When I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art this past weekend, I was shocked to see a painting that depicts a young girl in a sexually suggestive pose. Balthus' painting, Thérèse Dreaming, is an evocative portrait of a prepubescent girl relaxing on a chair with her legs up and underwear exposed. 
 
 It is disturbing that the Met would proudly display such an image. They are a renowned institution and one of the largest, most respected art museums in the United States. The artist of this painting, Balthus, had a noted infatuation with pubescent girls, and it can be strongly argued that this painting romanticizes the sexualization of a child. 
 
 In 2013, the Met hosted the exhibit "Balthus: Cats and Girls—Paintings and Provocations," which included more of Balthus' overtly pedophilic work. As the Guardian wrote: "The Met, not imprudently, has put a plaque at the start of the show that reads: "Some of the paintings in this exhibition may be disturbing to some visitors." If The Met had the wherewithal to reference the disturbing nature of Balthus for this exhibit, they understand the implications of displaying his art as a part of their permanent collection. 
 
 Given the current climate around sexual assault and allegations that become more public each day, in showcasing this work for the masses without providing any type of clarification, The Met is, perhaps unintentionally, supporting voyeurism and the objectification of children. 
 
 
 
 
 
 I am not asking for this painting to be censored, destroyed or never seen again. I am asking The Met to seriously consider the implications of hanging particular pieces of art on their walls, and to be more conscientious in how they contextualize those pieces to the masses. This can be accomplished by either removing the piece from that particular gallery, or providing more context in the painting's description. For example, a line as brief as, "some viewers find this piece offensive or disturbing, given Balthus' artistic infatuation with young girls." 
 
 Ultimately, this is a small ask considering how expansive the Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection is (they can easily hang up another painting), how overtly sexual the painting is (the Met's description of the piece provides no background on Balthus or his reputation), and the current news headlines highlighting a macro issue about the safety and wellbeing of women of all ages. 
 
 
 
 Please sign this petition if you agree that the Met needs to reconsider the way it is displaying Balthus' suggestive, Thérèse Dreaming. I will be sending a letter to the museum alongside these signatures. ||||| New Yorkers launched a petition demanding that the Metropolitan Museum of Art remove a 1938 painting of a young woman with her underwear exposed due to the “current climate around sexual assault” — but the Met refused Sunday. 
 
 The piece, “Thérèse Dreaming” by the French artist Balthus, “sexualizes” the girl by depicting her lounging in a skirt with her knee up on a chair, according to the petition, which was posted on the website Care 2. 
 
 “The artist of this painting, Balthus, had a noted infatuation with pubescent girls and this painting is undeniably romanticizing the sexualization of a child,” writes Mia Merrill, 30, a New York City entrepreneur who started the petition. 
 
 “Given the current climate around sexual assault … The Met is romanticizing voyeurism and the objectification of children.” 
 
 It proclaims, “The [Met is] a renowned institution and one of the largest, most respected art museums in the United States. 
 
 “I am simply asking The Met to more carefully vet the art on its walls, and understand what this painting insinuates. 
 
 “Ultimately, it’s a small ask in consideration of how expansive their art collection is … how overtly sexual the painting is, and the current news headlines highlighting a macro issue about the public health and safety of women.” 
 
 The petition, which launched Friday, had raked in nearly 7,000 signatures by Sunday evening. 
 
 But a rep for the museum said it won’t remove the painting because art is meant to reflect many time periods — not just the current one. 
 
 “[Our] mission is to collect, study, conserve, and present significant works of art across all times and cultures in order to connect people to creativity, knowledge, and ideas,” said spokesman Kenneth Weine. 
 
 “Moments such as this provide an opportunity for conversation, and visual art is one of the most significant means we have for reflecting on both the past and the present.” 
 
 In 2013, the Met held an exhibition of Balthus paintings titled, “Balthus: Cats and Girls — Paintings and Provocations.” 
 
 When the erotic realist died in 2001, the lead singer of U2, Bono, sang at his funeral. The president of France and supermodel Elle Macpherson also attended the funeral. ||||| Revisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. Here, Jen George revisits Balthus’s painting Thérèse Dreaming. 
 
 In Balthus’s painting Thérèse Dreaming, a young girl sits, face turned to profile, arms up, elbows out, hands rested on her head, legs a little open, underwear visible—a sort of clothed, daydreaming, preteen odalisque. She is at home in her youth. She has the countenance of someone who knows other things are coming, eventually. Maybe she knows what, though she probably doesn’t. Not like she needs to—experience comes from being alone in the world, and with time. When asked about the provocative poses of preadolescent girls in his work, Balthus said, “It is how they (young girls) sit.” 
 
