In the Arts section of Sunday’s Washington Post, they celebrated the appointment of curator David Ward as the senior historian of the National Portrait Gallery. Why does it matter? Ward was a central figure in the controversial 2010 exhibit “Hide/Seek,” which contained a defamatory video of Jesus crucified being crawled on by ants.
As a libertine leftist, Ward hated it when complaints from top Republicans caused the gallery bosses at the time to "cave" and remove the Jesus-trashing piece, as did liberal journalists. So the headline on Sunday honored Ward as “A historian with an eye on the future.” The caption under his picture promised Ward “is not afraid to present history in new ways.”
David Wojnarowicz
By Tim Graham | December 29, 2013 | 8:28 AM EST
By Tim Graham | November 27, 2011 | 8:22 AM EST
On the first Sunday of Advent, The Washington Post devoted two stories on the front of its Arts section to revisiting last year's controversy over a gay-left exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery that starred a video with ants crawling on the crucifix of Jesus. The "Hide/Seek" propaganda assembly is now on display at the Brooklyn Museum, and Post critic Philip Kennicott thinks the "right-wing Catholic ire" is already so yesterday: "the pace of cultural change on gay and lesbian issues is so rapid that even a year may have transformed the dynamics."
Whereas last year, museum bureaucrat Wayne Clough removing the ants-on-Jesus video was "a dark day for the Smithsonian, a successful, coordinated attack on free speech," Kennicott is still championing the gay-left curators and their vision of what they now call "the inherent queerness of America." They can't stand the idea that conservatives get to have any say at all.
By Penny Starr | November 15, 2011 | 10:38 PM EST
The bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn told officials at the Brooklyn Museum that a video depicting Jesus Christ on a cross with ants crawling over him is “disrespectful” to Christians and requested that it be removed, but Bishop Nicholas DeMarzio is not making public the correspondence between him and the museum.
The video, “A Fire in My Belly” by the late gay activist David Wojnarowicz, was pulled from a “gay erotic” exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. last year after CNSNews.com reported on it and Catholic groups and some members of Congress complained that the exhibit should be closed and that the video was offensive to Christians.
Talking Ants-on-Crucifix Art, NYT's Frank Rich Grieves 'Homophobia Is at Most a Misdemeanor' in D.C.
By Clay Waters | December 13, 2010 | 6:52 PM EST Frank Rich’s Sunday column for the New York Times, “Gay Bashing at the Smithsonian,” on the removal of a video from the “Hide/Seek” show of gay artists sponsored by the federally funded museum, was even more melodramatically offended (and offensive to Christian conservatives) than Arts critic Holland Cotter’s Saturday anguish.
After a video that included an 11-second clip of ants crawling over a crucifix was removed from the show for being offensive to Christians, it was inevitable that Rich, an enthusiastic defender of gay art (the artist who made the video, David Wojnarowicz, died of AIDS in 1992), would offer a fulminating defense.
By Rich's own description, the "Hide/Seek" clip showed a crucifix “besieged by ants that evoke frantic souls scurrying in panic as a seemingly impassive God looked on."
“Fire in My Belly” was removed from the exhibit by the National Portrait Gallery some 10 days ago with the full approval, if not instigation, of its parent institution, the Smithsonian. (The censored version of “Hide/Seek” is still scheduled to run through Feb. 13.) The incident is chilling because it suggests that even in a time of huge progress in gay civil rights, homophobia remains among the last permissible bigotries in America. “Think anti-gay bullying is just for kids? Ask the Smithsonian,” wrote The Los Angeles Times’s art critic, Christopher Knight, last week. One might add: Think anti-gay bullying is just for small-town America? Look at the nation’s capital.