That’s What I’m Talking About
Avram I think mentioned that he had missed the “Piss Christ” == “Quran Desecration” meme current in the apologiasphere, so, some links. The most prominent appearance seems to be Charles Krauthammer:
Even greater hypocrisy is to be found here at home. Civil libertarians, who have been dogged in making sure that FBI-collected Guantanamo allegations are released to the world, seem exquisitely sensitive to mistreatment of the Koran. A rather selective scrupulousness. When an American puts a crucifix in a jar of urine and places it in a museum, civil libertarians rise immediately to defend it as free speech.
This is not, as we have noted, even factually accurate. Andres Serrano did not place a jar of urine containing a crucifix in a museum.
I want to quote Krauthammer’s next passage:
And when someone makes a painting of the Virgin Mary, smears it with elephant dung and adorns it with porn, not only is that free speech, it is art — deserving of taxpayer funding and an ACLU brief supporting the Brooklyn Museum when the mayor freezes its taxpayer subsidy.
I completely disagree with the ACLU that any artwork deserves taxpayer funding. As to the painting itself, Chris Ofili’s Holy Virgin Mary, a net-friendly reproduction does nothing for me, though I find the figure-work itself pleasant enough. One critic, Olu Oguibe, essentially calls Ofili a fraud. (Warning: Annoying soundtrack.)
Anyone care to make the case for the painting? Oddly, I could envision a defense along the “sacred amid the profane” guidelines that I made for Piss Christ. But I just don’t find it as effective a work, even assuming that that is its goal. The achievement of Piss Christ is that the photography makes even the profane element – the cow’s-blood-and-urine broth – beautiful, and since the crucifix radiates light (really, it reflects it, but such are the tricks of the eye) it appears that it is the image of Christ itself that transforms its surroundings. Contrariwise, Holy Virgin Mary merely looks like a cartoon pregnant woman with butts and boobs taped to it.
I confess to not being able to tell where the cow dung is.
UPDATE: Almost forgot: “Piss Christ”/Quran-peeing memery from Technorati beta and Feedster. Another stake through theheart of the now-dead belief that ressentiment is exclusively a malady of the left.
Comment by sean —
June 10, 2005 @ 10:13 pm
So because you, a obscure man with rather unusual political beliefs, don’t believe in taxpayer funded art, Charles Krauthammer isn’t allowed to criticize the ACLU? You’ve lost me.
Comment by Avram —
June 10, 2005 @ 10:25 pm
Ofili’s Virgin Mary didn’t do much for me, and yes, I have seen the actual painting/collage. (I lived a block from the Brooklyn Museum at the time of the Sensation exhibit. I miss the place.) On an intellectual level, I can appreciate it thinking of it as an artifact from a parallel timeline in which Christianity caught on in Africa instead of Europe. On an emotional and aesthetic level, meh. It doesn’t display much attention to rendering, light, composition, or any of the other traditional artistic virtues.
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Oh, here’s a quick (ahem) sniff test for telling whether a critic of Ofili’s work has even a passing familiarity with it: If they describe the work as “spattered” or “smeared” with dung, they don’t. Ofili rolls balls of elephant dung, sterilizes them, coats them with resin, and either attaches them to the surfaces of the paintings, or to the lower edges of the frames like feet. In the case of The Holy Virgin Mary, that black ball near the figure’s right shoulder (to the viewer’s left) is such a ball; you can see it casting a shadow to the left.
Comment by Gary Farber —
June 10, 2005 @ 10:26 pm
“…so, some links.”
Ah, those new-fangled invisible type links.
Not that you need them for me; I’ve seen people doing the Koran-desecration/Piss Christ talking point all over the blogosphere for weeks. Clearly Avram isn’t keeping up with his quota of reading true patriots.
Comment by Gary Farber —
June 10, 2005 @ 10:28 pm
Hey, that addendum wasn’t there when I wrote the above. Fiend.
“…the now-dead belief that ressentiment is exclusively a malady of the left.”
In my dreams.
Comment by Gary Farber —
June 10, 2005 @ 10:31 pm
Almost missed this: “I completely disagree with the ACLU that any artwork deserves taxpayer funding.”
