Tonight is a full moon, the winter solstice and even a lunar eclipse, too. Here is The Sea a Dream, a 2008 video by the late Dan Asher.

Pictures from the successful protest on December 19, 2010 against the Smithsonian’s descent to rabid censorship:

Onward Christian Soldiers - the crowd stretched from the Met to the Cooper-Hewitt Museums

Crossing Fifth Avenue

Death by Audio

Protestor X!

Lisa Phillips of the New Museum, which is showing Wojnarowicz' video

"This is what your parents used to do!" says Jerry Saltz

Artist Nayland Blake and "it's-complicated" friend

Conclusion at Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum

“I wrote to the National Portrait Gallery this evening requesting that they remove my work “Felix, June 5, 1994″ from the “Hide/Seek” exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. As an artist who saw first hand the tremendous agony and pain that so many of my generation lived through, and died with, I cannot take the decision of the Smithsonian lightly. To edit queer history in this way is hurtful and disrespectful.” -AA Bronson on his Facebook page, 12/16/2010

This heroic artist and artworld fixture has made a bold, soul-searching resolution about his landmark work.  The work itself deserves the periodic attention it has received here and abroad.  In New York alone, I’ve spotted it at the 2002 Whitney Biennial, the Terence Koh lecture from 2009, and the current Whitney Museum show Singular Visions.  Interesting that the work is owned by the National Gallery of Canada.  How would that privately-funded institution respond to the Wojnarowicz controversy?

AA Bronson, Felix, June 5, 1994, 1994/99

What he said:

“I made this photograph of Felix a few hours after his death. He is arranged to receive visitors, and his favorite objects are gathered about him: his television remote control, his tape-recorder, and his cigarettes. Felix suffered from extreme wasting, and at the time of his death his eyes could not be closed: there was not enough flesh left on the bone.”

He continues:

The other Felix: Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled, 1991, one of 24 billboards

To exhibit Felix was AA Bronson’s progress toward reconciliation and letting go of the kindred spirit he lost.  One can only imagine the haunting pain he feels every time he agrees to exhibit the work, opening and re-opening those wounds, again and again.  By recalling Felix from the Smithsonian, AA isn’t just reclaiming his artwork.  He is reattaching himself to the Dead, a morbid grafting, which must be as horrific as waking up next to his corpse.

Stephen Kaltenbach

How Bill Donohue looked when he heard about the Wojnarowicz video:

Huma Bhabha, Untitled, 2005 at "Looking Back" The White Columns Annual

The National Portrait Gallery wants you to get off its lawn:

Ed Ruscha, "Los Angeles County Musem on Fire," 1968