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Who'll Save the Children from Katie Couric, Britney Spears Vaginart?
By
John Del Signore
Published Aug 22, 2009
Modified Aug 22, 2009
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John Del Signore/Gothamist
By
John Del Signore
Published Aug 22, 2009
Modified Aug 22, 2009
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Not us—see it below in all its NSFW, uh, glory. The "it" we're talking about here, be warned, is artist Jonathan Horowitz's 2008 piece "CBS Evening News/www.Britneycrotch.org," which frames two big digital prints on top of each other: The top image is Katie Couric at her news desk, and the bottom is Britney Spears’s infamous crotch shot, photoshopped to match Couric's upper half. It's the artistic antithesis of a Reeses Peanut Butter Cup, and you can see it at P.S. 1 in Queens with your own eyes (though the museum politely asks that visitors not flush their gouged-out their eyes down the toilet).
Horowitz's provactive mash-up has writer Fred Bernstein miffed, because he visited the exhibit with his 7-year-old twin sons but didn't notice the warning sign on the wall. Luckily, he spotted the piece before his sons did, and he quickly ushered them out of the room before they witnessed unspeakable horror. But it was a close call! In a City Room opinion piece, Bernstein declares, "It’s O.K. if P.S. 1 wants to show vulvas in extreme close-up... What’s not O.K. is that the only warning to parents was a tiny sign at the entrance to the gallery."
Worse, Bernstein sees these pee-pees and wee-wees everywhere, and it's getting so he can't take his sons to any museum without being confronted by sculptures of masturbating cowboys swinging giant jizz lassos (left). That's what happened at the Brooklyn Museum's Murakami retrospective, and while some visitors found it "amusing to watch parents as they tried to herd their kids and toddlers away from ejaculating penises and disturbing videos," Bernstein's says it's no joke. He proposes a new rule requiring "the warning signs should be at least as large as the exposed genitalia"—but that would force some galleries to basically install giant billboards!
Via See Tim Blog
Tagged
art
britney spears
cat's in the cradle
children
innocence
Jonathan Horowitz
katie couric
kids
ps 1
vagina
John Del Signore
Originally from the Albany area, John Del Signore has called NYC home since 1995. In addition to his thousands of meticulously-crafted bespoke blog posts for Gothamist, his writing has also been published in The Awl, Deadspin, The Nervous Breakdown, and performed at The Brick Theater in Brooklyn.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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