skeptical of shock art (though anyone who says it can’t exist anymore hasn’t taken a stroll down the Rape Tunnel) for the obvious reasons, but I’m starting to feel that there is actually a purity in crassness for the sake of crassness. Andres “Piss Christ” Serrano is a better example of this genre than Ofili, but maybe the go-to defense of these pieces as “thought-provoking” isn’t necessary - perhaps “provoking” is enough. ”It makes you think” isn’t as potent as “it makes you hate.”
The Greeks built their temples, when they could, high in the mountains, way above the stickiness of life on the ground, out of phantasmic stones and metals, adorned with the chiseled images of heaven. To experience this art properly was to be transported. All of the elements, from the size and situation of the temple to the choice of statuary, were intended to inspire as whole a feeling of supernatural communion as possible. Ancient art was rarely, if not never, some kind of commentary; the engagement was meant to be more emotional than intellectual.
Just as, say, the temple at Segesta is calculated in every detail to provoke rapture, perhaps The Holy Virgin Mary was calculated in every detail to provoke rage in viewers of a certain mind. I mean: feces on the Madonna and angels made out of dick pics.
Does hate-art, that which maliciously fucks a symbol or narrative that many people consider adjacent to their soul (Piss Christ was, in one showing, attacked with a hammer) rather than prodding sensibilities to the end of some kind of dialogue about art and expression, have any merit or future? Well, I think an artist who took this approach from a benighted angle and affronted what the “typical” human-rights, religion-skeptical, environment-conscious museumgoer holds dear, could create a very intriguing show. An assault on “taste” (Jesus kitsch, bad poetry about freedom, framing a pair of Nikes hecho en Mexico) is probably not virtiolic enough - not to mention the effect is turned on its side because one can’t be sure what the artist is up to. No, it almost has to be done in the medium of defacement, of either life or value: perhaps the artist wears only fur or tapes himself burning down a thatch of trees, perhaps he purchases fine old books or prints and destroys them, in a gallery setting. Or for more narrowly right-wing art, look no further than Facebook. Imagine the furor if the Obama-Joker Photoshop jockey were given exhibition space. Most anyone who’s ever been inside a museum would hate that - it would be perfect.
Sensation wasn’t meant only to outrage, of course, and, indeed, it was a big success for the museum, the artists, and especially Saatchi. Shadily, he owned most of the pieces, all of which certainly went up in value because of their mainstream visibility in the exhibition… an exhibition for which he also footed much of the bill. Art-flipping, essentially. He and the rest of the contemporary art world, however, are too savvy to promote art that is only repulsive. Why, it would be almost as unprofitable as promoting art that is only beautiful.
