The Most Controversial Art Exhibitions and Installations of All Time

In our opinion, art that causes some kind of stir is some of the best—not everything should just be looked at for pleasure. If a work of art can cause audiences to question their roles in life, the role of art, or the state of the world, that could be considered a success. Of course, different works and exhibitions cause stirs for different reasons: audacity of presentation, obscenity, risqué business, perceived blasphemy… whatever it is, it’s been a function of art throughout history to break with norms. We’ve collected some of the best and most contentious art shows that ever opened. Here are The Most Controversial Art Exhibitions and Installations of All Time.

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Location: Futura Gallery, Prague, Czech Republic
Date: 2003

Sculptor David Černý is known for creating public works that are strange and lurid. But in 2003, on the occasion of the first exhibition organized by the gallery Futura, he debuted Brownnosing, a large-scale installation. It featured the bottom half of humans, bent forward, with videos of politician Václav Klaus and the artist Milan Knížák feeding each other. This was accompanied by the Queen song "We Are The Champions" and was visible only by climbing a ladder and placing one's head through the ass-end of the sculptures.

Location: New York
Date: 1989

Gran Fury is a collective of activists who fight against governments and social bodies that make people with AIDS "invisible." By trying to reshape a public consciousness of the virus, they hope to reach an audience not usually privy to these issues, helping bring an end to the disease. In 1989, they were hired to create a series of ads for a public campaign on AIDS awareness. They used the opportunity to create "Kissing Doesn't Kill," with the appended tagline "Greed and Indifference Do." It depicted same-sex and interracial couples kissing and was met with disdain from a number of public institutions.

Location: Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC
Date: 2012

"According to What?" was the internationally acclaimed Chinese artist Ai Weiwei's first survey in North America, a combination of both old and new work. It was controversial for two reasons: the content of the work, which included defaced Chinese artifacts, as well as Weiwei's own absence from the show's opening—the Chinese government banned him from leaving the country.

Location: Guggenheim Museum, New York
Date: November 2011 - January 2012

Maurizio Cattelan has been hailed as a provocateur for years, doing things like stealing an entire artist's show from a gallery and trying to present the work as his own, with the title "Another Fucking Readymade." But it was his Guggenheim retrospective called "All" that caused the biggest stir. Instead of presenting a show in a traditional manner, he hung his work from the ceiling on platforms. The New York Times wrote of the show: "one of the strangest, most audacious exhibitions in its half-century history, suspending several thousand pounds'—and many tens of millions of dollars'—worth of high-end, internationally collected art from cables attached to a heavy-duty aluminum truss installed almost 90 feet in the air under the museum's glass dome." Among the pieces was Cattelan's most contentious work, depicting a wax sculpture of Pope John Paul II being hit be a meteorite, called La Nona Ora.

Location: Jacob Javits Federal Building, New York
Date: 1981 - 1989

Minimalist sculptor Richard Serra caused a federal stir with his massive steel monolith called Tilted Arc. The piece, commissioned by the federal government, cut the Foley Federal Plaza in front of the Jacob Javits Federal Building in Manhattan in half. More than 1300 people who worked in the complex signed a petition for its removal, citing disruption to their daily lives—they now had to walk around the massive 120-foot bisector. What developed was one of the most notorious trials in the history of art law, where it was finally deemed that the work should be removed.

Location: Códice Gallery, Managua, Nicaragua
Date: 2007

For this exhibition, Guillermo Vargas tied an emaciated dog to a wall in the Codice Gallery in Nicaragua. On the wall behind the dog were the words "You Are What You Read," spelled out with dog food. It was reported the dog died after the exhibition as a result of starvation. The artist argued that no one who saw the piece intervened by feeding the dog.

Location: London
Date: 2001

Installation artist Michael Landy spent two weeks destroying all of his worldly possessions in an abandoned London shop on Oxford Street. He smashed 7,006 items, including just mundane items of living, but extending to original works by Damien Hirst. At the end of the exhibition, all that remained were bags of garbage, which were not displayed or sold. Landy received no money directly for the piece, and was left with absolutely nothing as a result. He made very little art for a year after this.

Location: Miami
Date: 1980 - 1983

The public installation artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude stirred up a massive controversy in 1983 when they used 6.5 million square feet of pink polypropylene to surround eleven islands in Biscayne Bay. Environmentalists were furious at the prospect, and a federal trial came to a head just months before the installation.

Location: First shown at the South London Gallery, London
Date: 1995 - 2004

One of the most derided and variously received works of the 1990s, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 was controversial because of its sexual subject matter, although, as the artist explained, that was only part of the concept of the piece. "Some I'd had a shag with in bed or against a wall. Some I had just slept with, like my grandma," the artist said. "I used to lay in her bed and hold her hand. We used to listen to the radio together and nod off to sleep. You don't do that with someone you don't love and don't care about." When the piece was destroyed in a warehouse fire in 2004, the public reaction was of mockery rather than sympathy.

Location: Currently held by SFMoMA
Date: 1953

In the 1950s, the conceptual artist Robert Rauschenberg was exploring the very definition of art. Included in this exploration was an examination of whether or not a work of art could be created by removing marks from a page, rather than generating marks. He began with his own drawings, but decided for the work to be successful it would have to be of a drawing that was of monumental worth. For this, he went to the studio of the greatest living painter he knew, the abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning. After many drinks of Jack Daniels and heavy persuasion, de Kooning gave Rauschenberg a heavily worked-on painting that took him a full month to erase. The act was denounced as an abomination and criminal by many critics, as well as a destruction of property.

