Monday Morning Art Corner
You may or may not recognize the two pieces of art reproduced above. If you don't know what they are, please look at them and try to respond to the work alone. Even if you know what they are, try to pretend you're looking at them for the first time. Feel free to leave a comment on how you react.
I'm hardly an art critic, but my captions are what I would think after first seeing these pieces, with no background knowledge.
Both have been denounced by mayors, senators and columnists across the country--most of whom hadn't actually seen them. (And the controversy doesn't stop at our shores. For example, at the National Gallery of Australia, Dr. Brian Kennedy canceled an entire exhibit that featured the first painting.)
The first work is the "dung-smeared" Holy Virgin Mary by Chris Ofili (1996). The second is the even more controversial Piss Christ by Andres Serrano (1989), where a cross was submerged in urine (and blood). Both worked were widely condemned when they debuted, and have since become symbols of the art world's contempt for religious and Christian sensibility. The controversy has never really died down--it doesn't take much for opponents to mention these betes noirs. For example, in an otherwise reasonable column by Charles Krauthammer on the treatment of the Koran at Gitmo, he can't help but raise the spectre of these two works.
That's why I decided to show these pieces. I doubt if they can be understood unseen. I don't see two cheap and easy attacks on Christianity--if anything, they strike me as deeply religious work. (Not that offensive art shouldn't be protected, just that it's time for conservatives to stop using them as examples of attacks.)
I could try to put the artwork in context--Ofili, of African heritage, regularly uses elephant dung in his work, that sort of thing--but it's probably better to let the works speak for themselves. Go ahead and read more about them if you wish, but for now, just seeing them should be enough.
Some societies are not as tolerant as ours. We should celebrate such tolerance, not bemoan that things have gone too far.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:31 AM
5 Comments:
The tolerance is fine, LAGuy. Defend to the death your right to spray it and all.
The problems, however, are two. Foremost, it's the contempt with which the "art world" represented by these artists and their supporters holds for religion and the religious, not to mention conservative political and social beliefs. Contempt, like affinity, tends to be mutual.
Secondly, people resent their government doing this at all, which is to say, they resent being forced to pay for it.
Is it good for people to be poked in the eye? Maybe. But you can hardly be surprised if they're mad about it.
Your points are interesting, and while I generally do agree with free speech, do we really have to pay for someone else's hateful and contemptuous expression?
I especially question any artist who feels the need to use unsanitary media such as feces and urine in his or her work, regardless of the message that he or she is trying to convey.
The irony in all this is that on this site one cannot tell what substances are used to create these pieces of art, precisely because one cannot see the works face to face.
You both bring up government funding which I consider a separate issue. I think people would still be angry at this art regardless of whose paying for it.
I don't know much about Serrano, but from his Wikipedia entry it's very hard to imagine that "Piss Christ" was meant as a work of reverence:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andres_Serrano
LAGuy, I do agree that government funding is a separate issue. Obviously I know that you oppose gov't funding for this crap. I also agree that people would still be offended by this, even if it wasn't being paid for by us. But I don't believe they'd be anywhere near as offended if it were not publicly funded and if it were not in a public museum.
I think the museum thinks this counds as "balance" -- they have beautiful Bibles, so they need anti-Christian art too. This is absurd. The beautiful Bibles exist because of a time in the past where a vibrant culture created them, and they were central to that culture. Today there is a vibrant non-religious culture in the West: but dung-smeared icons of religions they disagree with are not an integral part of this culture. I would think that non-Christians would be more upset about this art than Christians. After all, the museum is implying that these represent the views of non-Christians.
There seems to be some close-mindedness here. Rather than actually trying to consider these pieces as works of art, people are just assuming they're attacks. Why? As far as I can tell, it's because these works of art are not done in a conventional manner from about 200 years ago.
These guys aren't illustrating Bibles (though maybe they should), they're making statements. It's not their fault if people don't want to try to understand.
Look at the first painting. It's quite nice. And it's smeared with paint, but definitely not smeared with dung, as enemies claim. They can at least get their facts straight.
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