Wednesday, April 13, 2005

Secret Service Art Review

Caught this one at Powerline.

Seems the Secret Service is investigating an "art" exhibit at Columbia College in Chicago. Some of the "art" is suggestive, to say the least, for killing the president.
"We need to ensure, as best we can, that this is nothing more than artwork with a political statement," Mazur said.

Two federal agents arrived at the exhibit's opening night Thursday, took photos of some of the works and asked for the artists' contact information, said CarolAnn Brown, the gallery's director.

Brown said the agents were most interested in Chicago artist Al Brandtner's work titled "Patriot Act," which depicted a sheet of mock 37-cent red, white and blue stamps showing a revolver pointed at Bush's head.
Well, it's not a revolver from what I can see in the picture, but beyond that I wonder why these "artists" are so upset. You make "art" with a strong statement that can be construed as threatening the present administration, and you think that the Secret Service will just ignore you?
The exhibit's curator, Michael Hernandez de Luna, said the inquiry "frightens" him.

"It starts questioning all rights, not only my rights or the artists' rights in this room, but questioning the rights of any artist who creates — any writer, any visual artist, any performance artist. It seems like we're being watched," he said.
Maybe it's time for de Luna to grow up. If you want to support highly controversial subjects on your walls, then you should expect someone will be watching you. If it frightens you, don't do it. I see no evidence of anyone's rights being questioned here. What rights exactly have they had questioned? The right to post inflammatory art? And since the art hasn't been removed or seized and no one has been arrested, what rights have you lost?

The Secret Service has a duty to investigate anything that may in any way be a threat to the sitting administration. If the artist can't take the glare of the official investigation, then maybe they should have used their heads in the first place and avoided it.

Actions have results in the real world. Whining about it will not make that fact go away.

2 comments:

Granted said...

Sure is a funny looking revolver. I didn't know they made them to look like Baretta's.

geekwife said...

Hmmm. I may be a cynic, but how odd is it that the media is calling this a revolver? "Revolver" sounds so quaint and old-fashioned, not terribly dangerous at all.

Replace the picture of Bush with one of Hillary, or any other liberal, and I'll bet the media would be calling it a "high-powered automatic weapon."