Artist, writer, and art professor at the University of Florida Coco Fusco responded by writing: "I find it alarming and entirely wrongheaded to call for the censorship and destruction of an artwork, no matter what its content is or who made it." She contextualized the painting within a history of anti-racist art made by white artists dating back to the 19th-century abolitionist movement. In weighing in on the discussion, Roberta Smith cited examples of "earlier works of art by those who crossed ethnic lines in their depiction of social trauma." Smith also positioned "Open Casket" in relation to other paintings Schutz has made of bodies that have endured suffering and violence. This includes "Presentation" (2005), a work based on dead American soldiers being returned home from war in Iraq and Afghanistan and their invisibility in the media due to a military ban on photographing them.