Brooklyn Museum showing 'art' of bloodied Jesus Christ with ants crawling over his face and into his eyes, permissible bigotry

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11/14/11, "It’s the Ant-y Christ," NY Post, A. Peyser

"The war on Christianity is getting uglier.

Just ahead of the Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa seasons, a new festival is taking shape in Brooklyn. I’ll call it Open Season -- on faith.

Intended to shock -- and awe! -- the culturally illiterate masses, this Friday the elite, money-hungry Brooklyn Museum opens an exhibit, “HIDE/SEEK.” Included in the show is a four-minute video depicting a statue of the bloodied, crucified Jesus Christ with ants crawling over His face and into His eyes.

The silent mini movie is titled “A Fire in My Belly.” Edited down from 30 action-packed minutes, the film also displays a fetishistic fascination with legless men, overflowing bowls of blood, and scenes of the artist clumsily sewing his own lips shut. Gross.

Whatever the intention behind the hideous display, the video’s creator, former prostitute David Wojnarowicz, took to his grave. He died of complications from AIDS in 1992 at age 37....

The work must disgust and repel the museum’s gullible audience of bourgeois culture vultures, and make them think the revolting piece of slime is great “art.”

Only an ignoramus -- or worse, a Christian -- would find the piece blasphemous or plain immoral, proponents say. ...

“It’s been open season on symbols of Christianity for a decade or more. In the left’s view, trashing Christian symbols is one of the last permissible forms of bigotry. What do you think would happen if they displayed a picture of the Prophet Mohammed with ants crawling on it and called it art?”

Museum director Arnold Lehman has defended the exhibit, but he wouldn’t talk about it (to me) before a preview Thursday....

In 1999, the Brooklyn Museum exhibited “Sensation,” including Chris Ofili’s “Holy Virgin Mary,” a painting of the virgin splattered with elephant dung and decorated with naked bottoms. Then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani called it “sick stuff,” and “Catholic-bashing,”

• but could not get the museum’s government funding pulled. ...

Kimball said besmirching religion pushes buttons. “We live in a society at war with its Judeo-Christian roots. It’s not surprising you see an effort to attack and ridicule those roots in the arts community -- the elites.”

He believes Rudy Giuliani was right. Why should the public pay for religious insults and filth?

“A Fire in My Belly” was on display at the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian last year, until an outcry persuaded the government-funded museum to yank it. The film was

• then played in the lobby of the New Museum in Manhattan."

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