Hide/Seek censorship issue taken up by "New Republic"

I find this reasoning moronic and offensive. Read the rest for the author's "Not that I agree with the Right either" blather.


There is a Wikileaks crudity about the way the "Hide/Seek" affair is unfolding, a delight in dumping everybody's secrets out in public and letting the chips fall as they may. The curators of "Hide/Seek," Jonathan D. Katz and David C. Wood, have apparently never encountered a hidden or nuanced aspect of an artistic personality that they did not believe ought to be given some boldface attention. Is their point that the elusive eroticism of Thomas Eakins, Marcel Duchamp, Marsden Hartley, Charles Demuth, Djuna Barnes, and Joseph Cornell is as American as apple pie? And given that Katz and Wood want to "out" American art, is it any wonder that Eric Cantor, the rockstar Republican congressman with the square jaw and the wire-frame specs, turned up on Fox News to announce that the show was an "outrageous use of taxpayer money and an obvious attempt to offend Christians during the Christmas season?" It is one of the strange and sad facts of the culture wars that the opponents so often speak the same language of "outing" and "outrageousness," while the withering of American cultural life continues unabated. The other day I visited Harleigh Cemetery in Camden, New Jersey, where Walt Whitman, the gay poet who hid his outrageousness in plain sight, is buried in an archaic stone monument of his own design. To reach the last resting place of the great bard of democratic possibility, you drive through Camden's battered streets, and you may well find yourself clinging to Whitman's belief that every man and woman and child can have their "imaginative individual responses"—indeed naturally does have such a response.



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Published on December 08, 2010 05:11
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