A few weeks ago, when the Brooklyn Museum of Art unfurled a banner proclaiming the word "Sensation" between the columns of its beaux-arts faade, it may not have anticipated the furor it would cause.

After all, this is New York, for decades the center of the avant-garde and self-proclaimed cultural capital of the United States. But these days, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani is in charge, and his battle to withhold public money from the controversial exhibition he has deemed "disgusting" has met with a perhaps surprising degree of approval around town.

In many ways, the exhibition has come to signal a new era in the city where cutting-edge artists used to squat in Soho lofts and Greenwich Village literati would kvetch about the world in sidewalk cafes.

Today, a thriving economy has brought yuppies and boutiques to Soho, making it a hip haven for the wealthy and driving most artists away. The Village, too, has become known more for its $3,000-a-month rents than bold new art. And, as if to make matters even worse for New York's art scene, the city now finds itself on the front lines of the culture wars.

The city's pugnacious mayor has built a reputation for his no-nonsense crackdowns on everything from homeless squeegee men to triple-X porn shops in Times Square, and molding the city into what some New Yorkers glumly call Disneyland.

A better New York?

Still, while others accuse the mayor of using authoritarian, heavy-handed tactics that trample freedom of expression, most have not complained - crime has plunged to record lows and the city's economy is booming. In this milieu, even New York's bedrock political philosophy of libertarian liberalism - government subsidies with no interference - has begun to lose its political appeal.

During this art crackdown, even defenders of the avant-garde have been cautious, and at times even uncomfortable. The current exhibition has provoked outrage from groups as diverse as the Roman Catholic Church and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).

Among other things, the "Sensation" show includes a pig sliced in two and suspended in glass tanks of formaldehyde, a self-portrait sculpture made with eight pints of the artist's own blood, and works that use dead flies and maggots. At the center of the fray, however, is a painting of the Virgin Mary globbed with elephant dung and pasted with cutouts from pornographic magazines.

Sick stuff, says Mayor Giuliani, who also called the work "anti-religious."

"I understand they want to make money, but this is what you do, like, on the 42nd Street of about 20 years ago, not what you do at a venerable and great museum," Giuliani says, harking back to a time when the well-known street in Times Square was the most famous red-light district in the nation.

The mayor's tactics

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