Brooklyn Bishop Attacks Video in Gay Art Show "Hide/Seek"

THE DAILY BEAST
By Blake Gopnik

A Fire in My Belly, Courtesy of The Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W Gallery,
New York and The Fales Library and Special Collections/ New York University

NEW YORK - Nicholas A. DiMarzio, the Catholic bishop of Brooklyn, was asking the museum to withdraw the video, titled A Fire in My Belly, from an exhibition that hadn’t even opened yet. DiMarzio and a handful of other Christians insist the piece is a “disrespectful” and blasphemous attack on their religion and won’t brook any other reading of it. They don’t care that David Wojnarowicz, who made the work in 1987 and died of AIDS five years later, said he chose to put Jesus in his piece because “I wanted to make a symbol that would show that he would take on the suffering of the vast amounts of addiction that I saw on the streets,” and because “I saw very little treatment available for people who had [AIDS].”  The exhibition Hide/See: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture opens at the Brooklyn Museum of Art on Friday, November 18. [link]