Topic: CNSNews.com
Penny Starr's fit of manufactured outrage over gay-related art at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery has had its desired effect: She reports that the gallery "will remove from one of its exhibitions a video that includes images of ants swarming over Jesus Christ on a crucifix."
But not as much effect as she wanted; she laments that the gallery "will keep in place images of naked brothers kissing, men in chains, Ellen DeGeneres grabbing her breasts, a painting of a male nude that the Smithsonian itelf describes as "homoerotic," and a painting made with nail polish and the cremated ashes of a man with AIDS who committed suicide."
Meanwhile, hammering home the anti-gay agenda behind Starr's attack is her immediate supervisor, CNS editor in chief Terry Jeffrey, who confirms the anti-gay motivation behind Starr's crusade in his Dec. 1 column, in which he plays art critic by insisting that the art Starr targeted can't possibly be good because it doesn't look anything at all like Michelangelo:
The National Portrait Gallery, part of the federally funded Smithsonian Institution, is presenting an exhibition that does exactly the opposite of what true art does.
When I studied English at Princeton, I had the good fortune to be taught by a series of scholars who in their lectures and precepts drove home the point that art, whether it be in literary or other form, must ultimately be measured by its capacity to make better human beings.
A work of art—or alleged work of art—can do only one of three things to a person’s character: It can hurt it, improve it or have no impact at all.
[...]
Is the Smithsonian Institution trying to move Americans to virtue through this exhibit? No. It is trying to mainstream vice and perversion. The National Portrait Gallery’s “Hide/Seek” exhibition does not celebrate art, it murders it.
Jeffrey somehow manages to avoid using the term "degenerate art," though it appears that's what he was thinking.
