Maybe they thought there'd be food at the opening

The Secret Service takes an interest in dissident art.

Secret Service at Art Show

Secret Service agents visited a new exhibition of politically infused art at Columbia College in Chicago, where they asked for the artists' names and phone numbers and photographed some works, The Chicago Sun-Times reported yesterday. The show, "Axis of Evil, the Secret History of Sin," running through May at the college's Glass Curtain Gallery, presents works by 47 artists from 11 countries showing political and religious leaders on fake postage stamps. "Patriot Act" is a series of mock 37-cent stamps depicting President Bush with a gun pointed at his head. "Citizen John Ashcroft" assembles the face of the former attorney general from images of naked bodies at Abu Ghraib, the prison in Iraq. The Sun-Times reported that a Secret Service spokesman, Brandon Bridgeforth, said he could not discuss specifics of the visit, which took place last week shortly before the show opened. "We're just looking into it," he said.

We've long known the Secret Service has been drafted in the effort to keep protesters far away from George W. Bush during campaign events (even when his stumping is being paid for by taxpayers), but now they're policing art shows?

I'm assuming they've equated some of the work as expressing a "threat" to the preznit, though the spokeman does not say. Really now. This was government intimidation against those who excercise their right to free expression, pure and simple.

UPDATE: Here's the full story from the Chicago Sun-Times.