Hugging Towers

One week after 9/11, I rescued the above unsigned painting from the front wall of the elementary school on my Chelsea street. It was one of hundreds affixed there in what doubtlessly was a group therapy project for the children. A violent rainstorm had just begun when I removed it and by morning the hundreds of other drawings lay ruined in puddles. I'll never own one of the repulsive commercial 9/11 souvenirs still being hawked on downtown corners, but Hugging Towers (as I have dubbed it), I'll keep forever.

FRANCE: Andres Serrano's Piss Christ Destroyed By Catholic Protesters

After weeks of demonstrations, yesterday Catholic protesters in France destroyed NYC artist Andres Serrano's classic and controversial Piss Christ. The UK Guardian reports:

The work has previously been shown without incident in France, but for the past two weeks Catholic groups have campaigned against it, culminating in hundreds of people marching through Avignon on Saturday in protest. Just after 11am on Sunday, four people in sunglasses entered the gallery where the exhibition was being held. One took a hammer from his sock and threatened security staff. A guard restrained one man but the remaining members of the group managed to smash an acrylic screen and slash the photograph with what police believe was a screwdriver or ice pick. They then destroyed another photograph, of nuns' hands in prayer.

Protests against the photograph had also gained the support of France's far-right National Front party. The gallery's owner says the destroyed artwork will remain on display "so people can see what barbarians can do."

GOP Congressional Group Plans To Cut Federal Funding For The Arts To ZERO

A coalition of Tea Party-backed Congress members headed by wingnut Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) plans to cut 100% of all federal funding for the arts.

A group of conservative Republicans, called the Republican Study Committee, revealed a new plan on Thursday to cut federal funding for arts down to zero. This means the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities would be left in the cold. Not to mention the potential hit at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Run by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the over 150-person group's plan, the Spending Reduction Act of 2011, would "save" $167.5 million pulled from the NEA and the Humanities endowment and $445 from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. They are forecasting that this erasure of cultural funding would reduce federal spending by $2.5 trillion over the next decade.

MoMA Gets Censored Smithsonian Exhibit

New York City's Museum of Modern Art has acquired the video created by late gay artist David Wojnarowicz, which was pulled by the Smithsonian after an outcry from the GOP and the Catholic League's Bill Donohue.

The museum acquired both the original 13-minute version of the video, titled “A Fire in My Belly,” and a separate 7-minute excerpt made by the artist; the two are now being shown in a loop as part of a display of contemporary art from the museum’s collection that will remain up until May 9. Mr. Wojnarowicz, who died of AIDS in 1992, made the video in the late 1980s in response to the AIDS crisis. It was included in a show at the National Portrait Gallery, a Smithsonian museum, examining gay themes in American portraiture but was removed after it was attacked by Bill Donohue, the president of the Catholic League, and several Republican congressmen who objected to an image in the video of ants crawling on a crucifix.

Another artist is threatening to sue the Smithsonian in a protest demand to have his own work removed.

UPDATE: The Catholic League's Bill Donohue isn't too upset with the MoMA move, but he still manages to call the museum's (straight and married) director a "queen."

Unlike the Smithsonian, which is federally funded, MoMA is largely supported by fat cats like Glenn D. Lowry, the museum's director, thus alleviating some of our objections. Lowry makes over $2 million a year and lives for free in a $6 million condo atop the museum. Unlike the rest of us, he pays no income tax on his housing. Looks like the artistic community got fleeced twice: once by embracing the "pathological nonsense" of this masterpiece, and once by the corporate welfare queen who runs—and lives in—the joint.

Quote Of The Day - Bill Donohue

"In a large survey of museum-going households released in April, it was found that they are significantly better educated and affluent than the U.S. population; they are also overwhelmingly white. The time has come, then, to stop funding the leisure of rich white people: all public monies for the arts should cease. Quite frankly, to make the working class pay for the leisure of the rich amounts to class discrimination. In the spirit of social justice, a better case could be made to fund professional wrestling—it's what the working class enjoy." - Catholic League president Bill Donohue, continuing his campaign against the Smithsonian.

Quote Of The Day - Frank Rich

"It still seems an unwritten rule in establishment Washington that homophobia is at most a misdemeanor. By this code, the Smithsonian’s surrender is no big deal; let the art world do its little protests. This attitude explains why the ever more absurd excuses concocted by John McCain for almost single-handedly thwarting the repeal of 'Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell' are rarely called out for what they are — 'bigotry disguised as prudence,' in the apt phrase of Slate’s military affairs columnist, Fred Kaplan.

"Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council has been granted serious and sometimes unchallenged credence as a moral arbiter not just by Rupert Murdoch’s outlets but by CNN, MSNBC and The Post’s 'On Faith' Web site even as he cites junk science to declare that homosexuality poses a risk to children' and that being gay leads to being a child molester. [snip]

"Has it gotten better since AIDS decimated a generation of gay men? In San Francisco, certainly. But when America’s signature cultural institution can be so easily bullied by bigots, it’s another indicator that the angels Keith Haring saw on his death bed have not landed in Washington just yet." - Frank Rich, writing for the New York Times.

Pat Buchanan: Defund The Smithsonian

"If there are no common standards of decency, there is no moral community, and where there is no moral community, there is no country. If we cannot agree on what is beautiful, moral and decent, are we really 'one nation, under God, indivisible' anymore? [WaPo art critic] Gopnik and the Post have put critics of the gallery's sex show on notice that their protests are to be restricted to the verbal. Neither they nor Congress have a right to tell curators what to exhibit and not exhibit.

"'The use of public dollars does not give lawmakers the right to micromanage or censor public displays,' says the Post. The gauntlet has been thrown down to the new GOP majority: Keep your puritanical hands off our museums. The Smithsonian needs a haircut next year to remind these folks who's boss and that with public funding comes public responsibility." - Pat Buchanan, calling for defunding the Smithsonian over its Hide/Seek show on gay images.

Tony Perkins On Smithsonian Flap

"The Battle of the Smithsonian is more than a Ben Stiller movie--it's reality for conservatives on Capitol Hill, who are disgusted by the latest exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery. Just across the street from FRC headquarters, a month-old display called "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture" is causing quite an uproar for a series of images that range from homo-erotica to religious blaspheme. The exhibit is so graphic that curators posted a "mature themes" warning on the doors outside.

"One video on a constant loop showed Jesus lying on a crucifix, covered in ants. Or it used to. Thanks to incoming House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), that clip was discontinued. Yesterday, Smithsonian officials scraped the video stream when Rep. Boehner said the Gallery should be correct the mistake or face big budget cuts. "American families have a right to expect better from recipients of taxpayer-funds..." But they couldn't expect better from this new leadership. Our hats go off to Congressmen Boehner and Eric Cantor (R-Va.) for taking a principled stand on the city's "art." House Republicans may not be in power until January, but they are already empowering America 's families." - Hate group head Tony Perkins, warning that the GOP has only just begun to clamp down on freedom of expression.

GOP Reps Call For Unfunding The Smithsonian Over Gay Exhibit

More Christianist bullshit about the gay video exhibit that I reported on yesterday.

(Via - Truth Wins Out)

Catholic League Pressures Smithsonian Into Removing Exhibit By Gay Artist

The Catholic League, that one-guy-with-a-computer outfit headed by anti-gay nutjob Bill Donohue, has successfully pressured the Smithsonian into removing an AIDS-themed video exhibit by the late gay artist David Wojnarowicz. Because for eleven seconds, ants can be seen crawling on a crucifix. The Smithsonian acted after incoming GOP House Speaker John Boehner and incoming GOP House Majority Leader Eric Cantor echoed Donohue's complaints.

The Washington Post's art critic Blake Gopnik reports:

As part of "Hide/Seek," the gallery was showing a four-minute excerpt from a 1987 piece titled "A Fire in My Belly," made in honor of Peter Hujar, an artist-colleague and lover of Wojnarowicz who had died of AIDS complications in 1987. And for 11 seconds of that meandering, stream-of-consciousness work (the full version is 30 minutes long) a crucifix appears onscreen with ants crawling on it. It seems such an inconsequential part of the total video that neither I nor anyone I've spoken to who saw the work remembered it at all.

But that is the portion of the video that the Catholic League has decried as "designed to insult and inflict injury and assault the sensibilities of Christians," and described as "hate speech" - despite the artist's own hopes that the passage would speak to the suffering of his dead friend. The irony is that Wojnarowicz's reading of his piece puts it smack in the middle of the great tradition of using images of Christ to speak about the suffering of all mankind. There is a long, respectable history of showing hideously grisly images of Jesus - 17th-century sculptures in the National Gallery's recent show of Spanish sacred art could not have been more gory or distressing - and Wojnarowicz's video is nothing more than a relatively tepid reworking of that imagery, in modern terms.

Here's that "hate-filled" clip by David Wojnorawicz. (The music is by the brilliant Diamanda Galas.) Congratulations, Catholic League. You've spring-boarded a relatively obscure work by a gay artist into national prominence.


