Cool Or Not Cool: Asking the Brooklyn Museum to Pull Crucifix Video?

An exhibition called “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture,” opens later this week at the Brooklyn Museum, and includes a video by David Wojnarowicz that's got the Brooklyn Dioceses’s collars in a bunch.

The video includes a 12 second clip of ants crawling over a wooden crucifix. Last week Brooklyn Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio wrote a letter to the big wigs at the museum asking it not be included because it’s “offensive to many people of faith.” The Brooklyn Museum denied the request (unlike the pansies at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery last year). Though upset that the show will go on uncensored, the Catholic League has stated they will not protest the grand opening. How nice of them. 

Wendy Olsoff, owner of the PPOW Gallery, which represents Wojnarowicz’s estate defends the video. “The [video] is not about religion, it’s about homosexuality — and the church needs to come to terms with that.” A Brooklyn Museum spokesperson echoed that sentiment when she stated, "The [Wojnarowicz] video is an expression of the artist’s outrage at indifference to human suffering during the early years of the AIDS crisis."

That may be true but as we pretentious Brooklynites know, art is open to interpretation. The artist’s intent doesn't make the Brooklyn Diocese’s reading any less valid. To dismiss that reading is almost another form of attack on the video’s artistic merits. In fact, this is exactly the kind of exhibit that becomes enriched by conversation about the different emotions and ideas it evokes.

Which is why, despite being raised a good Catholic boy and teaching Sunday school in Park Slope's own Saint Savior’s parish, I say “fuck the Catholic League’s whining.” Even if it was intended as a direct comment on the church, we should never, ever censor art because it may be offensive. So long as it’s displayed in an appropriate venue (which the Brooklyn Museum certainly qualifies as), art should say whatever the hell it wants to.

My final verdict: asking for this video to be taken out of the exhibition is NOT cool. But what do you think?

[Via the Brooklyn Paper]