Studio 360 is a national program. So we try to avoid being parochial.

We make a point of looking for stories west of the Hudson River.

But sometimes we have to take a look at the art controversies in our own backyard.

For better or worse, New York City is one of America's cultural capitals still and when an important New York loudmouth talks, people listen.

I'm referring to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

You may remember the brouhaha he stirred up in 1999 about a painting in a show called "Sensation" at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. It was a painting of the Virgin Mary that included bits of dung.

Last week the Brooklyn Museum opened a very un-sensational show - an earnest, middle-of-the-road, up-with-people exhibit of work by 94 black photographers, called, earnestly, "Committed to the Image."

And Rudy Giuliani? As his former boss Ronald Reagan famously said about another politician….

There he goes again.

The photograph in Brooklyn that riled the mayor this time is a version of Jesus' Last Supper. In the picture, Christ is depicted as a black woman - in fact, a naked black woman, who happens to be the photographer. The photograph is called "Yo Mama's Last Supper." It is, trust me, not especially outrageous. A little goofy maybe, but inoffensive.

Just to be clear, I am no rabid anti-Giuliani-ite. I voted for the guy, twice.

But when the mayor talks about culture, he sputters and whines and displays a truly shocking ignorance of art and museums and history. He sounds ridiculous. And this time, he doesn't even have the demagogue's excuse of running for office.

And he wants to prevent anything like this from happening ever again.

Of course, as a practical matter a decency commission would be insane, a nightmare.

And of course, a decency commission almost certainly would be unconstitutional.

And, of course, to hear such righteousness about "decency" from Mayor Giuliani, a man who has very publicly abandoned his wife for a mistress, is deeply ironic.

But the most disturbing thing is that the mayor of New York City sincerely believes that museums should never show a work of art that might deeply disturb somebody - might seriously upset their religious or sexual or political or moral equilibrium. Which is nuts. Since for more than a century, a good deal of every kind of serious art has meant to disturb and to rile.

That's one of the things we want art to do sometimes. Even four centuries ago, Shakespeare wrote the extremely disturbing and even indecent play, "Hamlet."

If Rudy Giuliani and a Republican Congress don't want the government directly subsidizing individual artists they don't like, OK, Fine. On that front of the culture war, let's declare peace with honor and move on. Important artists will find ways to keep painting and performing and creating, without any stipends from the NEA.

But at museums we have to draw the line. The Giulianis of the world - and their left-wing PC counterparts - cannot be allowed to de-fund art museums, to hold them to some standard of "decency" or ideological purity, to hobble curators. Just as universities and their professors require pure academic freedom, so too do museums and their curators require freedom to show the art they choose to show. They may do their jobs well or badly, but if politicians intrude on the process, micromanage it, public understanding is distorted and diminished.

As a person and a leader, Rudy Giuliani isn't bland or inoffensive or nice or pretty. So why does he think all the art in museums should be?

I'm Kurt Andersen, in Studio 360.