Big, Shocking Art:
Offending Friends And Neighbors

It's a backside that is hard to miss.

At 4 1/2 by 6 1/2 feet, the rear-view portrait of "Beth," painted in a photorealistic style, dominates Elsa Haft's living room. Ms. Haft, a New York lawyer and theatrical producer, "loved it" from the minute she saw it.

But not all of her house guests have had the same reaction. Esther Jungreis, for example, is the widow of an Orthodox rabbi. She had been looking for a private home to conduct a Torah class for young adults and was thrilled when Ms. Haft volunteered her apartment. Until she saw "Beth."

"It was a painting of someone's buttocks," says Rebbetzin Jungreis, who first asked Ms. Haft to cover up or take down the $40,000 painting, by John Kacere. "I didn't think it was the proper backdrop for a Torah class."

When Mrs. Haft refused, the rebbetzin tried holding class with "Beth" behind her. But she thought that distracted her students. Then she tried sitting across from "Beth," but couldn't tolerate looking at her. After a few meetings, the rebbetzin moved the class elsewhere.

"Sadly," she says, "the painting was a contributing factor."

Some art is just tough to live with. It's too shocking. It's too unwieldy. It provokes your guests. But as today's artists push the boundaries of conventional taste with "shock" art, homeowners are running into all sorts of hearth-and-home dilemmas: Can cutting-edge art and gracious hospitality coexist? How big is too big? When does a work go from being a conversation piece to a conversation killer? One thing is clear: Championing new art at home requires commitment, social savvy and a lot of Advil.

Living rooms aside, much of the work emerging from studios today is difficult to display in galleries and museums. The Royal Academy of Art's "Sensation" show, which closed in London in December, included 120 images by rising stars of British art, culled from the private collection of advertising guru Charles Saatchi. Protesters hurled paint and eggs at one particularly disturbing painting -- of a notorious child killer -- causing so much damage it had to be withdrawn for restoration.

Recent shows in the U.S. by Jake and Dinos Chapman, whose work includes a fiberglass model of Stephen Hawking in a wheelchair atop a rock tower, and Damien Hirst, who specializes in suspending farm animals in formaldehyde, also generated public outrage. Art can have the same effect at home. In the current Broadway hit, "Art," a guest claims an all-white painting that his friend has hung in his living room "makes me physically sick." Some people have found similar responses in real life.

Kim Heirston, a New York art adviser and dealer, says it took a lot of hand-holding to convince an Italian client from Naples to spend approximately $75,000 on a work by Mr. Hirst -- a sheep, cut in half and floating in two separate tanks called "Away From the Flock, Divided."

"He's an open person, but kept saying, `I must be crazy.' It took a lot of courage," she says. "He comes from a conservative family. The kids kind of love it, but the older people are appalled."

Appreciating provocative art can be part of a family's values. When Erik Murkoff hung a $20,000, 6-foot-by-6-foot painting of a wax cadaver with its entrails spilling out in the living room, he says his kids, ages 15 and 12, "were intrigued, not disgusted."

The only concession Mr. Murkoff, a film producer from Montecito, Calif., has made to child-proofing his collection is with a conceptual piece by Yugoslavian artist Marina Abramovic called "Knife Ladder." The $75,000 work, installed in the family library, is truly cutting-edge: a 15-foot-tall ladder with knife blades as rungs. After "jumping across the room to stop someone from slicing off their elbow" during a cocktail party, Mr. Murkoff fitted the blade edges with plastic covers. "That's for safety," he says.

Mr. Murkoff also owns a 28-inch-by-34-inch painting by Juliao Sarmento showing a woman in a skirt, from the waist down, seated with her knees slightly apart. There's a hand with a knife going under the skirt. The work, valued at $20,000, is on loan to a traveling retrospective of Mr. Sarmento's work; before that, it hung prominently in the Murkoffs' living room. "It elicited some response from everyone who saw it," Mr. Murkoff says. "Some found it fascinating; a lot of people didn't say anything at all."

Dealers contend these new art conflicts are as old as cave drawings. Works that shocked people a few decades ago are considered tame today. "My parents have a good collection of Expressionism, large Twombleys and Lichtensteins," says Ealan Wingate, director of the downtown Gagosian Gallery in New York City. "You hear people saying they like them, then turning and whispering, `How can they live with that?'"

Rosa de la Cruz, a Miami collector who champions conceptual and contemporary art, opens her home to small tour groups. She tries to circumvent behind-her-back whispering by engaging people in conversation and providing information. She compares a work by Felix Gonzales-Torres -- 175 pounds of candy sitting in a corner of one room -- to walking into a candy store. "It's a moment of happiness," she says. "You think, `Wow!'" She explains "Pulmao," by Jac Leirner -- a 1 1/2-foot-long lung made from three years worth of the cellophane strips used in the packaging of cigarettes -- as the artist's "obsessive documenting of her existence."