Um, could you cite an ACLU paper or press release or something to educate those of us who have missed the ACLU declaring that their position is that goverment funding of art is mandatory, perhaps, please? (I’m pretty sure that arguing that once funding is given, the First Amendment applies, is not that position.)
Comment by Avram —
June 10, 2005 @ 10:34 pm
Sean, Charles Krauthammer can criticize whoever the fuck he wants. And anyone who fucking wants to can criticize Krauthammer. Ain’t life grand?
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And if Krauthammer’s going to write a piece full of lies, errors, and faulty logic, well, that’s gonna attract criticism.
Comment by Hal —
June 10, 2005 @ 10:47 pm
That was the point I was going to make as well. From the ACLU site, I find their press release, but unfortunately your well-formed check for comments won’t let me post the URL (which should be accepted).
Comment by Avram —
June 10, 2005 @ 10:48 pm
Also note the way that Krauthammer blurs the distinction between funding a particular work of art and funding a museum.
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Krauthammer isn’t making the libertarian claim that all public funding to all art museums should be cut off. Instead, he seems to be supporting Giuliani’s attempt to cut off public funding to only one particular museum based solely on perceived criticism of his religion. Any libertarians think that’s defenisible? (I’m pretty sure the funding would have just been spent on something else instead, most likely other museums, so it’s not like there would have been a net tax savings or reduction in art funding.)
Comment by Avram —
June 10, 2005 @ 10:51 pm
Oops, I see it was more than just one museum. Still, on religious grounds, and with the mayor as the arbiter of what’s offensive.
Comment by Jim Henley —
June 11, 2005 @ 12:20 am
No, with my civil libertarian hat on, I agree that it is Bad and Wrong for the government to preferentially discriminate in its funding of the arts based on the message politicians think or pretend to think that art conveys. But what does anyone EXPECT to happen? Public funding is inevitably political. Publically funded art will inevitably become a political football. You’ll get unedifying controversy tending toward preemptive blandness over time.
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All hot-button funding issues aside, I’d still love to hear from anybody else on the virtues or lack thereof of the painting in question. Thanks very much, Avram, for your contribution toward that end.
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Sean, you’re a Piss Christ admirer. What do you think of HVM? Like it? Hate it? Left feeling meh? Also, no, Krauthammer isn’t allowed to criticize shit unless I tell him.
Comment by Jon H —
June 11, 2005 @ 4:37 am
Jim.
I agree with you about the aesthetics of piss christ and poo mary.
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Ofilli doesn’t really do anything for me. Wadded balls of meticulously prepared poo seem, I dunno, more like an expression of a poo fixation, rather than a carefully considered medium chosen to produce a given image. They seem like they’re extra.
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As far as I’m aware, Ofili is kinda known as ‘the dung guy’, as it’s a theme throughout his work. It’s almost like the other parts of the image are secondary, so long as he works in some poop. (I could be lacking in information, however.)
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Serrano, as far as I know, has not built a reputation as a guy who works urine into all his work. He’s a photographer, not a pee fetishist.
Comment by Gene Callahan —
June 11, 2005 @ 12:36 pm
Jim, isn’t a big difference here between an artist creating a work that may be offensive and a government employee deliberately insulting a billion people with whom we desperately need good relations?
Sean, I have a feeling your lost much of the time.
Comment by Diana —
June 11, 2005 @ 2:28 pm
Uh, guys, I don’t think you are dealing with the true stupidity of the Krauthammer article, which is to compare willful desecretion of someone’s scripture, in a prison, to invoke a certain reaction, (allegedly as a weapon of a just* war, no less) with the creation of provocative art. In the latter case the consumer is only hurt with his or her consent. In the case of neocons, this happens rather a lot.
BTW as an aside I agree with “Godless Capitalist” who used to contributed to Gene Expression gnxp.com that we’ll know we’ve won the war on
terror when Muslims produce a “Piss Muhammad.”
*in Krauthammer’s eyes
Comment by Jim Henley —
June 11, 2005 @ 4:55 pm
Diana and Gene: Of course. That point has been well and concisely made elsewhere, though. And it’s probably the most important failure, but not the only one. And it got me interested in the neocon/theocon reaction to art itself. Like, in many cases, making statements about a work you haven’t even seen. (e.g. HVM, which I suspect very few of its critics have laid eyes on. Instead, they trust blind reports from the, well, Emm Ess Emm!)
