The Art Critic with the Ethical Problem

Ari L. NoonanEditor's Essays

[img]1|left|Ari Noonan||no_popup[/img]I don’t know if Prissy Chrissie (Boy, Do I Have a Temper?) Knight, the Los Angeles Titanic’s art critic, is gay or merely dreams he is.

What is disappointingly clear this afternoon is that Mr. Knight is a dishonest journalist, straight or gay.

I thought Mike Hiltzik, an admitted liar who writes a Business Section essay, represented the newspaper’s limit of ethical hoodlums.

Mr. Knight, specializing in brass knuckles language usually reserved to characterize society’s dregs, must have had an inhumane fight with his boyfriend or girlfriend before sitting down to blow through a hurricane of puerile rage in yesterday’s edition.

The Titanic’s headline on his garbled gaggle was as amorphous as the point of his vulgar tantrum: “No portrait of resolve.”

The petulant Mr. Knight was peeved, we learn 5 minutes after his meandering story begins, because among 150 pieces in a history-of-gay-culture exhibit currently running at the Smithsonian, one apparently was removed, after a protest was filed, for its undeniable obscenity.

Mr. Knight does not tell us the controversial piece is gone.

He was too darned busy simultaneously stomping both of his feet, denigrating the critics with gutter language.

He also is frustratingly evasive about the exact protest made.

We Wuz Robbed

He is too busy scrupulously defending the heavenly joys of the gay lifestyle and plastering dirty names on the foreheads of critics and others whom Mr. Knight suspects feel the same.

All of that I could have tolerated if Mr. Knight had told the truth.

We know that the Case of the Apparently Removed Exhibit Piece is a phony excuse for a diatribe because he was blatantly dishonest about what was dishonest. He never disclosed the cause.

Citing the piece, “11 seconds of a 13-minute video made 23 years ago by the late artist David Wojnarowicz,” Mr. Knight goes on to describe “images of a decaying crucifix lament the failure of many Christians to act with compassion in the Aids’ pandemic’s early years.”

A decaying crucifix?

Who ever heard of one? I have not. Decaying from what? Ah, my dear Watson, you are closing in on the truth.

Then Mr. Knight swiftly pivots make into the hate speech he decries in others, pelting conservatives as worthy successors to A. Hitler.

Obviously out of embarrassment, Mr. Knight never quite confesses to us what was objectionable about the cross.

I had to look it up.

Disgusting ants were crawling all over the cross.

Oh.

Such an admission, Mr. Knight knew, would kill his claim for legitimate criticism.

Therefore, he did what the left commonly does. He skipped the crucial part that would have undermined his case.