"Contemporary art, regardless of what you collect, is difficult because people don't like to change," Mrs. de la Cruz says. "It's difficult to accept change, especially in our homes. We already have a concept of what art is and contemporary art breaks that up."

But she concedes that the work in her collection can be elliptical. Recently, while she was giving a tour of her home, one of the guests pointed to some electrical wiring popping out of the wall. "They said, `Oh, that's a new work,'" Mrs. de la Cruz recalls. "It was my alarm. I had just moved a painting. There were 20 people in the group. It would have been embarrassing to say. I just kept going and talking and that person felt good."

Sometimes it is sheer size, not subject matter, that makes art difficult to live with. Art adviser Ms. Heirston and her boyfriend Pentti Kouri built their SoHo loft specifically to showcase a 15,000-pound, forged-steel sculpture by Richard Serra, called "Blackmun and Brennan."

To create a room big enough -- 38-feet square with 15-foot ceilings -- they hired an architect to combine two floors, raise the ceiling 5 feet, and remove three columns. But in this case, big was too big. After six years of renovation work, the couple decided the work would be best exhibited in a museum. The piece was too heavy, they felt, and it was dissecting the soaring space their loft has become. "I would have loved it," Ms. Heirston says, "but it got too complicated."

For aficionados at this level, art is more than a decorative issue; it's a philosophical one. Rearranging pieces to pacify guests, no matter how compelling their argument, is taboo. Ask Rachel Lehmann. Dinner parties at her Geneva home have more than once disintegrated into rancorous attacks on contemporary American art. The cause? "Glass Dildo," a sexually graphic, 4 1/2-foot-by-8-foot painting by Jeff Koons that until recently hung in her dining room. "It is pornographic," says Ms. Lehmann, a dealer and collector of contemporary art, but "it's very beautiful."

Ms. Lehmann recalls that a group of bankers she invited to lunch took special umbrage to the picture, which depicts Mr. Koons and his ex-wife, the Italian porn star and legislator Cicciolina, engaged in a usually private act.

"It was supposed to be a lunch about venture capitalism for a certain business, and it turned into a lunch where American art became the enemy," says Ms. Lehmann, a partner in New York's SoHo gallery Lehmann/Maupin.

In art circles, this kind of guest reaction seems downright rude. "What gets me is that no one would ever say, `Why do you have such ugly furniture?' or `Why do you live on this street?'" says David Maupin, a New York City collector and Ms. Lehmann's partner in the gallery. "But they feel free to criticize your art."

He recounts a recent dinner party at his home when two guests took offense to a $60,000 work by British artists Gilbert & George in his dining room. "It's an abstract and colorful and quite elegant painting," says Mr. Maupin of the work, a photograph of urine cells blown up and painted over. "A mother and daughter were so disturbed they said they lost their appetite."

New York real-estate developer William Ehrlich has endured 30 years of criticism, not only of his art collection, but of the home he built to display it in -- and has never budged an inch to accommodate critics. The interiors, furniture and floors of his six-story East Side townhouse are all white, as they were when he first moved in. The only color shows up in the artworks.

"I made the decision to allow me the flexibility that if I wanted to put up a 35-foot painting, I could do it," says Mr. Ehrlich, whose living room is home to, among many other pieces, "Hell on Wheels," a series of 100 soldiers' helmets lined up on the floor. "I've had people say, `All you need in this room is an operating table,'" he says. "People say, `Where do you keep your books? Don't you have any throw pillows?' We have areas where we have hundreds of books, but they're not visible. I don't get comfort from seeing them."

Many young decorators find contemporary shock art, big art and conceptual art a fun counterpoint to such conventional concerns as area rugs and window treatments. But more-established society decorators shiver at the thought, especially when the work has graphic sexual content.

"It's hard to use a public space with that kind of art," says Mario Buatta, a New York interior designer, also known as the "Prince of Chintz." "With young children, they're not old enough to understand. The couple that has that kind of work on their walls, maybe they're suggesting that's what they like to do. And you don't want to ask because you never know. Guests might think [the owners] are progressive thinkers. It all depends how you use your apartment."

You can never be sure just what will offend people. Ms. Haft, who has the painting of a bare bottom in her New York home, fends off complaints about a piece she displays in her Vermont ski cabin: a 2 1/2-foot-long stuffed honey badger, indigenous to Africa, that she bought from Dartmouth College Museum of Natural History when it was honing its collection.

"Many people are offended by it," she says, especially animal lovers. "Someone recently leaped back and recoiled in horror. My grandson, Isaac, said, `Don't worry, it's only a dead animal.'" Though she says she has some sympathy with animal-rights activists, she refuses to remove it. "I just leave it there because I'm ornery now."

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