In the End, It’s Simply Misnamed

Despite posted warnings, none of the visitors to the Brooklyn Museum of Art seemed to be visibly shocked, nauseated, confused, panicked, euphoric or the least bit anxiety-ridden on the day I saw “Sensation: Young British Art From the Saatchi Collection.” Mostly they were having quiet fun.

Young and old listened to the voice of David Bowie whisper into their ears from audio headsets, as he attempted to offer some context for Jenny Saville’s big paintings of corpulent nudes (exploding the pretentious paint-as-flesh antics of Lucien Freud) or Richard Patterson’s big illusionistic picture of a toy Minotaur standing on a ledge (a famous Surrealist Picasso motif, here gone video-game Pop) or Jane Simpson’s sculpture based on a Rococo commode (albeit one painted to look like a chunk of suet).

The museum’s dire warnings about extreme physical and emotional distress were plainly meant for fun. With the possible exception of New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani--who, for his own electioneering purposes, uttered tin-eared denunciations of “Sensation” to the effect that it glorifies “sick stuff”--nobody of sound mind and functioning cortex would take such cautions at face value.

How could they? In art, outlaws are mainstream. They’re expected. It’s been this way for decades. “Sensation” represents the institutionalized counterculture at something like its zenith--if “zenith” is not too flattering a word for art that is, on the whole, pretty lame.

“Sensation” does clarify one thing: For young British art in the early 1990s, American artist Bruce Nauman has been the defining patron saint. The show could have been called “Nauman Redux in Young British Art From the Saatchi Collection”--Saatchi himself, incidentally, having been a major collector of Nauman’s art--or maybe “Nauman’s Spawn.”

The breathtaking formal rigor of the American’s multimedia precedent is almost never encountered in the show, but Nauman’s thematic concerns are everywhere apparent. The gnawing anxieties of contemporary social experience, focused like a laser on the psychological tremors of sex and mortality, form the zeitgeist of “Sensation.”

Sometimes the connection is more blunt. The flayed rubber skin of a man suspended by his ankles in Marc Quinn’s “No Visible Means of Escape” is vintage Nauman, while Quinn’s self-portrait bust made from his own frozen blood is Nauman overproduced.

Rachel Whiteread has extrapolated an entire career from Nauman’s 1966-67 concrete cast of the empty space beneath his chair. She multiplies that work times a hundred in gumdrop-colored resin for “Untitled (100 Spaces)” (1995) to minimal effect, but gets a bit more resonance out of expanding the scale in “Ghost” (1990). This cast of the interior of a small, blocky room, made from impassive blocks of dingy, light-absorbent plaster, has the dour presence of a mausoleum.

Even Damien Hirst--who, with Whiteread, is the most critically well-regarded artist of the 44 in the show--is unimaginable without Nauman’s prior example. Yes, Jeff Koons’ basketballs floating in aquariums precede Hirst’s various sculptures of a pickled shark, a lamb, a pig, some fish and a cow floating in big steel containers filled with formaldehyde (they date from 1991 to 1996). But so does Nauman’s 1988 “Carousel,” in which cast-aluminum animal carcasses are unceremoniously dragged around the floor in a vicious hypnotic circle, or his sliced-and-diced foam effigy, “Untitled (Two Wolves, Two Deer)” from 1989, which hangs mutely from the ceiling. Hirst’s sensibility is more akin to these than to Koons.

Artists are of course supposed to steal. And Brits, from Shakespeare and Hogarth to Bacon and Hockney, have made a specialty of finding ways to theatricalize social experience. Here’s the catch: Many of the “Sensation” artists simply theatricalize Nauman’s already devastatingly theatrical take on late 20th century social life. The result is unassimilated pastiche.

That’s the main reason “Sensation” has the look of the world’s biggest graduate student show. Another is that, without exception, the chosen paintings are at best mediocre.

