Penny Starr, it seems, is not done trying to censor art.
Starr, if you’ll remember, was the lead instigator in the Media Research Center’s efforts in trying to censor a gay-themed art exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, with particular focus on one particular piece — a video by David Wojnarowicz which includes a few seconds of ants crawling on a crucifix.
That exhibit has now moved to a museum in Brooklyn, and Starr has resumed her censorious ways. A Nov. 15 CNSNews.com article by Starr highlights how “The bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn told officials at the Brooklyn Museum that a video depicting Jesus Christ on a cross with ants crawling over him is ‘disrespectful’ to Christians and requested that it be removed.”
Starr engages in selective and biased reporting throughout her article. Starr describes the exhibit as “gay erotic” without attribution, and she dismisses the late Wojnarowicz as a “gay activist.”
As she and the MRC frequently did during their manufactured controversy over the Smithsonian exhibit, Starr discusses only how the video “the video was offensive to Christians” and fails to mention the artist’s intent with the images in his video. As more responsible and less biased news outlets have noted, Wojnarowicz grew up Catholic and frequently used Catholic imagery in his art, and his point in the video’s depiction of the ants crawling over the crucifix — made as he was dying of AIDS — was to illustrate the ideas that God may be as indifferent to humans as humans are to ants and that we should love the small things of the planet as we hope to be loved by God.
But Starr doesn’t care about art — indeed, at one point she puts the word “art” in scare quotes to describe previous exhibits at the museum. She only wants to inflame and get her name out there as a right-wing crusader.