The Art Police

I see from last Sunday's New York Times that Charles Saatchi has started up a Chinese version of Stuart, the sort of MySpace for art students that's a heavily visited subdivision of the Saatchi gallery website. If you don't already know it, it's a place where students can chat, show examples of their work, and post comments and links to friends' pages and to their own websites.

What especially caught my eye in the Times piece was a statement by a Saatchi rep that the gallery did not anticipate interference from the Chinese government about the content of the art posted on the Chinese site. Maybe. The Chinese haven't been shy about putting their great big foot down to block unwelcome Internet content. Just ask the good people at Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and Wikipedia. Then, from the Saatchi spokeswoman, came this:

"We don't foresee our site becoming a platform for anti-government propaganda, but we do of course aim to be respectful to the wishes of our host nation if our site starts being abused."

Anti-government propaganda? I would have thought there might be a better term for art that dared to be critical of a one party state, but maybe I need to get with the program. Will Saatchi also be taking down art from the English-language version of Stuart that criticizes the Iraq war, or is it only dictatorships that get their delicate sensibilities protected? It only gets better when you recall that it was art from Saatchi's collection that formed the basis of the "Sensation" show at the Brooklyn Museum eight years ago, the one that got Rudy Giuliani so upset because of a Chris Ofili portrait of the Virgin Mary festooned with elephant dung. I guess that was back when Saatchi was into snubbing authorities, not being "respectful" to their wishes.

But we live in strange times, when museums and galleries, which used to be the first line of defense against government censorship -- remember Jesse Helms vs. The Ghost of Robert Mapplethorpe? -- have decided that it's in their interests to play ball with touchy regimes. Keep in mind that Tom Krens, the director of the Guggenheim Foundation, has promised that the Guggenheim's Frank Gehry-designed satellite museum that will be part of the massive new Abu Dhabi arts district, will avoid showing work that offends Moslem sensibilities, including female nudes. The Louvre, which will also have a spinoff museum there, has made a similar arrangement, though it hasn't specified what to do about nudes. But hey, there's enormous money on the table here. The Louvre will get a whopping $1.3 billion for the deal, including $525 million merely for the use of its name. And Saatchi, a major collector of contemporary Chinese art, may have reasons of his own to want to stay on the good side of Chinese authorities.

I can see the virtue of cultural exchange, and even the need sometimes to conduct the exchange within more narrow parameters than the agreeable free for all that is freedom of expression in the West. But make no mistake, Western museums and galleries are now going to find themselves acting as enforcers for unenlightened rulers. And I will bet that's going to put them in some very tight spots. But if any of them really feel it's necessary to take on that role, I have a candidate with first rate credentials to become their next chief curator.