Artist Wants to Withdraw From Smithsonian Exhibit

This isn’t the sort of controversy that’s good for an art exhibition. First, the Smithsonian’s decision to pull a video from its exhibit—titled Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture—prompted the Warhol Foundation to withdraw its funding. Now one of the artists in the exhibition is asking that his mural-sized photograph be taken down in protest. Canadian artist AA Bronson, a pioneer of gay-themed contemporary art, refused to reconsider when called by a curator of the Portrait Gallery. “Everybody in the show should withdraw their work,” he said. The controversy began when Christian activists and Republican Congressmen John Boehner and Eric Cantor protested a 1987 video that featured 11 seconds of a crucifix covered in ants, and the Smithsonian promptly pulled it.