Free Speech Battle Looms as N.Y. Museum Controversy Makes It to Courtroom

The battle over a museum exhibition that Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani calls vulgar art moved into a courtroom Friday, with the museum calling the mayor’s decision to pull its multimillion-dollar subsidy “a 1st Amendment catastrophe.”

It will be up to U.S. District Judge Nina Gershon to decide whether the city can continue to withhold its subsidy to the Brooklyn Museum of Art that totals about $7.2 million annually. The museum sued for an injunction to keep the city funds flowing.

Giuliani has lashed out at the exhibition, “Sensation,” which includes a portrait of the Virgin Mary decorated with elephant dung, mannequins with genitals as facial features and a glass tank featuring a fake cow’s head and 20,000 live maggots.

Museum attorney Floyd Abrams accused the city of trying to punish free speech.

“The behavior of the city is a 1st Amendment catastrophe,” Abrams said. The city and Giuliani are attacking the museum “for doing nothing more than exercising its constitutional rights.”

The Constitution has nothing to do with it, city attorneys said.

They said the museum broke its contract with the city, creating grounds for eviction. Its lease requires the museum to educate schoolchildren and the general public.

“This exhibit, that has dung all over the Virgin Mary, is going over the line,” City Atty. Michael Hess said. “That’s not educating children.”

The judge delayed her decision on the museum’s request for an injunction, saying she wanted to review more written arguments.

More than 13,000 people paid to see the exhibition during its opening weekend.