OTTAWA - An exhibit featuring Nazi regalia and photos of an artist consummating his marriage to his porn-star wife has prompted the National Gallery of Canada to limit children's access to the showing.
Pop Life: Art in a Material World, on loan from London's renowned Tate Museum, will be the featured exhibition in Canada's premier gallery this summer.
The 11-room spectacle features work from pop artists Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons and several others who were inspired by Warhol, who took subjects as banal as celebrity portraits and every day consumer goods and transformed them into works of art.
But the provocative nature of the exhibit has prompted the minister responsible for art in Canada to declare that he won't be attending the show the government has helped fund.
"I've made my personal judgment and I'm not interested in seeing the exhibition any more than I've already seen it," Heritage Minister James Moore said.
Moore said he saw photos of the exhibit when the gallery requested additional funding from the government for the exhibit. That funding request was denied, but not because of its content, Moore said.
The heritage minister announced Thursday that the gallery was among four institutions to benefit from a $15 million investment in national museums. The gallery will receive $2 million.
Moore said the exhibit had no impact on his ministry's funding decisions.
"I'm not the minister of good taste, I'm the minister of heritage," Moore said in French Thursday.
"Individual Canadians have the right to decide what kinds of arts and culture they want to consume, and they can vote with their feet and their wallets on their own."
Young children who are not accompanied by an adult will not be allowed to enter two rooms of the exhibit.
Jonathan Shaughnessy, co-ordinating curator for the exhibit, said the gallery has a responsibility to ensure that young people aren't exposed to shocking images without their parents' knowledge.
"The gallery doesn't want to censor the work that's on display in the gallery, obviously," Shaughnessy said. "But we have an obligation that we can't have young people that are unescorted go home after and say, look what I saw at the national gallery today."
Shaughnessy said the gallery would not specifically check identification at the door.
National Art Gallery director Marc Mayer said he wasn't concerned about the controversy surrounding the show.
"The show hasn't opened yet," he told reporters. "So first of all, controversy is in the eye of the beholder, and second, let's wait to see the exhibition before we have any controversy."
The gallery's exhibits have provoked opposition in the past.
The gallery issued a warning label for several paintings by Daphne Odjig this past winter for their sexually explicit nature. Another warning was posted outside a room containing a picture of a man masturbating on the Internet.
Diana Nemiroff, director of the art gallery at Carleton University, said part of the role of art is to provoke and challenge the viewer.
Nemiroff is no stranger to that kind of provocation. As a curator of the National Art Gallery in 1990, she defended the gallery's decision to spend $1.8 million on Barnett Newman's Voice of Fire, a massive canvas with vertical blue and red stripes that many said was too simple to be called art.
The painting sparked a parliamentary debate over what constitutes art -- and eventually appreciated significantly in value.
"Often art galleries are in a position of being taste leaders," Nemiroff said. "The aim is to bring the audience along rather than follow it."
The Pop Life exhibit opens in June and runs throughout the summer.
