COMEBACKS
HOLY !@$%
T
he day before the White House
announced that Rudolph Giuliani
would be joining President Trump’s legal
team, news broke of another controver-
sial New York figure’s comeback. After
a tumultuous stay in the United States,
a stint in Tasmania, and three years in
the art collection of Steven A. Cohen,
the hedge-fund billionaire—whose com-
pany, in 2013, paid a fine of $1.8 billion
after pleading guilty to charges of in-
sider trading—“The Holy Virgin Mary,”
the British artist Chris Ofili’s painting
of a black Madonna, adorned with el-
ephant dung, is soon to be installed in
the Museum of Modern Art.
“The Holy Virgin Mary,” like many
newcomers to the city, lived in Brook-
lyn before she made it to Manhattan.
The painting had its American début
in 1999, at the Brooklyn Museum, as
part of an exhibition of the collection
of Charles Saatchi, titled “Sensation.”
Giuliani, who was then mayor, was so
ofended by Ofili’s painting that he froze
city funding to the museum and threat-
ened to evict it from its city-owned
building. The museum sued the city for
violating its First Amendment rights.
“The court ruled in our favor—very
strongly,” Floyd Abrams, the museum’s
counsel, said recently. “The Mayor re-
sponded in a manner that you might
think bears some resemblance to our
President.” The judge in the case, Gi-
uliani said at the time, was “totally bi-
ased” and “out of control,” and “part of
the politically correct, left-wing ideol-
ogy of New York City.”
The other day, Ann Temkin and
Laura Hoptman, MoMA curators, vis-
ited a squat, Carolina-blue warehouse
in Queens. They had dressed for the oc-
casion, like tourists at the Vatican. Hopt-
man had on a dark suit; Temkin wore a
colorful print dress. Inside, the women
navigated a series of hallways and stair-
cases leading to a basement, where “The
Holy Virgin Mary” is being stored.
“When we acquired the work and
put it in front of our committee, it looked
like it had descended from Heaven,”
Hoptman said, gazing at the picture.
“See how it glows?”
“It’s a serious painting,” Temkin said.
“There’s so much joy in this work,
and humor and love,” Hoptman said.
Ofili’s Virgin Mary, who is paintedon an eight-foot-tall yellow canvas, wears
a blue robe that is parted to reveal a
breast. An exposed breast is common
in paintings of the nursing Madonna,
but this Madonna’s breast is a lump of
lacquered elephant dung—an efect that
is earthy and beautiful. The painting sits
on similar mounds of manure. The Ma-
donna is dusted with gold glitter and is
surrounded by images that resemble
butterflies but which are, on closer in-
spection, photographs of female geni-
talia cut from porn magazines.
“Most paintings hang on nails, and
they’re of the ground and away from
you,” Temkin explained. “The whole
idea of having the dung support the
painting is that it’s there, in your space.”
Gesturing at the glitter, she pointed
out that a traditional Madonna would
feature “precious, precious gold leaf from
six hundred years ago.” She went on,
“Or you can buy a jar of great gold glit-
ter and have a field day.”
In 1999, Giuliani described Ofili’s
painting as “sick” (he used the same
word to describe people who kept fer-
rets as pets). “If I can do it, it’s not art,
because I’m not much of an artist,” he
said. “You know, if you want to throw
dung at something, I could figure out
how to do that.”
“The fact is that Giuliani and manysaying, “He’s a decent, family-man citi-
zen.” (The same year, in an attempt to
capture, rather than to counter, the bit-
ter strain of populism in his party, he
named as his running mate Sarah Palin,
who proved only to be an advance woman
for Trump.) McCain finally withdrew
his support for Trump after the release
of the “Access Hollywood” tape. (“I have
daughters,” he said.) He also cited Trump’s
vilification of the Central Park Five. By
then, however, just a month remained
before the election.
McCain doesn’t really come to terms
with that series of decisions in his book,
although he does distance himself from
many of Trump’s policies, and from his
mind-set. He defends the Dreamers,
and says of Trump’s “lack of empathy”
for refugees, “The way he speaks about
them is appalling.” He recalls, with rel-
ish, flying back to Washington last July,
soon after undergoing surgery, to cast
a vote that prevented his party from jet-
tisoning the Afordable Care Act with-
out providing a replacement: “Reporters
pressed me for my decision, and I ofered
a smartass remark, ‘Wait for the show.’ ”
McCain is now at his home in Corn-
ville, Arizona, where he has been visited
by a stream of friends and colleagues.
Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority
Leader, said that he “didn’t want to miss
the opportunity to tell him how much
his friendship meant to me.” Former
Vice-President Joe Biden, a friend since
the early nineteen-seventies, told the
Times, “John knows he’s in a very, very,
very precarious situation, and yet he’s still
concerned about the state of the coun-
try.” Others told reporters that McCain
was planning his funeral, and did not
want Trump to attend. That prompted
Senator Orrin Hatch to remark that ex-
cluding Trump would be “ridiculous,”
because he is the President and “a very
good man”—a comment that mostly
served to demonstrate the extent to whichthe G.O.P. has come to accept Trump as
its leader. (Hatch apologized after being
rebuked by McCain’s daughter Meghan.)
And McCain had a visit from Jef
Flake, the junior senator from Arizona,
who last October denounced Trump
from the Senate floor in impassioned
terms, while also announcing that he
would be quitting politics. Afterward,
McCain praised Flake for his willing-
ness to pay a “political price” for his be-
liefs. Perhaps the best lesson that Mc-
Cain still has to ofer, though, is how not
to say goodbye—how not to take the
easy exit. He is the embodiment of certain
non-Trumpian Republican ideals. But
those ideals cannot be realized in the ab-
stract, away from the voting booths. The
disgraced former sherif Joe Arpaio,
whom Trump has pardoned, calling him
a “great American patriot,” is running for
Flake’s seat. The next Presidential elec-
tion is in two years. Time is running out.
—Amy Davidson Sorkin