 When I first saw Thérèse Dreaming, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I stopped to sit. Maybe I’d been tired. I had been traveling cross-country with a counterfeit sixty-day Greyhound Ameripass—it allowed for unlimited bus travel within the U.S—and I had been smoking heavily and maybe not sleeping at all. I couldn’t stay all day in the Brooklyn apartment where I’d been sleeping, so most days I went to the Met, looking at art, spacing out, reading, sometimes staring at blank walls. It was inviting, the room and the painting. Thérèse’s skirt was like mine. My hair was longer. I liked her shoes. I liked that she was both in this room and not; she was dreaming, but I couldn’t see where she’d gone. 
 
 I spent my days at the Met mostly trying to forget that I was hungry and without money. I wasn’t dressed properly for late fall in New York. I wrote letters I didn’t send to an older man, an artist back in California. He’d tried to draw me once, late at night, but I couldn’t sit still because I didn’t know how. In the drawing, he’d rendered my face too young, somewhat elfish. He’d titled the drawing The Model Who Kept Moving. “I don’t look like that,” I’d said. “You don’t know what you look like,” he told me. 
 
 A week into my visit, walking south along Fifth Avenue after the museum had closed, I met an older man who was also walking. He asked me why I walked so fast. 
 
 “Where is your coat?” 
 
 He told me about New York, what the best places were, why the city itself was superior. “It is different and better if you have money. I can show you the other side.” 
 
 The letters to the artist in California were brief, hopeful notes, written with a vague intention that if sent, the artist would think of me. Maybe we could see each other in the daytime, I’d written. 
 
 “You should learn how to wear makeup,” the man on Fifth Avenue said as we neared Fifty-Ninth Street. He took me to get my makeup done at Bergdorf Goodman. We didn’t look at coats. At the beauty counters, wealthy women asked for creams, serums, masks, and lipsticks by name. I was made up heavily with blush. 
 
 At the rooftop bar at the Peninsula Hotel later, there were heat lamps. I asked for whiskey, but he ordered us martinis. 
 
 “You could be anybody,” he said. “The hotel owner’s daughter, for instance.” 
 
 I was young enough, or feeling the alcohol enough, to believe that I could be anybody, that a way to get through life was to believe that you’re a certain type of anybody whom things belong to, are for. I ate all the free nuts. People looked at us, probably because I was looking at them. Or maybe they were looking at my heavy blush. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to eat the nuts. 
 
 Later in the hotel elevator, he put his hand on my neck. 
 
 “Do you always go where strange men tell you to go?” 
 
 “No,” I shrugged. 
 
 “They might want to harm you. Maybe I want to harm you.” 
 
 “Well, do you?” 
 
 “Maybe.” 
 
 I told him a friend was waiting for me. He wrote his number in the journal with the letters. 
 
 A few days before I left New York, I took a friend to the museum to look at the painting. 
 
 “Does she remind you of anyone?” I asked him. 
 
 “No,” he said. His failure to recognize a similarity between the painting’s subject and myself created a sudden distance between Thérèse and me. I’d spent so much time with her, more than with any one person in the last month, that I had almost considered her the type of close friend that girls have in youth, when they want to look the same and dress the same and think the same, and often do. 
 
 I went back to the museum alone the day I was to leave from the Forty-Second Street bus terminal, trying to convince myself that I did look like Thérèse, that we had some quality in common. The gallery was empty. I sat looking at her, studying her face, trying to remember the ways we were the same. Thérèse didn’t reassure me, she didn’t acknowledge anything. She sat still in her pose, eyes closed, face turned away, her profile and underwear catching the light. 
 
 I was about six years older than Thérèse is said to be, but Thérèse Dreaming would be the image, the place, that stayed with me when I traveled west across frozen highways, on a series of busses, stopping at Greyhound terminals and gas-station food courts, sleeping next to older women and accidentally resting my head against their shoulders as they farted all night and played scratchers and talked to me about their families. I remember they all told me how young I was, asked me what in the hell I was doing. “I wanted to be alone,” I said. “I wanted to be left alone for a little while.” 
 
 Jen George lives and works in New York City. Her fiction has appeared in Harper’s, n+1, The White Review, BOMB, and The Brooklyn Rail. The Babysitter at Rest, published this month by the Dorothy Project, is her first book. ||||| Have you ever feared that an illicit text message would be revealed to another pair of eyes or, far worse, spread around the internet? 
 
