It's Not Nudity, It's Art!

The city has apologized and agreed to pay $56,000 to a group of art students whose exhibition at a Brooklyn war memorial was closed last year just a day after it opened because authorities deemed it “inappropriate” for the public space.

The exhibition, erected at the World War II memorial in Cadman Plaza Park by a group of Brooklyn College master’s students, included such [x-rated elements] as live rats (gasp!), a sculpture of a hand holding a penis (double gasp!), images of “sexy” nuns and gay sex (triple gasp!) and a written narrative describing a sexual encounter with a man named Dick Cheney (well, okay, that last one is kinda pushing it—for a war memorial).   The payment and apology were part of a settlement reached by the city in response to a federal lawsuit filed by the students and their professor, which charged city officials with [violating their First Amendment rights](http://www.nysun.com/article/56021). Of course, this is not the first time the mayor’s office has tried unsuccessfully to fight the display of sexually explicit artwork. Back in 1999, [Rudy Giuliani made a failed attempt](http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/nov1999/muse-n02.shtml) to withhold public funding from a display that featured a black Virgin Mary on a canvas decorated with elephant dung at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. “The lesson here is that the government is not the appropriate body to judge the value of art work,” [Norman Siegel](http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/07/arts/07arts.html?_r=1&ref=arts&oref=slogin), a lawyer for the students, said in response to the settlement. Nope, that’s up to self-righteous art critics—and, evidently, First Amendment lawyers—to decide.

Photo courtesy of [get directly down on Flickr]