New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman was granted the front page of Wednesday’s Arts section for a snobbish chiding of uncouth American conservatives who helped squelch a video some found sacrilegious, by a featured artist in a Smithsonian gay art exhibit: “In Britain, Separation of Art and State.” (“Separation” except for when it comes to actually subsidizing the art, which Britain does.)
The Times even ran a large photo of a clip from the controversial video by artist David Wojnarowicz, “A Fire in my Belly,” showing ants crawling over a crucifix. This is the same newspaper that proudly refused to reprint newspaper cartoons mocking the Prophet Muhammad after radical Muslims instigated an uproar back in February 2006.
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Kimmelman was convinced that conservative outrage against the art was politically “orchestrated.”
“There was also ‘Sensation,’ ” Mr. Serota added, an exhibition that caused a ruckus here in 1997, although for reasons different from those creating a stir at the Brooklyn Museum two years later. In the United States Mr. Donohue and Rudolph W. Giuliani, New York’s mayor at the time, in the role that Representative Cantor plays now, went through much the same paroxysm of orchestrated grief over a work combining an image of the Virgin Mary with elephant dung.
Kimmelman skipped over the fatal outrage stirred up by radical Muslims over cartoon images of Muhammad that appeared in a Danish newspaper, perhaps because he led off a February 8, 2006 article by refusing to defend them, calling them “callous and feeble cartoons.” Apparently Kimmelman finds some anti-religious art more appealing than other kinds.