Tomorrow's New York Sun will have this report:
"The city yesterday [promised] to pay $750 to each of the 18 art students and a professor who had participated in an exhibit the city closed last year at the Brooklyn War Memorial ... The payments and an apology settle a First Amendment lawsuit brought by the students, charging city officials with censorship. The exhibit, put on by master's degree candidates at Brooklyn College, included a sculpture of a penis and a separate piece containing a written narrative describing a sexual encounter with a man named Dick Cheney. One day after the display opened in May 2006, the Brooklyn parks commissioner ... locked the doors to the War Memorial, which Brooklyn College students had used as an exhibit space."
The Sun's lede is that the city "backed down," though a less than $15,000 settlement doesn't strike me as much of a capitulation. (On the other hand, there may be something to the students' lawyer's point that the apology might serve to "create a government consciousness not to do this again.") The article also sees the resolution as evidence that "the Bloomberg administration is pursuing a more conciliatory path when accused of censorship than had the [Giuliani] administration," but, as noted in this post from last year, Mayor Bloomberg strongly defended the city's actions at the time: "Nobody's suggesting that anybody shouldn't be allowed to exhibit art. The issue here is this is not a museum. This is a war memorial. There has been an understanding ever since art was put here that the art would be appropriate for families and respectful of and appropriate for a war memorial and this time it was not."
UPDATE: The New York Times has a brief piece this morning. One thing I missed last night is that the city also agreed to pay $42,500 in legal fees to the students' lawyers, so, at $57,000, the settlement starts to look a little more capitulatory. There's also an editorial in today's Sun which begins: "It's hard to recall a more abject show of weakness in city government in recent years than the decision of the Bloomberg administration to apologize for closing an 'art' exhibit of pornographicalistic political commentary against our wartime leaders that Brooklyn College students had mounted inside the city's war memorial in Cadman Plaza park."