 Such a prospect is small potatoes in comparison to Karen Finley's upcoming performance and installation at the New Museum in New York titled, "Sext Me If You Can." Participating volunteers will have to see their indecent texts immortalized as an objet d'art, hung on the walls of the modern museum. Obviously the performance is not for the sheepish, but there is a personalized work of art in it for those who have the chutzpah to send a message. 
 
 The piece is presented as part of NEA 4 in Residence, which revisits four artists whose funds were revoked by the NEA for their transgressive content. 
 
 Finley, the sexually explicit performance artist who memorably had her NEA grant rescinded in the '90s, is no stranger to controversy. After tackling subject matter including sexual abuse, rape and addiction, Finley is turning her attention to a lighter subject -- the sext -- and how it pertains to eroticism, technology and commerce. 
 
 For the piece, New Museum patrons will be able to personally commission a work by the artist by purchasing access to a private phone number. For between $200 to $500, depending on the size of the painting, you will receive a reserved time slot, where you will receive a sexting tutorial. After that, you'll be led into a private space, cell phone in tow, where you are free to sext Finley as much as you please. Whatever you send will serve as Finley's inspiration when she transforms your images or thoughts into a painting. 
 
 That's right, a legendary New York provocateur will translate your nudie pic or lewd words into paint. Maybe the selfie really is the cultural marker of our time... The revamped T&A; will hang in all its glory in the New Museum lobby from May 23–26, after which the bold sexters can take home a copy of the work they inspired. Voila! Just like that, a trashy temporary image is transformed into a culturally relevant one before your eyes. 
 
 Would you text your goodies to a famed artist? Let us know your thoughts on this unusual exhibition in the comments. In the meantime check out these other shocking acts by artists: ||||| NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — The NYPD was on the hunt Monday afternoon for a man accused of attacking a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art after complaining about a crooked painting. 
 
 As CBS2’s Scott Rapoport reported, police said the a man sporting a long beard and wearing all black went up to the guard at 6:15 p.m. this past Friday to tell him about the painting. 
 
 The 46-year-old guard told the man not to touch the artwork and advised him to inform the staff at the information desk, police said. 
 
 As the guard turned to walk away, the man smashed a glass bottle on the back of his head and shouted, “Do your job!” according to police. 
 
 “Oh, really?” said museum visitor Jonah Diaz. “Wow, that’s ridiculous.” 
 
 “It’s very sad and unfortunate,” said museum visitor Carrie Pozum. “I mean, this should just be a safe place to go and enjoy the art.” 
 
 The suspect apparently cut his hand on the broken bottle, leaving a trail of blood through two galleries. Police followed the trail out the building, but were unable to find the suspect. 
 
 The victim was treated at a hospital for a cut to his head. 
 
 “It’s just terrible that that would have happened to somebody who’s just here doing their job,” said museum visitor Jenny McArdle, 
 
 The suspect is described by police as a white male, 20 to 25 years old, standing 5 feet 8 inches tall and weighing about 150 pounds. 
 
 Late Monday afternoon, the Met Museum released a statement reading: “The safety of our staff and visitors is our number one priority. We are grateful for the professionalism of our security team, and are working in coordination with the NYPD on this incident. 
 
 Anyone with information in regards to this incident is asked to call the NYPD’s Crime Stoppers Hotline at 1-800-577-TIPS (8477) or for Spanish, 1-888-57-PISTA (74782). The public can also submit their tips by logging onto the Crime Stoppers website or by texting their tips to 274637 (CRIMES) then enter TIP577. ||||| Dana Schutz’s depiction of the mutilated body of a 14-year-old African American boy has been accused of using black death as racialized ‘spectacle’ 
 
 A painting included in this year’s Whitney Biennial in New York is being protested for perceived racial insensitivity. 
 
 Open Casket by American painter Dana Schutz depicts the mutilated corpse of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old black boy murdered in 1955 after it was falsely claimed he flirted with a white woman. 
 
 Whitney Biennial 2017: Trump's shadow looms over politically charged show Read more 
 
 “Many in the black art community are upset by the work,” says Parker Bright, who has been spurred to picket the painting daily since the exhibition opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art on Friday. Standing, barring museum visitors’ view of the work for up to four hours a day, Bright wears a T-shirt on to which he has written “No lynch mob” on the front, and “Black death spectacle” on the back. “I wanted to confront people with a living, breathing black body.” 
 