Location: Royal Academy of Art, London / Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin / The Brooklyn Museum, New York
Date: 1997

A collection of some of the most controversial works of the 1990s, "Sensation" brought together works by Damien Hirst (his shark suspended in formaldehyde), Marc Quinn (a self-portrait made from his own blood), Sarah Lucas (sexually explicit images), and Marcus Hindley (a depiction of serial killer Myra Hindley made up of the handprints of children). It was first shown at the Royal Academy of Art in London, where the following disclaimer was posted near the door: "There will be works of art on display in the 'Sensation' exhibition which some people may find distasteful. Parents should exercise their judgment in bringing their children to the exhibition. One gallery will not be open to those under the age of 18." It generated much controversy for its strong subject matter. When it came to New York, Rudolph Giuliani instigated a lawsuit to evict The Brooklyn Museum. It was largely influenced by the Catholic Defense League, over anger that a panting by Chris Ofili of the Virgin Mary contained feces in its materials.

Location: Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Ohio
Date: 1988

There was a massive scandal in 1990, the year following the death of the widely celebrated photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. In a retrospective of his highly homoerotic work at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, seven of the 175 photographs were considered un-viewable. As a result, the museum was sued for obscenity, the first time in the history of the nation such a thing had happened. The museum was found not guilty because of First Amendment rights.

Location: Durham, England
Date: 2006

Art pieces rarely cause actual death or destruction, despite how controversial they may be. But when Maurice Agis created a site-specific installation of one of his vivid and colorful Dreamspace V, the unthinkable occurred and two people died. The large, interactive, walk-through sculpture tore free of its moorings and flew into the air with 30 people inside of it. The artist witnessed the accident and vowed to never create works on that scale again.

Location: Reina Sofía, Madrid
Date: 1937

Picasso's huge mural depicting the 1937 massacre of a Basque village, this painting is controversial for a number of reasons. As a decry against fascism, it's become known as "a picture of all bombed cities." Its home has been the largest point of contention because Picasso did not want it displayed in Spain until justice had been restored there. When it was on display at MoMA in 1967, 400 artists signed a petition directed at Picasso to have the painting removed from the U.S., citing the atrocities of the Vietnam War. In 1974, a young artist named Tony Shafrazi spray painted the words "Kill Lies All" on the canvas. In 2003, a tapestry version of the piece was covered up at the United Nations. Now it is permanently housed in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Spain.

Location: A billboard near the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC
Date: 1988

Kool Moe Dee's lyrics inspired the title of this piece by David Hammons, a work that was meant to comment on the widening gap between civil rights leaders and the hip-hop generation. Featuring a portrait of Jesse Jackson with white skin, bleached hair, and blue eyes, the mural was critical of black leaders' assimilating into the white political climate. It was initially on a public billboard near the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, but was later moved inside after a group of young black people attacked it with sledgehammers.

Location: Online
Date: 2013

Igniting a fire about censorship practices online, Los Intocables (The Untouchables) by Erik Ravelo dealt with how children are exploited in different ways throughout the world. "The children are crucified," we wrote about the project earlier this year, "in a sense, to each of their representative villains, their faces blurred, indicating a loss of identity. While the aggressors in the photos are against the wall in an almost criminal way, leaving their backs to the children indicates a kind of disregard." Facebook deemed the material too shocking and removed it from the website. A petition was started to allow the artist to display the work on Facebook.

Location: Society of Independent Artists, New York
Date: 1917

In a major landmark move of 20th century art, Marcel Duchamp submitted a rotated urinal to the exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in 1917. The piece, entitled Fountain was rejected, itself causing a scandal as the rules of the exhibition stated that anyone who paid the required fee would be accepted. The piece caused uproar about what is and what isn't art and refocused art's purpose from physical practice to intellectual interpretation. Since Fountain's debut many artists have claimed triumph by urinating in the piece, causing further scandal around the piece.

Location: Arts Factory, Las Vegas

Date: May, 2011

Before the "killer clown" called John Wayne Gacy was put to death in 1996, he produced a number of paintings from his jail cell. His attorney auctioned off most of this work, and some of it burned in a public bonfire. When Westley Myles of the Arts Factory in Las Vegas announced a benefit sale of the remaining pieces, leaders of the National Center for Victims of Crime attacked the planned charity show that would benefit their own charity. In May 2011, the exhibition went on display at Myles' gallery, creating a conversation about the binary of artist morality and the responsibility to the victims of Gacy's crimes.

Location: Most recently at the Edward Tyler Nahem Gallery, New York
Date: 1989 - 2012

Andres Serrano received death threats and hate mail for years following the unveiling of his photograph Piss Christ. It was a photograph of a small plastic crucifix, submerged in a jar of Serrano's urine. The work ignited a debate about public arts funding because Serrano received more than $15,000 from the taxpayer-funded National Endowment for the Arts. Many Christians took offense to the piece. "At the time I made Piss Christ, I wasn't trying to get anything across," Serrano explained to the Guardian in 2012. "In hindsight, I'd say Piss Christ is a reflection of my work, not only as an artist, but as a Christian." When the piece was shown in 2011, it was vandalized "beyond repair" by a group of Christian fundamentalists armed with hammers.

Location: Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Date: March, 1989

A young artist named "Dread" Scott Tyler created a whirlwind of controversy with his piece, What is the proper way to display a U.S. flag? Consisting of a photomontage of Korean students burning the flag, a guestbook, and an American flag on the floor, the piece was criticized when it debuted at the Art Institute of Chicago for being disrespectful to the flag. Thousands of people protested, and the Art Institute's funding was cut dramatically the following year. President Bush even made comment on the piece, calling it disgraceful. The entire U.S. Congress denounced the artwork as well, moving to pass further legislation to protect the flag. "I am a German girl," wrote one visitor to the piece in the guestbook. "If we Germans would admire our flag as you all do, we would be called Nazis again...I think you do have too much trouble about this flag"