RELATED: Over at Art Info, Tyler Green has a lot of questions for the curators at the National Portrait Gallery regarding their capitulation to this act of religion-based censorship.

ALSO RELATED: Since we know Donohue can't resist visiting JMG whenever his name is mentioned, here Bill, this Andres Serrano is for you.UPDATE: People For the America Way respond: "There is absolutely no reason for our government to be in the business of censoring art, or cave to pressure from extreme Religious Right organizations just because it’s Christmas. That Bill Donohue and the Catholic League are fighting for censorship is unsurprising. That the GOP leadership is echoing their call is shameful. That the Smithsonian has given into their transparent political bullying is deeply disturbing."

Golden Girls Nesting Dolls - Now On eBay

Several months ago, a lot of you were plotzing over Ginger Williams' hand-painted Golden Girls nesting dolls. Ginger writes us this morning with the news that the dolls are now available on eBay.

Photographer Jeff Sheng's DADT Exhibit

Bathhouse Art

A new book about Michelangelo speculates that his inspiration for all the nude male figures in the Sistine Chapel's Last Judgment mural came from his frequent visits to Rome's gay bathhouses and brothels.

Elena Lazzarini, a researcher from Pisa University, believes the enormous fresco is replete with homosexual imagery, including a man being dragged into Damnation by his testicles and kisses and embraces between male figures. She has explored the theory in a new book, claiming that Michelangelo drew much of his knowledge of male anatomy from his frequent visits to gay brothels and 'Turkish baths' in 16th century Italy. "The virile male bodies are inspired by the physiology of labourers engaged in physical exertion, with taut muscles, strenuous exertion and pain etched into the expression on their faces," said Miss Lazzarini. Michelangelo's explicit depiction of naked male bodies caused outrage in the Roman Catholic Church when the fresco was unveiled, with the artist accused of indecency and obscenity. Biagio da Cesena, the papal master of ceremonies, said the fresco was more suited to "public baths and taverns" than to a place of worship.

One art critic is unamused.

Some art critics like to say that the Last Judgment reflects Michelangelo’s own tortured relationship with his faith, in particular his belief that suffering is vital to finding faith in God. here is no light entertainment in this intense masterpiece, one which stretches across the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel, the building traditionally used for papal elections. It seems almost heretical to link such a masterpiece to a common bathhouse.

(Tipped by JMG reader Vivian)

Sarah Palin Fan Art

Many more examples here. Some of them clearly aren't by actual fans.

Cool Art Watch

The above sculpture titled Non-Sign has been erected at the American-Canadian border near Vancouver. I invite your art-fag interpretation as to its meaning.

Banksy Directs Simpsons Opening

Gothamist notes that last night's opening sequence of The Simpsons was story-boarded by famed graffiti artist Banksy.

The Cher Within

Prints are now onsale on Etsy.com:

My painting “The Cher Within” depicts the magical moment when a drag performer prepares to cross the line between ambiguous guy in his underwear to full-on diva extraordinaire, in this case fashioned after his ultimate heroine, Cher. The painting also represents the diva in everyone, those who have actually taken their sequinned acts to the stage and those who may have offered more intimate performances behind bathroom doors, with towels for wigs and hairbrush microphones. I highly advocate vogueing before any and all reflective surfaces, because with enough imagination (and some extra-long false eyelashes for good measure), you never know who will be looking back at you from the reflection.

(Tipped by JMG reader Ed)

Pag - The Lady Is Dead

This clip has been on YouTube for a few weeks, but it's too hypnotically strange and beautiful not to pass along. Very Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle. The music sounds exactly like Antony & The Johnsons to me, but it's the Irrepressibles. Possibly NSFW.

Morning View - White Ghost

Currently installed in the middle of Park Avenue at 70th Street, Yoshitimo Nara's White Ghost is part of his show at the Asia Society Museum. The exhibit opens tomorrow and runs until the end of the year. You might know Nara's work best from the album covers he did for artists such as R.E.M and Shonen Knife, the latter of whom will perform at the museum on September 25th.

Designing Women Nesting Dolls

From artist Ginger Williams, the maker of the Golden Girls Nesting Dolls. Ginger tells me that my first post about her dolls went rather viral, with mentions of her work popping up on MSNBC and garnering her an interview on Good Morning, Sacramento where she also displayed her Steel Magnolias dolls. Many of you have asked about purchasing the dolls, but Ginger says that she's still trying to figure out the licensing issues. Check out her above-linked artist site for updates.