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."
Yesterday a group of students at Harding University in Arkansas launched an online zine meant to "give voice to the experiences of gay and lesbians" on campus, but the school immediately blocked the site from campus by listing it on its porn filter. Read the students' stirring manifesto, The State Of The Gay.
My click-tracker tells me that over 1700 of you hit the Harps contact page link I posted at the beginning of the day. It's a tiny victory to be sure, but it's also a message to all the nation's retailers. Nice work, everybody.
Last night Twitter user JennHudd tweeted out this photo she took at Harps, a grocery store in Mountain Home, Arkansas. Apparently US Weekly's cover shot of Elton John, his partner, and baby is just too shocking for children. Harps has over 60 locations in Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri. Call their home office at 877-772-8193 or use their contact form if you'd like to register a polite protest.
UPDATE: According to a company spokesperson, the store claims it was responding to customer complaints when it covered up the magazine. GLAAD investigates:
I spoke with Harps Corporate Executive Assistant Marty Yarborough, who told me that every Harps store is equipped with these shields and that they get put up whenever customers complain about the content of a magazine cover. She said the word from the store about this particular cover was that “several” customers had complained, so the shield went up. She also confirmed that these shields are utilized on a store-by-store basis, so the magazine would not have been covered up at any of the other Harps locations, unless customers complained there as well. She also told me that the usage of the shield on this particular cover is “in no way our opinion on this issue.” She quickly added, ”we do not have an opinion on this issue.”
UPDATE II: The Harps corporate office has issued an official press release on the matter.
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.
The leaders of Kenya's evangelical movement are pressuring the national museum to remove a world-famous collection of bones which conclusively depict the evolution of apes to humans.
The collection includes the most complete skeleton yet found of Homo erectus, the 1.7 million-year-old Turkana Boy unearthed by Dr Leakey's team in 1984 at Nariokotome, near Lake Turkana in northern Kenya. The museum also holds bones from several specimens of Australopithecus anamensis, believed to be the first hominid to walk upright, four million years ago. Together the artefacts amount to the clearest record yet discovered of the origins of Homo sapiens.
Bishop Bonifes Adoyo, the head of Christ is the Answer Ministries: "The Christian community here is very uncomfortable that Leakey and his group want their theories presented as fact. Our doctrine is not that we evolved from apes, and we have grave concerns that the museum wants to enhance the prominence of something presented as fact which is just one theory."
"Jim was monstrous proud about it, and he got so he wouldn't hardly notice the other hipsters. Hipsters would come miles to hear Jim tell about it, and he was more looked up to than any hipster in that country. Strange hipsters would stand with their mouths open and look him all over, same as if he was a wonder. Hipsters is always talking about witches in the dark by the kitchen fire; but whenever one was talking and letting on to know all about such things, Jim would happen in and say, 'Hm! What you know 'bout witches?' and that hipster was corked up and had to take a back seat." - An excerpt from The Hipster Huckleberry Finn, which substitutes "hipster" wherever the n-word appears in the original.
"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.
"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.
"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.
"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.
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."
This is Morality In Media's annual White Ribbon Against Pornography week and they would like you to start demanding that the police enforce all those laws about folks legally purchasing the legally-made smut featuring legally consenting adults.
"The reason we have continued to promote the campaign is because people all across the country find it to be a convenient way for them to express their opposition to pornography and their support for a standard of decency in the community," explains Bob Peters, head of Morality in Media. Bob PetersEven though the Supreme Court has partially corrected the problem, one of the reasons for the proliferation of pornography is court decisions. "Another main reason why we have so much pornography in our country is because people don't complain," Peters suggests. "They don't make complaints to the police; they don't make complaints to their local or state prosecutor; they don't make complaints to the U.S. attorneys and they don't make complaints to members of Congress, to mayors, to city legislators and state legislators."
Please support Morality In Media by tying a white ribbon around your tingly parts and emailing a photo of same to Christine O'Donnell.
RELATED: The Evidence For God blog wants you know that sex with robots is always wrong and that is where we are headed if we don't stop interweb porn, like, right now.
After a Facebook-based uproar from uptight anti-titty parents, Sesame Street has decided that they will not be airing a segment in which pop star Katy Perry sings to Elmo while wearing a low-cut costume.
Sesame Street has a long history of working with celebrities across all genres, including athletes, actors, musicians and artists. Sesame Street has always been written on two levels, for the child and adult. We use parodies and celebrity segments to interest adults in the show because we know that a child learns best when co-viewing with a parent or care-giver. We also value our viewer’s opinions and particularly those of parents. In light of the feedback we’ve received on the Katy Perry music video which was released on You Tube only, we have decided we will not air the segment on the television broadcast of Sesame Street, which is aimed at preschoolers.
After weeks of demonstrations, yesterday Catholic protesters in France destroyed NYC artist Andres Serrano's classic and controversial Piss Christ. The UK Guardian reports: 
