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got to know him found an arresting personality-a Manhattanite on overdrive,
with an appetite for life both high and low. After news spread that
Mapplethorpe had AIDS, the artist chronicled his long battle with the disease
in photographs of his own increasingly ravaged face; in the last self-portrait
Mapplethorpe holds a walking stick topped offwith a skull. His death earlier
this year occasioned an outpouring of critical encomiums that was unusual,
even in this Age of Instant Celebrity, for an artist who a decade earlier had
been virtually unknown.
Given how charged his work was and his life ended up being, it would
be absurd to expect anybody to respond to Mapplethorpe coolly. But what
happened even before his death, around the time the Whitney mounted a
retrospective in the summer of 1988, was very strange indeed. People be–
gan to act as if Mapplethorpe was exactly what he had never been-a mid–
dle-of-the-road guy. There's often something vague and euphemistic about
the terms in which this very hard-edged and specific artist is dealt with.
When Ingrid Sischy, the former editor of
Artforum
,
titles an essay for the
catalogue of the Whitney show "A Society Artist" it sounds almost coy. And
the name of the show that arrived at the Washington Project for the Arts in
June is a little odd as well: "The Perfect Moment" suggests the sort of bland
hyperbole one would use when readers weren't supposed to know that the
subject was very sexy.
Museum people have their reasons for skirting over Mapplethorpe's
hard-core side: they don't want to lose the public. But what reason do critics
have for sounding so damn blase? Why does there seem to be this need to
demonstrate that someone who held the fashionable world in thrall with his
bad-boy behavior was actually just the boy next door? I have a friend who
says of political attitudes toward homosexuality: "The radical right might put
gays in concentration camps, but the liberals would do worse-they'd force
gays to go to psychiatrists." In a way that's exactly what the liberal critics
are doing with Mapplethorpe: they sanitize and sentimentalize him, they ex–
plain that
all
the fuss has been about nothing, that we all feel the same way.
These are roughly the terms in which Mark Stevens described Mapplethorpe
in a review of the Whitney show, published in
The New Republic
last
September. "I find none ofMapplethorpe's photographs especially unsettling,"
Stevens wrote. "Even the picture of Mapplethorpe [with a whip up his anus]
is curiously unaffecting; it is so staged that we feel safely distant, part of an
audience....Mapplethorpe is easy to like....Except to those who are
threatened by homosexuality...these photographs will seem cozy. That's the
surprise." Michael Brenson, writing about "Mapplethorpe: The Perfect
Moment" in
The New York Times
at the height of the controversy, went even
farther in this direction. He seemed to end up arguing that Mapplethorpe
