Wherever Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ (1987) goes, howls of protest usually follow. In 2011, French Catholic fundamentalists vandalised the photograph, which shows a plastic crucifix in a glass of the artist’s urine, in an exhibition at the Collection Lambert in Avignon. But this has not stopped Michel Draguet, the director-general of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, from making plans to stage a retrospective of Serrano’s works at the museum in Brussels early next year. “Maybe we will not show Piss Christ because [the Lambert case] is still in the French courts. If the case is closed, it will be shown,” he says. Draguet says that the show (18 March-21 August 2016) will include six other examples of defaced works.
