The Sunday gospel describes John the Baptist’s dramatic appearance in the desert clothed in camel’s hair and eating locusts and wild honey. Such untamed earthiness, however, is often unwelcome. This past Tuesday a short graphic video depicting ants crawling over a crucifix that was part of an exhibit at the National Potrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Museum was removed after complaints from conservative lawmakers and organizations, including the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights.

Exhibit cocurator David Ward said that the video, which also includes other graphic imagery, was made in 1987 to explore the social response to AIDS through the years. "That it is violent, disturbing, and hallucinatory precisely replicates the impact of the disease itself on people and a society that could barely comprehend its magnitude," he said.

"I regret that some reports about the exhibit have created an impression that the video is intentionally sacrilegious," Martin Sullivan, the museum's director, said. "In fact, the artist's intention was to depict the suffering of an AIDS victim. It was not the museum's intention to offend. We are removing the video today."

Some critics feel the controversy was manufactured. “The irony is that [the video is part of a long] tradition of using images of Christ to speak about the suffering of all mankind,” writes art critic Blake Gopnick, who points out that “17th-century sculptures in the National Gallery's recent show of Spanish sacred art could not have been more gory or distressing.”

In an irony of the calendar, the museum pulled the video on the eve of World AIDS Day, December 1. The day is designed to raise awareness of the health epidemic. An estimated 33.3 million people worldwide had AIDS in 2009, as compared to 26.2 million a decade earlier.

Source: Articles by Jacqueline Trecott and Blake Gopnick for the Washington Post, Nina Madell for the
New York Daily News, and William Browning for Yahoo News