 Bright’s complaint is echoed on social media, with one Twitter user posting that Schutz was a “white woman profiting off of black murder caused by a white woman”. 
 
 Hannah Black, an artist who has previously taken part in a residency at the Whitney, has gone so far as to claim the painting should be destroyed. Black adds in an open letter: “The subject matter is not Schutz’s; white free speech and white creative freedom have been founded on the constraint of others, and are not natural rights.” 
 
 Schutz countered in an emailed statement: “I don’t know what it is like to be black in America, but I do know what it is like to be a mother. Emmett was Mamie Till’s only son. The thought of anything happening to your child is beyond comprehension.” 
 
 Emmet Till was visiting family in Money, Mississippi when it was alleged he grabbed shopkeeper Carolyn Bryant, made sexual comments and whistled at her. On hearing of the incident, Bryant’s husband, Roy, together with his half-brother, JW Milam, kidnapped Till, killed the boy and left his body by the side of the Tallahatchie river. Roy Bryant and Milam were acquitted by an all-white jury. In January, Carolyn Bryant, now 72, admitted she had made up much of her testimony. 
 
 Till’s mother had insisted on an open casket to demonstrate the extent of the injuries that befell her son. Schutz’s painting is drawn from photographs of this. 
 
 Schutz has won critical acclaim for her semi-abstract, lyrical works. While her paintings, which have fetched up to $482,500 at auction, are not typically as overtly political as Open Casket, previous subjects include Michael Jackson’s autopsy and the 2014 altercation between Solange Knowles and Jay Z. 
 
 Woman at center of Emmett Till case tells author she fabricated testimony Read more 
 
 Christopher Y Lew, one of the curators of the exhibition at the Whitney notes that Shultz made the work in response to the number of African Americans killed in by US police in recent years. 
 
 “It comes at such a polarized time in America,” Mia Locks, Lew’s co-curator, said when asked on the issue of whether Till’s murder was an appropriate subject for a white artist. “Groups are getting caught up in their own bubbles, speaking only to each other. 
 
 “We were aware that this was sensitive work on some level. The horrific murder of Till is something we all have to confront, regardless of race.” 
 
 “It is easy for artists to self-censor” Schutz said. “To convince yourself to not make something before you even try. There were many reasons why I could not, should not, make this painting … (but) art can be a space for empathy, a vehicle for connection.” 
 
 The artist added that the work will not be for sale. 
 
 This is not the first time the Whitney Biennial has been embroiled in a row over racially insensitive work. The YAMS collective, a group of musicians, poets, actors, writers and artists, pulled their participation in 2014 in response to the inclusion of artist Joe Scanlon’s work. Scanlon, who is white, makes work under the pseudonym “Donelle Woolford”, a black woman. 
 
 Black warns in her open letter that the concerns of black artists on Schutz’s painting will be “derided by many white and white-affiliated critics as trivial and naive”.
– As one New York City institution wrestles with high-profile molestation accusations, another finds itself the target of outcry over the "sexualization" of a young girl—in a painting. The Metropolitan Museum of Art says it will not take down the 1938 painting "Thérèse Dreaming" by the French artist Balthus, though 7,000 people have asked that it do so via the petition site care2. The petition started by Mia Merrill describes the work as "an evocative portrait of a prepubescent girl relaxing on a chair with her legs up and underwear exposed," and calls it "disturbing" that the museum would knowingly display such a sexualized image in our "current climate." As for the knowingly part, she notes that the Met paired a 2013 exhibit of Balthus' work with a sign explaining some of the pieces could be "disturbing" to viewers. A 2013 Guardian article indicates "Thérèse Dreaming" was part of that exhibit. Merrill writes that "if the Met had the wherewithal to reference the disturbing nature of Balthus, they understand the implications of displaying his art." The New York Post reports the museum on Sunday said the painting would remain hanging, with a rep saying, "Moments such as this provide an opportunity for conversation." The museum's description of the piece notes that Thérèse Blanchard, Balthus' neighbor in Paris, was 12 or 13 when she was painted. The Paris Review reports the late Balthus was asked about the "provocative poses" he painted young girls in, and replied, "It is how they sit." In his review of the 2013 exhibition for the New Yorker, Peter Schjeldahl had this to say: "I kept thinking of a line by Oscar Wilde: 'A bad man is the sort of man who admires innocence.'" (A US couple has been forced to give up their $1.75 million painting.)