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For a while last fall, Chris Ofili was the most famous artist of African descent who ever lived. And his painting The Holy Virgin Mary (Fig. 1), exhibited in "Sensation," then the most notorious exhibition in the world, was the best-known work of Pan-African art-ever. More celebrated than the multimillion-dollar "Bangwa Queen" from Cameroon. More influential than all those African masks which were said to have "inspired" Picasso in MOMA's Modernism show. More notorious even than the Piss Christ of the wicked Afro-Caribbean photographer Andres Serrano.
After all, none of these other works had been called "sick stuff" by His Honor, the Mayor of New York, who then threatened to cut off city funds to the Brooklyn Museum of Art for having the temerity to exhibit "Sensation," which presented the work of "Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection." Nor had any other piece of African art ever been condemned by the Cardinal Archbishop of New York, or been sidestepped by the President's wife, who censured the mayor's political moves against the museum while affirming that she "shared the feeling many New Yorkers have that there are parts of this exhibition that would be deeply offensive. I would not go to see this exhibition" (Nagourney 1999).
Of course the Mayor, the Cardinal, and the First Lady had not actually gone to see the painting. But they knew what millions of others in the country and the world also knew: that Ofili had applied (or "smeared," as the censorious pols and church folk asserted) a piece of elephant dung to the breast of the Holy Virgin. And to make matters worse, he had surrounded his image of the Mother of God and Queen of Heaven with little cutouts which upon closer inspection turned out to be butt and crotch shots from porno mags. No wonder these praetorian guards of our public morality and civic virtue went ballistic. The Senate passed a resolution of its displeasure, a censure even Mapplethorpe and Serrano had avoided when their various offending objets d'art nearly closed down the National Endowment for the Arts. No other African, not Nkrumah or Lumumba or Mandela, had ever generated so much Solonic attention. Mr. Chris Ofili had really put Africa on the map.
Finally Federal...