Few of the artists are worth mentioning by name, but some of their works may be noteworthy.

One of the first pieces in the exhibit is a largecomputer printout based on Rudolph Giuliani's portrait from Time's issue for 2001 Man of the Year. It is called LIBERTAS,DEI TE SERVENT! (2002). The Chinese artist who produced thiswork, in the words of the show's curator, Lawrence Rinder, "draws
on the 'great leader' archetype familiar to the genre of socialist realism... [and] substitutes for the more typical figure of Stalin, Lenin, or Mao the American mayor who sinceSeptember 11 has become world-renowned." You might imagine thatconnecting the Left's least favorite mayor to three gentlemen who were collectively responsible for thirty million murders is enough to please the Whitney crowd.

Yet there's more: this artist "unexpectedly adds two balls of elephant dung beneath the canvas, a thinly veiled reference to Giuliani's censure of artist Chris Ofili's contribution to the Brooklyn Museum's 'Sensation' exhibition in 1999." Sanctum sanctorum of left-liberal New York piety: Forget Tiananmen; let us remember the Eastern Parkway massacre.


http://newcriterion.com:81/archives/22/09/nowhere-panero/