Thursday July 21, 2005

The Only Way to Win is Not to Play

A while ago, I mentioned in passing the Daily News’ successful crusade against the Drawing Center. By riffling through all the exhibitions the Center has hosted since 9/11, the paper was able to find three pieces they deemed unpatriotic and—in turn—found members of victims’ families to be offended that the museum was included in construction plans at Ground Zero. They manufactured a controversy out of whole cloth, in other words, and a partisan one at that. One of the works contantly cited by the News is an image of a prisoner at Abu Ghraib, a topic which is of course quite separate from 9/11, except according to the Bush administration and its know-nothing functionaries. Being directly affected by 9/11 hasn’t univocally determined survivors’ views on Abu Ghraib, the war or even on Bush. To use anecdotal objections to hijack public policy is dishonest.

Now, the good news. The Drawing Center might pull out of the project all together. Even better news—the Daily News didn’t get to break the story. Rather, Crain’s New York Business (I work for Crain, but in another division) reports that the Center has put their planning on hold. Furthermore, “a number of arts executives, including one on the committee that selected the Drawing Center for the site, say the center should pull out even if it gets the assurances it wants from the LMDC, because its every move will be intensely scrutinized.” Says one exec, “The Drawing Center just got its first dose of what it’s going to be like to be there. Whatever it shows there will be subject to undue criticism.”

And other arts organizations selected for the development plan—including the Joyce and Signature Theaters—are beginning to have remorse as well, “saying privately that they wish they hadn’t been selected.” And who can blame them? What organization of any kind—a business, a non-profit or whatever—is going to want to become a tenant at Ground Zero, where its every move will be subjected to an ideological litmus test?

Maybe the idea that what is built at Ground Zero should represent something vital about New York should be scuttled altogether. Let’s lease the land to the nearest red state, Virginia, and build a gigantic water slide from Richmond that terminates in a giant Holidome-like affair that sells FDNY hats and Lance Armstrong bracelets and that ice cream that looks like little balls of rubber, so tourists can swoop in and feel the sorrow of an event they didn’t experience and be confirmed in their moral certainty that Bush has done everything right, despite what a majority of New Yorkers think. After all, if those most directly affected by 9/11—residents of New York and D.C.—got to determine public policy, Bush would no longer be president.