What Did Art Ever Do To You?
From David Wojnarowicz's "A Fire In My Belly"
The Smithsonian institute has a new exhibit that it is touting called Hide/Seek, which focuses on sexual differences in modern America, and of course some people are up in arms about one of the “controversial” pieces. A four-minute video segment entitled “A Fire In My Belly,” by David Wojnarowicz, a gay artist who died from AIDS-related illness in 1992 who created the piece as tribute to his fellow artist and lover, Peter Hujar, who’d died five years earlier to represent his agony and suffering before his death. One of the scenes shows a crucifix crawling with ants, an image that Catholic League President Bill Donohue, calls “offensive” and “hate speech”. After a truckload of complaints, including those from Congress Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, Smithsonian director Martin Sullivan decided to pull the exhibition in hopes that the controversy would go away, but now many free speech activists are saying that he caved in to pressures from the conservative right.
Okay, so I hate art most of the time anyway because it seems like a cheap way for people to make a living without having to actually do any real work, but come on! Politicians have nothing better to do than hound some dead artists work? I can only hope that our government officials will go after fixing the economic crisis with the same zeal that they possess for censoring art.
-Dylan
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