Sensation at Brooklyn Art Museum (thru Jan 9, 2000)
In the first room of the Sensation show you come face to face with the infamous shark by Damien Hirst. To my eyes it was looking a little threadbare, perhaps from all the hype. It is no harder for the uninitiated to negotiate the work in Sensation than to distinguish between the actual hype the Brooklyn Museum throws in on top of the inherent self-promotion within the artwork itself.

The borders between Art and Marketing blur. Marketing aside, most people who have a steady intake of popular culture have pretty strong stomachs so, I doubt whether the work is offensive in that way. The case with Sensation is whether or not the viewer thinks he/she is being huckstered. That is what the layman finds offensive, whether he or she is a Senator, cab driver or the Mayor of New York. The teenagers I saw walking around with their parents sure had a lot to giggle about. This precedent in art goes back to the dawn of the abstract, but in this case is nearer to the audacity of pop art. This show follows suit in this grandiose fashion with all the art in-jokes it can muster.

There is a great unifying sense of humor that is unimaginable coming from anywhere else but Britain. What some people donšt understand is that, in Britain, "sex" is Funny. There is no middle-American puritan right wing there. People in the States use different yard sticks for pop culture as art. Not so in Britain. Herein lies the sophistication, marketing-wise.

This British invasion includes Damien Hirst (Turner prize winner) and his Goldsmith (the art school that pioneered the production and training of art stars) college buddies who have been the mainstay of this "new wave" of British art for more than a decade. They show work which is designed to tease and confound much like mean spirited school boys. The British term "Taking the piss" or "piss-take" come to mind. American translation: "Blowing smoke up yer ass" which means mocking, just for the hell of it, without letting it be known. But the British culture at large is represented by this work, literally in the "trailer park" artist's family photos. Tracy Emin's "slag art" functions in this way. You are the art you make? Some sort of dark social dissection made concrete with the overt allusions to, and illustrations of sex and death.

But you can't fault these guys and gals. They hit the nail on the head awfully hard. You can't actually find fault with work if it is "shallow" and self promoting and offensive if it was designed for those exact purposes and receives the appropriate responses, can you? Their combined knowledge of art process is daunting. Their ability to combine their individualized issues into one big marketable onslaught is amazing. It stops short of massive "sellout" because the work holds up while standing there looking at it. The only question that arises is why? Why has art at the end of the modernist century come to this point?

Not that all the work is shallow, but it is all self-reflexive. Even the work of Rachel Whiteread (also a Turner prize winner) which is so reminiscent of 70's minimal sculpture (casts of negative spaces) has the feel of the ersatz minimal, albeit beautiful. Here, her work suffers from all the sideshow surrounding it.

But enough about art. Guiliani most certainly could not have helped more if he'd been paid by Charles Saatchi and Christie's and the British Council. The question is, was all this hoopla managed? Certainly Ofili's (another Turner Prize winner) work was the least offensive.

It's impossible to imagine more made to order hype and hype that works so well. Few people outside the art world would know who Andre Serrano or Robert Mapplethorpe were if not for the attempts to ban them by politicians. (Banned pop records in Britain frequently make #1 in the charts). What is fascinating is that you can't say exactly how the high profile of these artists affects the art. The art merely plays into it, a cat and mouse scenario.

My fascination walking through this onslaught was with the blurbs beside each piece. They were taunting the response from the viewer, "are you offended yet?" I can only imagine David Bowie intoning "are you offended yet" in a cheeky Ziggy Stardust vocalization.

Following the show you enter the shop where you listen to pumped in Brit POP. There are tons of little things to buy like toy sharks and anything alluding to chopping things in half, even t-shirts defending the first amendment. More hype designed to include the activist artists?

Downstairs in the cafe, the Brit theme continued. I had decided to dine on the Westminster Bangers (& cheese? my second choice was Tower of London Smoked tuna) when I noticed the price was as large as the plate was small. Still, fantastic marketing and daring from the Brooklyn Museum normally known for their academic leanings. Looking back on it, I wish I'd listened to the Bowie audio on the headphones and had the bangers for lunch.

James Rosenthal, December 1999