With three of my kids in tow (13,12,10) we visited the Tate’s Pop Life show and were repeatedly admonished not to enter various rooms with frontal nudity. Undeterred, we waltzed into the very closed and guarded doors of the Jeff Koons and Cicciolina porno room. After I told the apprehensive woman stationed beyond the sealed-off entranceway my kids were fine with it, they’d seen it all before, she panicked and went on red alert: “I have a code 4, I have a code 4”, she blurted into her walkie-talkie. You would think the World Trade Center was being bombed again. When I reassured her it was ok she demanded an audience with the security manager saying she didn’t have authority to admit us, even with parental permission. In an adjoining gallery was an empty space where Richard Prince’s purloined image of a naked ten year-old Brooke Shields once hung, before being removed by the police/self-censors at the Tate. Maybe instead of art’s cozy relationship with money, sex and celebrity worship, the show is a better illustration of what a bunch of puritanical prudes we still are.
Kenny Schachter