O what a tangled web we weave/ When first we practise to deceive!” It is a pity that no one introduced Arnold Lehman—as of this writing, still the director of the Brooklyn Museum of Art—to these thoughtful lines by Sir Walter Scott. They might have saved him a lot of trouble. Mr. Lehman hoped that the exhibition “Sensation: Young British Artists From the Saatchi Collection” would be a public relations coup for the Brooklyn Museum. It had everything going for it: not only works of art that were disgusting, blasphemous, and pornographic, but also (since such objects are dime-a-dozen in the art world today) the oppositon of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. The mayor’s opposition to the exhibition was a godsend. In the eyes of the so-called “arts community” and other redoubts of self-righteousness, it transformed the battle over “Sensation” into a free speech issue. For a brief and shining moment, “Se ...

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