Celeste Katz in the NY Daily News shovels it in Museum's art dumps on Rudy:
Here's Rudy Giuliani's latest art attack.Zounds! The "artwork" at the Whitney really is crap! But it's nice of them to schedule it for Independence Day. Even better, the artiste, Zhou Tiehai, is from Shanghai. I guess we won't see Deng Xiaoping posed behind the elephant plops.
An artwork featured in a new exhibit opening today at the Whitney Museum depicts America's mayor looming heroically over the city skyline - with two balls of elephant dung resting at the sides of the canvas.
The work is thinly veiled reference to Giuliani's fury over a portrait of the Virgin Mary smeared with elephant dung that was part of a 1999 show at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.
The lampoon of the former mayor is part of the "The American Effect," a Whitney show featuring foreign artists' sometimes jaded take on the U.S. - just in time for the Fourth of July.
Thereby Zhou Tiehai and his colleagues are retracing the steps of the late Deng Xiaoping's revered theory of taking the initiative in the economic drive and moving towards the sea itself, into the world, 'xia hai'.But back to the Daily News for other fare for connoisseurs:
... a 1996 painting of a Japanese air raid over a burning New York City and a photo of the soldier who pointed a rifle at a terrified Elian Gonzalez, enclosed in a picture frame that features a smiling Mickey and Minnie Mouse.Way cool, but I hope they got the right picture in the Elian Gonzalez item.
The Giuliani portrait - loosely based on his Time magazine Person of the Year cover - is not his first unflattering depiction in the Whitney. In 2000, some of his condemnations of the Brooklyn Museum show were printed in the Gothic typeface favored by the Nazis in an exhibit that featured a recording of storm troopers marching.
