Abstract
In this chapter, I investigate the controversy surrounding the “Sensation” exhibit in Brooklyn, New York, which by most accounts began, along with the exhibit itself, in September 1999.1 By approaching a case in this way, I enter into a dilemma faced by the researcher of any presumably complex social, historical, and discursive conflict: Who counts as a participant? This is a thorny problem. So many parties might legitimately claim participant status that trying to account for them all would be impractical, perhaps impossible. It is a subset of the larger problem of determining and delimiting context, where for any given event some uncountable number of statements, locations, and frames of reference at many scales of abstraction might, in principle, apply.2 This presents a daunting challenge to the investigator who aspires to get it right, to present an accurate and complete account of a controversy.
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Notes
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The corpus consists of texts from the top three circulating New York City newspapers. Since the Brooklyn Museum controversy took place in the fall of 1999, the choice of newspapers for the corpus is based on circulation data from that year (M. Schwirtz, “Market Profile: New York,” Mediaweek, 9 (1999), pp. 29–34). The first number indicates the 1999 daily circulation for Manhattan and the second the circulation for Brooklyn: the Daily News (New York) 117, 277/129, 590; the New York Post 107, 370/53, 288; the New York Times 207, 421/46, 434. In order to construct the corpus, I used three LexisNexis Guided News Searches, targeting the New York Post, the New York Times, and the Daily News (New York). In order to have been included in the corpus, the headline or lead paragraphs of a text must have contained the term “Brooklyn Museum” along with one or more of the following terms: “Sensation,” “Virgin Mary,” or “dung.” These are the most appropriate search terms because they identify the name of the institutional site of the event, the name of the exhibit in question, the title/subject of the painting in question, and the unusual material used in the painting. Since three of the four terms are proper names, and since the one common noun is rare, these terms are highly proprietary to the event, especially in combination. Together, the three searches produced a corpus containing 273 texts and totaling 204,203 words.
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© 2012 Peter A. Cramer
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Cramer, P.A. (2012). Recruiting and Nominating Participants for the Brooklyn Museum Controversy: The Contributions of New York City Print Journalists. In: Howells, R., Ritivoi, A.D., Schachter, J. (eds) Outrage: Art, Controversy, and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137283542_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137283542_4
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