The Washington Post knows how to ruin a Christian's Sunday morning. Jason Edward Kaufman, a regular Sunday art reviewer for the Post (even if he's described by the paper merely as a "freelance writer"), was apparently assigned to review a new exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art that looks back on the "so-called culture wars of the late 70s through the 90s, when social conservatives sought to prevent tax money from supporting art that dealt with homosexuality, feminism, racism, or other contentious issues."
It's obvious from the start that the reviewer is being dishonest in suggest the conservatives are political, but the artists and their supporters aren't political, they're just for freedom of expression. The exhibit is "a chance for younger viewers to learn about previous clashes between religious conservatives and advocates of freedom of expression in the arts." But Kaufman is just getting started. He also argued (wrongly) that the Catholic Church ignored the AIDS crisis and that opposing taxpayer-subsidized blasphemy is akin to fascism.
Again, Kaufman recounts the National Portrait Gallery's decision to remove a film by the late David Wojnarowicz featuring ants crawling on a crucifix: "Portions of the film included brief scenes of ants crawling on a plastic crucifix that the Catholic League declared 'hate speech disguised as art,' as though Christ has not endured far worse in the annals of art history. The film is no love letter to the Catholic Church — an institution that condemns homosexuality and ignored the AIDS crisis that inspired the work — but neither is its allegorical imagery inappropriate for an art exhibition."
The Catholic church did not "ignore the AIDS crisis" in the 1980s, as if the church never cared for AIDS sufferers in Catholic hospitals or began AIDS ministries. Leftists say this to attack the church for failing to support homosexuality or the universal use of condoms during sex. Kaufman then further displayed his animus against Catholics:
There would be more incidents before the latest debacle, typically involving politicians reiterating Catholic groups’ baseless charges of blasphemy. The hypocrisy is astonishing: The same legislators who for decades permitted the Catholic Church to self-police its pedophilia-plagued priesthood piously express anger over alleged affronts to public decency by artists whose work they misunderstand. As the Nobel Prize-winning author Sinclair Lewis wrote, “When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross."
Kaufman also explained that Wojnarowicz made a "Sex Series" that responded to "public indifference and the Reagan administration's inaction in the face of the AIDS crisis." The statement than that the Reagan administration was inactive is also factually false. It's one thing for The Washington Post to publish liberal opinions on AIDS and art, but these statements about the history of AIDS responses desperately needed a copy editor and fact checker.
Typically, Kaufman felt the social conservatives simply "misunderstood" that when an artist sinks a crucifix in his own urine and calls the work "Piss Christ," it's somehow not meant to provoke. Kaufman couldn't even acknowledge the artist boasted it was his own urine, it was merely "yellow fluid," as if it could have been lemonade:
It is remarkable how closely the government interference with the National Portrait Gallery parallels the events of 1989. That year the Corcoran Gallery of Art, fearing congressional reprisals, canceled a Robert Mapplethorpe retrospective that included sexually explicit photographs. And Andres Serrano’s photograph of a plastic crucifix submerged in yellow fluid — he dubbed it "Immersion (Piss Christ)" — drew vehement fire from the Christian right.
"Piss Christ" had won a North Carolina contemporary art contest fractionally funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, and Christian fundamentalists demanded an end to federal arts funding. It didn’t matter that Serrano, a Catholic, intended the submersion of the dime-store icon as a critique of the degrading commercialization of religious sentiment.
Once again, Kaufman is simply dishonest, and everyone should know it. He intended the submersion as a provocation. Pretending it's somehow a religious man's critique of commercialization? That's an aggressive misunderstanding.
