Reasonable people can disagree, and I disagree with just about everyone on the Smithsonian “Hide/Seek” controversy. To cement my reputation as an artworld contrarian, I have posted an OpEd-style piece on HuffPost Arts, “Hide/Seek” Gamesmanship: National Portrait Gallery is Wrong Target.
I don’t usually link from this blog to my Huffington Post columns, because they closely resemble what I post on CultureGrrl. (But art-lings come first: CultureGrrl posts appear before HuffPost spinoffs.) I made an exception this time because what I did for Arianna distills and further develops the ideas that I’ve touched on here, here and here. It is pegged to Monday’s news development regarding the Warhol Foundation’s hot-headed threat to deny all future support to the Smithsonian unless the National Portrait Gallery restores the removed David Wojnarowicz video to the “Hide/Seek” exhibition. Who’s bullying who?
For an antidote to all this hysteria, I direct your attention to an online clip showing Wojnarowicz speaking about the 1980s Culture Wars. (I link to and quote from that clip at the end of my HuffPost piece.) The creator of the grating, raging (and now viral) video, A Fire in My Belly, which has sparked such irrational outrage on both sides of the current controversy, comes across here as softspoken, reasoned and committed to freedom of expression.
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