Comment by matthew hogan —
June 12, 2005 @ 10:39 am
Are we really debating whether or not artwork called Piss Christ is intentionally offensive or rather beautiful, spiritual, and churchworthy because of the light/color-enhancing effects of the fluid used?
It’s called PISS CHRIST, for, um, Christ sakes! I don’t care if it gives off Virgin Mary bubbles to the tune of “Dies Irae”. How far do you have to look? How deep do you have to be?
Comment by Jim Henley —
June 12, 2005 @ 10:55 am
Oh. Well that’s that then.
Comment by Sven —
June 12, 2005 @ 12:16 pm
This is interesting. Check out the photo credit in the NYT Magazine’s cover story on torture.
Comment by Gary Farber —
June 12, 2005 @ 12:18 pm
If only da Vinci had entitled Mona Lisa “Skanky Grinning Crack Whore,” we’d have no need to think about it further. His genius is ever deeper than realized.
Comment by Brian O\'Connell —
June 12, 2005 @ 4:07 pm
The bottom line on these controversies is that the media took Muslim complaints on alleged Koran-abuse seriously but did not take Christian complaints seriously at all with regard to the “abuse” of Christian iconography.
And where do the murder of Theo van Gogh or the fatwah against Salman Rushdie fit into this? It seems as if the media elite only respects religions that might kill them. We won’t see Piss Mohammed because that artist knows he’d be murdered.
To some degree, the perception that Christians are Western and largely abide by Western rules of free expression exposes them to more criticism than Muslims will receive any time soon. Mocking Christianity won’t get you killed.
Comment by Avram —
June 12, 2005 @ 9:19 pm
What exactly do you mean by “took seriously”, Brian?
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Also, what do you mean by “media elite”?
Comment by Jim Henley —
June 12, 2005 @ 10:15 pm
Brian, how old were you when the “NEA Four” controversy happened?
Comment by Brian O\\\'Connell —
June 12, 2005 @ 10:52 pm
By “took seriously”, I mean reported the complaints without questioning the complainers’ motives or the genuineness of the complaints. There’s a tone of “what’s really behind these complaints” when Christians make trouble for art, as if the complaints cannot be taken at face value. This is rather unlike how the Muslim complaints were received. (Not that I advocate taking religious claims at face value.)
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By “media elite”, I mean the New York Times and the like.
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Interesting question, Jim. I was in high school and followed the controversey quite closely (in the NYT as it happens- I was in NYC at the time). I was a lefty for the most part, but even so thought there was something wrong with the left’s position.
Comment by Avram —
June 12, 2005 @ 11:38 pm
“When Christians make trouble for art”? Which Christians do you mean? Christians like church-going Catholic Chris Ofili, who created The Holy Virgin Mary, or Christians like Catholic mayor Rudy Giuliani, who blew his stack over it?
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By tone, are you referring to the newspaper articles that argued that Ofili was working out of a desire to generate controversy that would lead to fame, or the ones that said Giuliani was just trying to appeal to conservatives in upstate New York as prepration for his Senate bid?
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I’ve noticed that these controversies are rarely Christians-vs-secularists; they tend to be right-wing-Christians-vs-moderate-or-leftist-Christians. The true secularists generally don’t find strong meaning in religious symbols.
Comment by Brian O\'Connell —
June 13, 2005 @ 2:17 pm
The Christians I’m referring to are the ones in the middle who don’t complain very loudly. I disagree that true secularists don’t find strong meaning in religious symbols- they’re aware of the strong symbolic meaning of desecrating them. That’s one of the attractions.
Comment by Avram —
June 13, 2005 @ 3:05 pm
Um, could you clarify, Brian? In message 22 you said “There’s a tone of ‘what’s really behind these complaints’ when Christians make trouble for art”, but now you’re saying you’re talking about Christians “who don’t complain very loudly”. So, who exactly are these Christians who make trouble for art but don’t complain loudly?
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And could you provide examples of secular artists who desecrate religious symbols leading to big controversies? Chris Ofili isn’t a secularist, he’s a Catholic. Andres Serrano was raised Catholic, and now seems to be some kind of fuzzy-edged believer who says he is “drawn to Christ but [has] real problems with the Catholic Church”, which doesn’t sound secular to me.