The Case of the Disappearing Dildo
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Back in 1997 the museum’s special events department invited six artists to decorate umbrellas for the terrace; the following spring Heather Felty, a curatorial assistant, was asked to add a dozen new pieces to the collection. Darmody had recently graduated from the School of the Art Institute (where he’d once worked for MCA assistant curator Michael Rooks), and he eagerly accepted a $200 commission to design an umbrella, with up to $100 for expenses. He covered the canvas with nostalgic totems–a toy soldier, a magnifying glass, a Superman comic book–and painted it with circular bands of red, green, yellow, and black. To finish it off he added the words horny and displaced, and using epoxy he glued the dildo to the knob at the apex of the umbrella. “I wanted to make it different and put my penis out there,” he explains. “I think my interest in the imagery had to do with my Catholic upbringing and being a man.” Apparently no one at the museum raised an eyebrow. Rooks insists, “I really liked what he was doing with his sexual imagery.”
Felty invited him to replace the dildo, but Darmody decided to redesign the umbrella entirely. This time he painted it a fleshy pink and put his initials all over it. He went to an adult bookstore, bought a ten-inch latex dildo, routed out the center, and glued it onto the knob with industrial epoxy. “There was no way that thing was going to come loose this time,” says Darmody. But when he visited the museum in late July, the replacement dildo had vanished. Furious, he tried to phone Felty, but by this time she’d left the MCA for a job in New York. Darmody got in touch with Julie Rodrigues, a research assistant, and asked that his umbrella be painlessly destroyed. “If it wasn’t going to be the umbrella I’d delivered to them a second time, I just didn’t want it shown out on the terrace at all,” he says. Rooks called Darmody but was unable to dissuade him, and the umbrella was trashed.
Oprah Winfrey makes her much ballyhooed professorial debut this Tuesday with her course “The Dynamics of Leadership” at Northwestern University’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management. Enrollment for the course, which will meet on the Evanston campus, is about 120, split evenly between full-time and night-school students. (According to the school’s Web site, students will keep a journal, worth 15 percent of the final grade, in which they’ll record their reflections on the course content as it pertains to their lives.) Despite the coup of adding Winfrey to the faculty, Kellogg is trying to keep the course from turning into a circus: no journalists will be allowed in the hall, students are not allowed to tape sessions, and any student transferring his seat to an outsider could be booted out of class.
