Today I Will Set Out To Offend As Many People As I Can

The Brooklyn Paper’s Gersh Kuntzman visits the banned-in-Brooklyn Brooklyn College year-end art show:

So this is what all the fuss was about? That art show that got banned by the Parks Department because it was “inappropriate” for children and veterans opened late last week in DUMBO — and I was first on line.

Anything inappropriate for kids and killers — that’s good enough for me.

Real nice, Gersh! Actually, they’re not all killers — just the ones with the little star stickers affixed to their football helmets (one for each “kill” — yee haw).

But that’s not the worst of the hyperbole:

But the real good news is that there are plenty of pieces that rise to the level of good old dirty art.

Take the masturbating hand sculpture that Brooklyn Parks Commissioner Julius Spiegel called “inappropriate.” Yes, it is a sculpture of a hand gripping a penis. Yes, the penis is erect. But the backlit sculpture, like the three others in Augusto Marin’s series, is covered in a gauzy cloth that makes it resemble a religious icon like the Shroud of Turin. Only a cultural boor (paging Herr Spiegel?) could fail to see the quality of the work or ignore the point Marin is trying to make about the perpetual clash between the “sacred” and the “profane.”

Emphasis added because I’m pretty sure Spiegel’s family survived the Holocaust.

Real nice, Gersh!

(The best thing about the Brooklyn Paper is its over-the-top New-York-Post-meets-college-newspaper tone. And sometimes the worst thing about the Brooklyn Paper is its over-the-top New-York-Post-meets-college-newspaper tone.)