Artist Andres Serrano is no stranger to controversy, with thousands of postings on various social platforms mostly related to his infamous Piss Christ photograph. This latest batch of materials released by the House Oversight Committee — AKA the Epstein documents, another swamp of moral sludge — drops Serrano back into frame, not because of a new body of work or some grand institutional endorsement, but because he once exchanged emails with the notorious sex predator Jeffrey Epstein about Trump and, in passing, art, politics, the usual fallout zone.
The correspondence is dated October 10, 2016. The Access Hollywood tape had been released, candidates were shouting across cable news, and Serrano wrote to Epstein that he was prepared to vote against Trump “for all the right reasons,” but now felt so repulsed by the wave of selective outrage that he was tempted to cast what he called a “sympathy vote.”
(On Oct 10, 2016, at 4:19 PM, Jeffrey E. jeevacation@gmail.com wrote:
No good choice. How are u
On Mon, Oct 10, 2016, at 4:09 PM, Andres Serrano [REDACTED] wrote:
Jeffrey,
I was prepared to vote against Trump for all the right reasons, but I’m so disgusted by the outrage over “grab them by the pussy” that I may give him my sympathy vote.
I’m sure Bill C said things, too.
Andres)
Serrano had just stepped off a plane from Ireland, fresh from opening Torture, a show heavy with hooded bodies, institutional theatre, and moral rot. In the email, he even attached a picture of himself beside one of the works: a hooded figure, photographed like evidence. Serrano has always known how to turn even commonplace documentation into something theatrical, slightly cruel, and impossible to forget.
By now, everyone is familiar with the origin story: Piss Christ, 1987. A glowing crucifix drowned in his own urine, framed like an Old Master, lit like a relic. It triggered evangelical fury, congressional fury, tabloid fury. Senator Jesse Helms tried to weaponise the image as proof that art was a taxpayer scam. Serrano, raised Catholic, kept working with the materials already inside his body — blood, milk, semen, urine — and refused to behave like a villain or a martyr. He was neither. He was an artist obsessed with the membrane between devotion and disgust, and once that becomes your subject, you’re exiled from polite dinner chat forever.
So how does Epstein enter the Serrano timeline? The two men met, or at least corresponded. Serrano photographed Epstein for a portrait, which now hangs like radioactive residue over Serrano’s archive. Serrano, for context, had also photographed Trump back in 2004, adding another specimen to his long list of American mythological figures, saints, and devils photographed with the same gaze.
Serrano’s preoccupation with Trump didn’t stop there — for his 2019 exhibition, he displayed a collection of more than 1,000 pieces of Trump memorabilia under the title “The Game: All Things Trump” in Chelsea. The installation was part forensic archive, part pop-decay circus, part historical autopsy. Earlier this year, he even suggested building a “Trump Altar” as the U.S. pavilion at the Venice Biennale. When challenged over whether such a project could qualify as non-political — a requirement outlined by State Department guidelines — Serrano responded with a flat line: “I’m not political. I don’t judge, I observe.” The sentence sounds both deeply honest and strategically evasive, maybe even a little funny. Serrano has always known how to provoke while keeping his hands technically clean.
Still, provocation ages unevenly, and Serrano’s cultural fallout has not been smooth. In 2022, Grantmakers for the Arts slapped a content warning on his keynote address, stating that some viewers may find his remarks “hurtful and harmful.” It’s not difficult to see why: Serrano traffics in discomfort, but discomfort doesn’t land theatrically anymore; it becomes instant screenshot fodder, fodder for think-pieces, fodder for withdrawal of institutional trust.
Meanwhile, hidden inside this new document trove is an entirely separate thread: Epstein discussing art acquisitions, private studio visits, and even debating the provenance of Salvator Mundi with journalist Michael Wolff. At one point, he said whether the inflated sale price — $450.3 million at Christie’s — was less about art and more about geopolitical favour trading. No conclusions, just scattered theories typed like gossip.
What remains after reading all this is a quiet, awkward truth: Serrano has spent a lifetime staring into taboo, and sometimes taboo stares back wearing a human face you don’t want in your phone records. Whether that makes him complicit, naïve, fearless, reckless, or simply consistent with his own methodology — that argument is unfinished. Serrano has always worked with fluids that stain, and stains don’t wash out just because a news cycle moves on.
Photo: Courtesy Wiki Media Commons