Trump made comments about the painting in 1999 while running for president as a Reform Party candidate.
Good article about Trump and the arts, from beginning to the end:
His first media spectacle, in 1980, focused on the then-33-year-old developer destroying a pair of Art Deco reliefs that were part of the facade of the Bonwit Teller Building in midtown Manhattan, which Trump tore down to build his Trump Tower. The Metropolitan Museum of Art wanted the reliefs for its collection, as the Washington Post recalled in a bit of retrospective reporting recently, and Trump agreed to donate them, if the cost of their removal wasn’t prohibitive. It wasn’t, but Trump’s construction crew destroyed the works anyway. <...> He has been flirting with a presidential run since the late ’80s; as early as 1999, he made a public call for censorship and claimed that his hypothetical presidency would cut federal funding for the arts. That was the year that Mayor Rudolph Giuliani embarked on a crusade against the Brooklyn Museum for its exhibition of Chris Ofili’s The Holy Mary Virgin (1996), which depicts the Madonna in materials including oil paint, glitter, and elephant dung. Giuliani told the Times the work wasn’t art because he could make it himself. He went so far as to try to cancel the institution’s lease with the city, evicting it from its home of more than 100 years. Outside of religious groups, Giuliani had few allies in this fight in New York, besides Trump, who released a statement to the Daily News—in reference to what the paper referred to only as “the Brooklyn Museum’s elephant-dung Madonna”—saying, “As president, I would ensure that the National Endowment of the Arts stops funding of this sort.” (The Daily News pointed out that the organization’s correct title is “National Endowment for the Arts,” and that the NEA did not give any funding to the Brooklyn Museum’s show that featured Ofili.) Regarding the Ofili, Trump continued: “It’s not art. It’s absolutely gross, degenerate stuff.” Note the word “degenerate.” There was, of course, another politician who used that adjective to describe works of art that offended him. <...> But, oddly enough, Trump did have a brief moment as a public-art advocate. He was a major supporter in the late-90s of a planned installation along the Hudson River of a statue of Christopher Columbus by Russian artist Zurab Tsereteli. New York eventually rejected the sculpture, as did a variety of other American cities that Teserteli attempted to donate his work to, including Baltimore; Fort Lauderdale, Florida; Miami; and—of all places—Columbus, Ohio. Looking back on it now, Trump’s pride in the sculpture seems just about right. The work is not so dissimilar from one of his hotels. Standing nearly 350 feet tall and weighing in at about 600 tons, the work—as Trump explained in a New Yorker profile from 1997—has “forty million dollars’ worth of bronze in it.” http://www.artnews.com/2016/04/04/absolutely-gross-degenerate-stuff-trump-and-the-arts/
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Trump made comments about the painting in 1999 while running for president as a Reform Party candidate.
Good article about Trump and the arts, from beginning to the end:
His first media spectacle, in 1980, focused on the then-33-year-old developer destroying a pair of Art Deco reliefs that were part of the facade of the Bonwit Teller Building in midtown Manhattan, which Trump tore down to build his Trump Tower. The Metropolitan Museum of Art wanted the reliefs for its collection, as the Washington Post recalled in a bit of retrospective reporting recently, and Trump agreed to donate them, if the cost of their removal wasn’t prohibitive. It wasn’t, but Trump’s construction crew destroyed the works anyway. <...>
He has been flirting with a presidential run since the late ’80s; as early as 1999, he made a public call for censorship and claimed that his hypothetical presidency would cut federal funding for the arts. That was the year that Mayor Rudolph Giuliani embarked on a crusade against the Brooklyn Museum for its exhibition of Chris Ofili’s The Holy Mary Virgin (1996), which depicts the Madonna in materials including oil paint, glitter, and elephant dung. Giuliani told the Times the work wasn’t art because he could make it himself. He went so far as to try to cancel the institution’s lease with the city, evicting it from its home of more than 100 years. Outside of religious groups, Giuliani had few allies in this fight in New York, besides Trump, who released a statement to the Daily News—in reference to what the paper referred to only as “the Brooklyn Museum’s elephant-dung Madonna”—saying, “As president, I would ensure that the National Endowment of the Arts stops funding of this sort.” (The Daily News pointed out that the organization’s correct title is “National Endowment for the Arts,” and that the NEA did not give any funding to the Brooklyn Museum’s show that featured Ofili.) Regarding the Ofili, Trump continued: “It’s not art. It’s absolutely gross, degenerate stuff.” Note the word “degenerate.” There was, of course, another politician who used that adjective to describe works of art that offended him. <...>
But, oddly enough, Trump did have a brief moment as a public-art advocate. He was a major supporter in the late-90s of a planned installation along the Hudson River of a statue of Christopher Columbus by Russian artist Zurab Tsereteli. New York eventually rejected the sculpture, as did a variety of other American cities that Teserteli attempted to donate his work to, including Baltimore; Fort Lauderdale, Florida; Miami; and—of all places—Columbus, Ohio. Looking back on it now, Trump’s pride in the sculpture seems just about right. The work is not so dissimilar from one of his hotels. Standing nearly 350 feet tall and weighing in at about 600 tons, the work—as Trump explained in a New Yorker profile from 1997—has “forty million dollars’ worth of bronze in it.”
http://www.artnews.com/2016/04/04/absolutely-gross-degenerate-stuff-trump-and-the-arts/
In 2016, Tsereteli’s statue finally ended up in one of Trump’s favorite places: Puerto Rico https://puppet-djt.livejournal.com/134374.html?thread=357862#t357862