Dwight and Ann Althouse (among many others) are reporting on the vandalizing of a photographic print of Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ in France. (I’m not going to go into a history of the piece itself, whose heyday of controversy was before most of today’s college seniors were born; I suspect my readers can Google as well as anyone.) The attackers have not been apprehended, but there has been much speculation that they were disgruntled Catholics, though the proof of that is entirely conjectural. Assuming this is true (and not, as Althouse suggests, an inside job), this is like a perfect storm of fail for the attackers:
Destroying other people’s property is wrong. Even if you disagree with them. Even if they’re asshats. (I have no idea if Serrano is an asshat or merely an attention whore.) These are the tactics of left-wingers and jihadists, not thinking members of western democracies.
Andres Serrano is known for Piss Christ, and…um, hold on…let me think…uh, prints of Piss Christ. The guy had his 15 minutes of fame and slipped back into well-deserved obscurity, until you morons came along and gave him another 15 minutes. You’re doing it wrong.
Despite Instapundit’s observation that Christians are just following the examples of Muslims in suppressing blasphemous art, this attack will not actually achieve that end. This is possibly the best possible thing you could do for Serrano’s career. Indeed, I suspect legions of starving left-wing artists all across America have leapt from the futons in their parents’ basements at the news to boldly start working on art offensive to Christians, or at least fill out grant proposals for same. Destroying such art doesn’t intimidate anyone. No, as Islamists have proven again and again, you have to kill people to intimidate others into silence. Not that you should do that, and I’m in favor of the death penalty for killing your fellow countrymen for reasons of political ideology. Then again, this took place in Europe, where they’ve abolished the death penalty. Stabbing a blasphemous artist to death on the rue de martyrs would get you three hots and a cot for life…or until the state has to empty the prisons because they’re out of money.
So whoever did was either a very stupid religious believer, or a very smart guerrilla marketer…
Tags: Andres Serrano, art, France, Islam, Piss Christ, religion
This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 19th, 2011 at 5:51 PM and is filed under Jihad. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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