Racial profiling applies to New York art

It's not enough to just storm red-faced from the gallery. What Mayor Rudolph Giuliani doesn't like gets a righteous whack with his mayor-club. That's why he told reporters that Renee Cox's "Yo' Mama's Last Supper," a reinterpretation of Leonardo da Vinci's "The Last Supper" that depicts Jesus as a nude, black female, is "disgusting," "outrageous" and "anti-Catholic." He wants to cut the Brooklyn Museum's funding. He wants to create a task force. \nIn 1996 Sam Taylor-Wood, a white, British artist showed her piece "Wrecked," which depicted Jesus in "The Last Supper" as a nude, white woman, at the Brooklyn Museum. No one arched an eyebrow. Not even the now-blustering Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. What's going on here?\nGiuliani is lucky he can use his elected position to make his personal taste in art matter to everyone. Our heads must whip around to see what's rubbed him the wrong way this time. But what if the mayor just didn't "get it"? There's always that risk when you walk into an art museum. People like that risk. \nBut Giuliani's looking out for the people's tax dollars, too. Instead of funding a museum, a city subsidy of $7.2 million annually, Giuliani has threatened to create a censorship task force to "set decency standards for those institutions that are using … the taxpayers' money." Hopefully the lawsuit mania that erupts won't be too expensive. I heard that if you have 40 lawsuits in a month, the next one's half off.\nWhen you think of Giuliani actually trying to set up rules for art displayed in a museum, various censorship reflexes should spasm throughout your body. At night, you should wake up lathered in sweat from a dream where the Brooklyn Museum had nothing but paintings of sailboats, fruit and golden retriever puppies. \nMore perverse than that is the real notion that the cultural exchange we seem to be so proud of in this country in some ways only runs in one direction. Guess which direction. The right to control and manipulate images is one that marks and maintains the dominant culture. It tells others which limited roles and contexts they may see themselves in, what is out of bounds and what is appropriate for them. This has rung true throughout history. Creative rights have often been directly tied to civil rights.\nAmerica devours black music, humor, dance, fashion, slang and culture. Photographer Renee Cox, far from devouring Catholicism, merely seeks to explore it. A Jamaican-born Catholic herself, Cox should not be charged with trespassing on her own religion simply because she's black.\nCox is not trying to win a presidential election. Nor is she trying to mislead anyone. One political party marched crowds of blacks and minorities across its national convention stage last November in a truly bizarre attempt to coat its image in faux-multiculturalism. They deliberately misrepresented their demographics and policies by showing more minorities on the stage than in the audience. Our entire nation laughed about it afterwards. A lot was riding on their false advertising. \nBy contrast, what does Cox stand to gain by changing the skin color of Jesus and the apostles in her piece entitled "Yo' Mama's Last Supper?" Nothing, really, except a quirky, humorous and, like it or not, thought-provoking piece of art. "For me it was about taking these images that were held up to me as high art, and this is it; and flipping the script and putting in people of color," Cox said to Cable News Network -- Financial. \nRepresentation rights should flow both ways. Even before that, though, we should ask what the motives are behind certain cultural juxtapositions. Do they seek to exploit or mislead others? Maybe they simply make us ask questions. Why are minorities used to create an image when it suits others, whether showing strictly women of color on crisis pregnancy billboards along the highway or gathering minorities up for a ridiculous, token-flaunting political convention? Both actions attempt to convey something less than authentic to the outside world. Meanwhile, Cox is imagining herself outside of what the guys in charge have prescribed for her.