And surely he is right to the extent that only time will tell. But this is a monstrously pernicious attitude in the here and now. He simply assumes that because the piece has stayed in the Los Angeles Country Museum for twenty years, it must be art. If the critics stopped that piece from being shown, it would not have encouraged another generation of artists to try to one-up it with something even more shocking. If there were a Nazi-run Museum, Cohen's reverence would not last the fiscal year.
Museums are educational institutions if they are anything.
Every time the government pays for a piss-drenched crucifix or subsidizes some AIDS sufferer to carve himself up in front of a live studio audience, some other jerk wants to do something even grosser. But what is horrifying is the degree to which the Left wants to marry itself to the slow-boiling frog definition of art. Hey, if we're shocked by something today, just give it time and we'll get sufficiently desensitized. Chris Ofili should remove the elephant dung from the Virgin Mary and plaster her with Cohen's column. The greatest creative expressions in human history were made under great adversity and in truly censorious environments.