The prize for silver-tongued satire goes to Christopher Buckley for his hilarious send-up of Hillary's press conference in this week's Wall Street Journal:

Finally let me say that I was as surprised as anyone when I was informed that I have a brother named Hugh Rodham ... While I did grow up in a household with numerous other people, I was never informed that I had brothers. It was never discussed. If it was, I was not present.

If Hillary had had any thought of dumping Clinton the name along with Clinton the man, her brother's cash orgy, as well as his recent bizarre behavior and infantile ranting in full camera view, has made the Rodham name much less savory to reclaim.

In other news, the Brooklyn Museum of Art was in warmed-over pea soup yet again with its exhibition of work by black photographers, which opened two weeks ago and includes an image by Renée Cox in which she appears nude as the gesturing Christ of Leonardo da Vinci's "The Last Supper." Neither the museum nor Mayor Rudy Giuliani appears to have learned any lessons from the last flap over the "Sensation" exhibit imported from England 17 months ago.

Once again, the Brooklyn Museum's smug, intellectually inert leadership provided no curatorial context or intelligent advance support for Cox's provocation, which in this case was worsened by her own rambling remarks to the press. (She openly maligned the Catholic Church and complained that "African-Americans are invisible, especially in Renaissance art." Last time I checked, there were no Americans at all in Renaissance art.) Once again, Giuliani blew a legitimate issue by authoritarian grandstanding: His instant call for a "decency" review panel for city-funded arts institutions was not only grotesquely neo-Victorian (reminiscent of the Legion of Decency that once policed Hollywood releases) but positively ludicrous in view of his own flagrant carrying on with a mistress all over metropolitan New York.

The debate over the latest show threatened to break down along predictable ideological lines except that a distinct note of weariness was perceptible among the media elite who would normally take to the hustings for the arts establishment. Cox's work (which I've seen only in online reproductions) appears not to be strong or original enough to sustain a major culture war. But this incident, like the prior one (which centered on a dung-and-porn-bedecked image of the Madonna by Nigerian-born British artist Chris Ofili), suggests that black artists are being cynically used by white collectors, curators and museum administrators as a p.c. cover to attack traditional religious values. It's exactly the same tactic used by gay activists when they facilely try to link racial discrimination with hostility to homosexuality.

As an arts educator as well as an Italian-American, I'm fed up with the snobbish insularity of those who fail to see that each incident like that now specialized in by the Brooklyn Museum not only besmirches the image of art in the eyes of a skeptical general population (whose daily culture is a degraded pop) but dangerously foments ethnic and sectarian animosity. Within 24 hours of the opening of the present show, local radio talk shows in New York and Philadelphia were seething with allegations about the Jewish presence on the Brooklyn Museum's board and administration and denouncing the fact that museums and galleries that would never show racist or anti-Semitic art routinely mount material offensive to Catholics.

Although I'm an atheist who believes only in great nature, I recognize the spiritual richness and grandeur of the Roman Catholicism in which I was raised. And I despise anyone who insults the sustaining values and symbol system of so many millions of people of different races around the world. An authentically avant-garde artist today would show his or her daring by treating religion sympathetically. Anti-religious sneers are a hallmark of perpetual adolescents. When will artists climb out of the postmodernist ditch and accept their high mission to address a general audience? An art of chic coteries, whether in rococo aristocratic France or in drearily ironic, nervously posturing New York, ends up in a mental mousehole.

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