Henry J. Stern
June 8, 2007  



 
 The city's Parks Department has been told to pay $56,750 to settle a lawsuit brought on behalf of graduate art students at Brooklyn College..  The school had asked for and received permission from Parks to display temporarily their students' work in the Brooklyn War Memorial, a building in Cadman Plaza Park built to honor Brooklynites who served in World Wars I and II.   Although most of the paintings and sculptures were not objectionable, one sculpture depicted a man holding a p-nis.  Another contained a live rat, and a third showed various homosexual acts.  Straight sex is apparently out of vogue with these artists.

Shocked by what he saw, which violated an oral agreement he said he had with the college, Brooklyn  Parks Commissioner Julius Spiegel ordered the works removed on May 4, 2006.  The exhibit was dismantled, and several pieces damaged accidentally by park workers.  The rat, a durable creature, was reported to have escaped injury.

The story was covered yesterday in the Brooklyn edition of the Daily News  by Nick Reisman and John Marzulli. The news gave the story its lead editorial today, under the headline, CHILDREN BEHAVING BADLY.  The headline refers to the art students, not the city officials.  The Times covered the story on June 7 in a news brief by Felicia R. Lee
A snippet by Stefanie Cohen appeared in the Post yesterday. "The art show," she wrote, "included caged rats and images of sexy nuns and gay sex.".
 
Attorney Norman Siegel, twice a candidate for Public Advocate, represented the students in action against the city.
The Corporation Counsel represents city agencies, and concluded that it was in the city's interest to settle the case for a relatively small amount.  Under the agreement, the 18 students and their professor will receive $750 each, and Mr. Siegel will pocket $42,500 in legal fees.  It is unusual for a lawyer to receive 75 per cent of a settlement and his 19 clients to divide the remaining 25%, but there is no question that Mr. Siegel's vigorous advocacy and media access were of great assistance in obtaining the settlement.

The settlement included the extraction of an apology from Commissioner Spiegel.  His statement was a watered down version of the British sailors confession to entering into Iranian waters.  It suggested a bully requiring his victim to say he was sorry, when in fact he was sorry only that the bully was squeezing him.

The Corporation Counsel acted fairly and reasonably in settling the case.  First Amendment issues have a way of getting out of hand, and the unilateral removal of the art work was not the proper way to do it.  Corporation Counsel Michael A. Cardozo has set a modern record by serving two terms at a salary which is a fraction of what he previously earned.  And the city is winning more cases recently, as the result of the work of his office.
 
Nonetheless, you as a taxpayer may ask: why should we have to pay damages for the removal of a hand clasping a p-nis, a live rat and a depiction of a blow job from a public place frequented by parents and young children?

Legal cases are sometimes settled because one party does not want to risk a judicial decision which would set a precedent, or a defendant does not want to take the chance of a substantial award by a jury.risk a jury award.
In this case the unilateral removal of the artwork, without notice to anyone, was not the proper way to proceed, since the permit that had been granted was not contingent on any particular type of art being shown, nor did the artwork require the approval of the Borough Commissioner to be displayed.  The Borough Commissioner did not follow the due process required in cases involving First Amendment issues, whether or not the paintings were appropriate for public display.

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Back to the Past:  What We Learned About the Revolution, and What We Did - or Didn't  - Do About It.
 
A similar situation arose in Brooklyn in 1994, the first year I was Parks Commissioner under Mayor Giuliani.  An artist who called himself Dread Scott created a sculpture of a police officer, a headless mannikin,  who was lying on the ground bleeding, having just been slain by a young revolutionary.  Many protests came in from veterans' groups and Staten Island Borough President Guy Molinari.  On hearing of the issue, I followed Rule 12-G "Go to the scene." and drove at once to the large monument , the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Arch, in Brooklyn's Grand Army Plaza at the northern end of Prospect Park.

There was a staircase within the large arch.  I climbed two flights and there was the display in question.  It featured a dying police officer, bleeding onto the ground.  A young rebel faced the sprawled body.  The revolutionary appeared to be holding a liquor bottle in each hand.  I thought that did not depict the "freedom fighter" in a favorable light and asked why..  It was then explained to me that although they looked like liquor bottles, they were in fact Molotov cocktails, bottles filled with gasoline to be flung at tanks.  For youngsters, Molotov was the Soviet foreign minister under Stalin..  The name itself means hammer, just as Stalin meant steel, and Lenin came from beyond the Lena river.  They were born as Scriabin, Djugashvili and Ulyanov - which are scarcely noms de guerre.
 
The question became what to do about the Dread Scott picture. The exhibit was clearly inflammatory, it degraded the police and exalted the revolution to come.  The artist had a perfect right to draw, paint or sculpt whatever he wanted.  The issue was why should the state voluntarily choose to display it in a public place.  Veterans and police groups demanded its immediate removal., but I did not want to do that.

     The sculpture was in a place so obscure that even I had never heard of it before this event.   The space was open to the public only a few afternoons each week for a few hours.  There was about a week left before the exhibition would end.  A generous estimate would be that the gallery had about a dozen visitors a day, and not everyone stopped at the shot cop, most went on to see their own works of art..
 
The issue was placed before Mayor Giuliani by the Borough President of Staten Island, a good man named Guy Molinari. He had received complaints from Staten Islanders, although the statue was in Brooklyn.  I suggested that the artist in this case would love to have the work removed so he could sue and call attention to himself, his work and censorship in America.  The artist did not call himself Dread Scott to frighten people.  He would like to have been involved in a great controversy, like his 19th century namesake, the fugitive slave Dred Scott, whose case went to the Supreme Court of the United States.  

.The Mayor wisely decided not to act.  A week later the sculpture came down, and a First Amendment controversy was avoided.  The Prospect Park Conservancy could review proposed art displays in advance, and make judgments as to appropriateness.  Art work that was obscene, racist, violent or otherwise objectionable did not have an untrammeled right to be displayed at City Hall or any other public place.  However, once you have put it up, you have to be very careful about taking it down prematurely.

Some of our West Side readers will defend Dread Scott's work on the basis of artistic freedom.  He can paint or draw anything he wants, but for the city to display publicly the glorification of the murder of a police officer at a time and place when cops are being shot to death is a little strong for many of us Philistines (now Palestinians).

In our own effort to be fair and balanced,  we invite you to link the Dread Scott website, where you will see an entirely different view of the events we have described and the values we have expressed.  As Mayor Koch used to say,
"If you agree with me on eight out of twelve issues, vote for me.  If you agree with me on twelve out of twelve issues, see a psychiatrist."
 
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