The Brooklyn Institute of Arts & Sciences v. The City of New York and Rudolph Giuliani

Facts

The Brooklyn Museum, operating since the 1890s in a City-owned building under a lease and contract arrangement, planned to display the “Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection” exhibit beginning October 2, 1999. The exhibit included approximately ninety works by forty contemporary British artists, including Chris Ofili’s “The Holy Virgin Mary,” which incorporated elephant dung and small photographs of buttocks and female genitalia. On September 22, 1999, after learning of the exhibit’s specific contents, Mayor Giuliani and City officials demanded cancellation, calling certain works “sick” and “disgusting” and stating they “desecrate” religion. The Mayor publicly declared the Museum had no right to government subsidy to “desecrate someone else’s religion” and threatened to terminate all funding, cancel the lease, evict the Museum, and replace its Board of Trustees. The City withheld the October 1999 payment of $497,554 in appropriated operating funds and filed an ejectment action in state court on September 30, 1999. The Museum had informed City officials, including the Commissioner of Cultural Affairs (an ex officio Board member), about the controversial nature of the exhibit months earlier, providing catalogs showing the disputed works, without objection until September 22.