Ant-Covered Jesus On Display at Smithsonian Art Exhibit

posted at 1:00 pm on November 30, 2010 by Howard Portnoy
[ Repression ]   

I can’t decide which artwork to feature on my Christmas cards this year. Will it be the portrait of Ellen DeGeneres grabbing her breasts? A photo of two naked brothers sharing a passionate kiss? Ordinarily, I’d opt for a video still of Jesus, post-crucifixion, with ants crawling all over his face and body but I fear the resolution may not be high enough to convey the full import.

These and other delights for the eye go on display today at the National Portrait Gallery, one of the museums of the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington. The exhibit, titled “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture,” will run through Feb. 13, giving those planning to take the kids to D.C. over Christmas vacation a chance for a little “art appreciation.”

CNSNews.com quotes David C. Ward, a National Portrait Gallery historian and co-curator of the exhibit, as stating:

This is an exhibition that displays masterpieces of American portraiture and we wanted to illustrate how questions of biography and identity went into the making of images that are canonical.

I’ve ghost-written some half dozen art books in my time, but apparently I’m not up on my “masterpieces of American portraiture” or “canonical images.” I was under the impression that the late Robert Mapplethorpe, whose work is represented in the exhibit, was best remembered for the scandals he generated during his life rather than for the quality of his “homoerotic” art.

That adjective, homoerotic, is used in the catalog accompanying the National Portrait Gallery exhibit, which is further described as

committed to showing how a major theme in American history has been the struggle for justice so that people and groups can claim their full inheritance in America’s promise of equality, inclusion, and social dignity. As America’s museum of national biography, the NPG is also vitally interested in the art of portrayal and how portraiture reflects our ideas about ourselves and others.

Now I get it! The photo of men in chains is symbolism! So presumably is the scene in the curator’s cut of the video A Fire in My Belly that depicts creator David Wojnarowicz, who died of AIDS, with his mouth sewn shut. And as for the pictures of male genitalia? Well, sometimes, to quote Freud, a cigar is just a cigar.

The article at CNSNews.com, which includes images from the exhibit, mentions that $5.8 million of the National Portrait Gallery’s annual funding of $8 million in fiscal year 2009 came from taxpayer dollars. As an art aficionado, I would be hard pressed to argue that the general public should have a say in what does or doesn’t appear in a state-financed art gallery. If it did, the paintings of Mark Rothko and Helen Frankenthaler might never have seen the light of a museum. Nevertheless, this exhibit raises the age-old question of whether there is a line that art should never cross and, if there is, where it should be drawn and by whom.

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Cross-posted at Libertarian Examiner. Follow me on Twitter or join me at Facebook. You can reach me at howard.portnoy@gmail.com or by posting a comment below.

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