Ironically, the sweet, decoratively ebullient paintings by Chris Ofili, singled out for Giuliani’s harshest abuse, are easily the best in the show. Ofili’s hip-hop version of a traditional Madonna, “The Holy Virgin Mary,” hovers in serene splendor amid a flutter of cupid-like cutouts from pornographic magazines. The picture is a thoroughly modern update on the standard face-off between sacred and profane--and thus anything but sacrilegious.

If it were, Ofili’s chromatically effusive painting “Afrodizzia,” with its clouds of cutout pictures of black pop stars, glittery dots and drizzles of oil paint and elephant-dung tributes to Miles Davis, Cassius Clay and other mostly African American cultural heroes would be virulently racist. But only a mayor on the make--notably, a politician whose own denunciation of a black Madonna painted by a Catholic artist of African descent is itself racially charged--could finally be that stupid.

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Maybe it’s the overblown context, but Sarah Lucas’ slight, intentionally corny sculptures end up stealing the show. Her small plaster fig leaves and angry, red-wax grimace--teeth bared and chomping on a cigarette butt--exude their own Nauman-esque verve. But the adolescent jokiness of “Two Fried Eggs and a Kabob,” which lays out foodstuffs on a dinner table in a sexually suggestive way, and of a soiled mattress adorned with a pair of melons and a bucket, plus a couple oranges and a cucumber, brings on ripples of guilty laughter and sordid revulsion far in excess of their meager means. There’s a whacked-out tenderness to these abject, wisecracking works. Lucas has a curiously honest, rhetorically economical gift.

Would that the same could be said for the galumphing show. There is more negligible work by more undistinguished artists here than in any major museum show in recent memory. That dim fact represents a depressing failure on the part of the Brooklyn Museum, which set aside its curatorial independence and pretty much turned over its galleries to a private collector.

The aim, of course, was to kick up some dust, as “Sensation” did in its 1997 debut at the staid, financially troubled Royal Academy of Art. There the show packed ‘em in--and made a bundle in the process.

That’s plainly why “Sensation” found a place on Brooklyn’s schedule--though without the media storm ignited by Giuliani’s incendiary comments, it’s doubtful the show would have drawn crowds approaching those it did on the artists’ home turf. As it is, attendance in its first month in Brooklyn averaged almost 3,000 per day--about 1,000 more than average daily museum attendance in each of the last two years.

These sorts of art-poor, publicity-heavy shenanigans aren’t new, but they are getting more common. Museums have been reduced to them for two principal reasons: politics and envy.

Post-Reagan politics have decimated the public sphere, represented in art by steady cant calling for reductions in public funding of cultural institutions. This, in the wealthiest nation on the planet.

“Sensation” embodies a cruel paradox on this slippery slope toward privatization. A private art collection is presented almost wholly without the curatorial intervention that is a public institution’s fundamental job; is paid for--with dubious ethical propriety--by private money (including Saatchi’s, anonymously); and raises a firestorm of posturing political outrage whose upshot is: further demands for diminished public funding.

Envy? Well, Brooklyn is not Manhattan, however short the subway ride, and the Brooklyn Museum, however impressive, doesn’t have the tourist-driven cachet of the Guggenheim, the Whitney, the Museum of Modern Art or the Metropolitan.

For Brooklyn, “Sensation” must have seemed a huge temptation in the field of current art--a field in which the Met is uninterested, MOMA suffers from the rigor mortis of self-importance, the Whitney has lately abandoned ship and the Guggenheim has devolved into a Museum of Bloat (witness the latter’s current huge, flatulent retrospective of Francesco Clemente, from which the artist’s critical reputation may not recover). Add the artistically dull (if lucrative) gallery scene that has characterized New York for several years now, and “Sensation” must have seemed potentially--well, sensational.

It’s not.

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* “Sensation: Young British Art From the Saatchi Collection,” Brooklyn Museum of Art, 200 Eastern Parkway, (718) 638-5000, through Jan. 9. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.