From MyJewishLearning, The Adventures of Todd and God, Episode 1: How to Light the Hanukkah Candles.
See here for MJL editor Daniel Septimus’ response to comments on the video, including some who “have objected to God’s first Hanukkah gift to Todd: a box of cigars. While we certainly weren’t trying to assert the divine approval of tobacco products, I understand why it might make some uncomfortable.”
Septimus also assures viewers that God, even in lighting his cigar from the candles, doesn’t violate Jewish law…
Murray Zimiles, co-curator of “Gilded Lions and Jeweled Horses” at the American Folk Art Museum, is himself an artist, whose work represents a “disturbingly violent exploration of the Holocaust” and is in Lauder’s collection. [Litchfield County Times]
Ramon A. Mendoza argues “the common and academic case of the problem ‘Swastika.’” [Hi-Desert Star]
Stained glass artist Rosalind Brenner is “humbled” by a commission from the Young Israel of Kew Gardens Hills for a creation window. For those who aren’t aware, stained glass windows are quite rare at Orthodox Jewish synagogues. [East Hampton Star]
surferchickk asks on the Punta Warez vBulletin, “what are the general rules for using figural representation in Islamic art?” to which dAnCeR BaBe replies, “why do you ask such interesting questions????!!!! like they are all like historical… i wish i could answer them… srry:(”
Is unearthing Photoshop files on a dead man’s personal computer the same as grave robbing? There is life after death, at least for Jeremy Blake’s paintings. [NY Times]
Without auteurs, the “Classics would be ancient history” and “risk growing dusty and irrelevant.” [The Guardian blog]
The Tai Situpa, 54, “the monk who paints the foliage,” says of his work, “The tree becomes more lush as it grows. Similarly people do a lot of things… they should do what they want, but they need to realise why they are doing. Awareness is important.” [Express India]
“I’m not a dance-in-church person … I am a dancer, and a choreographer and a Christian. … I don’t have to broadcast that,” choreographer Stephen Wynne. [Jackson Free Press]
The Spertus Institute is opening its new $55m building, pictured, in Chicago. My review of its first show will be forthcoming. [JTA]
In Australia, Pope Benedict XVI will see Richard Campbell’s work, which “brings together traditional Aboriginal culture and the Catholic faith.” [Macleay Argus]
The “Chinese equivalent of the Sistine Chapel,” the Buddhist art of the Mogao Caves, is in danger. [Independent]
Top pilgrimage sites: Vatican–1, Mexico City’s Basilica of Guadalupe, pictured–2. [Dallas Morning News]
Alexander Zorin, amid reflecting on Christian art and the KGB: “The artist, more than anyone else, harbors doubts about the usefulness of his creative work. He often feels alone and fears that no one is listening to him.” [Spero News]
UK officials are trying to prevent Gillian Gibbons, a British teacher based in Sudan, from getting whipped for letting her class call a teddy bear “Mohammed.” [CNN, The Guardian, AllAfrica.com]
The Royal College of Art’s “RCA Secret 2007,” or ‘hunt the masterpiece,’ means some lucky or discerning eyes get a Hirst for only 40 pounds. [Christian Today]
The title says it all: “Christian Bookstores Refuse to Sell Gay Study Bible.” Added bonus: learn the term “arsenokoite.” [Christian Post]
Ayaan Hirsi Ali says Muslims “should take to the streets when, in the name of their prophet, people are beheaded and passengers are blown up - not only when drawings of Prophet Muhammad are made.” [AP, via Religion News Blog]
“Our Kind of People,” a four-day exhibit by the Church of Ireland, will explore “the success stories of people born and brought up in the area is to be held, documenting the life stories of 85 people.” [Christian Today]
From John Simon’s review of The Letters of Noël Coward in the IHT:
The astute English critic Kenneth Tynan identified Broadway humor as being chiefly of two kinds: Jewish and homosexual. He might have called it kvetch and bitch, perfectly good types, but not really British. Noël Coward, who was only one of those two things, specialized in neither type in his œuvre. He kept it all for his correspondence.
From a Reuters story on the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, exhibit, Picturing the Bible: The Earliest Christian Art: “Many Texans like to think they reside in the heart of the U.S. ‘Bible Belt,’ the southern heartland of conservative Christianity, and the exhibit offers them the chance to see the artistic roots of their faith first hand.”
(Above) Image from “Religious Art for Peace In SL” by California Condor, the Evangelist of Second Life in Second Life Herald, on a show “Cultural Origins: Pathways to Peace” at Ir Shalom at the Jewish Historical Museum for the Art. The show, in partnership with the Cetus Gallery District and Twilights Peace Group, “featured pictorial art from Jewish, Muslim, Aboriginal, Christian, Hindu and New Age faiths.”
LennyS recalls of his father’s “Calli-Graphic Judaica” on Wednesdays with Michel: “There were times when a Rabbi would call to ask for a logo for a dinner or an organization and dad had it designed before he hung up the phone. His mind worked lightning fast, and he could usually turn out art in minutes or hours.” See the work here.
The Iranian Academy of Arts is acquiring Christian art, which, according to Hadi Sohrabi, who is running the exhibit, demonstrate, “We have many great masters amongst our Christian community and we must create this opening for them to make their mark by showcasing their art.”
One month ago, Ori Soltes received a call from a Jewish docent at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Soltes, a lecturer at Georgetown University’s religion department and author of several books on Jewish art, recalls the docent was upset by the District museum’s “emphatic refusal” in its current show, Morris Louis Now: an American Master Revisited, to acknowledge any Jewish influence or intention in the artist’s work.
“I gave her the list of my arguments, but because she is merely a docent, she was ignored,” said Soltes. Despite the docent’s recommendation and Soltes’ experience about five years ago lecturing docents at the Hirshhorn when the museum was under different leadership, Soltes was not invited to discuss Louis.
“I find it difficult to find another explanation for ‹ I repeat ‹ the vehement refusal even to consider the possibility that [Louis’] Judaism had any effect on his art, particularly considering his pre-canonical work, than some subtle form of genteel anti-Semitism,” he said.
Perhaps the most gripping image collected within the Library of Congress’ book is a page from the catalog for the “Exhibition of Degenerate Art,” which was “curated” by Joseph Goebbels in 1937. The first sentence on the top of the page (see image one) reads, “Even this was once taken seriously and highly paid” … As was the case with non-Jewish artists like Swiss painter Paul Klee (1879-1940) and German painter Max Ernst (1891-1976), the Nazis often accused painters they hated of being Jews, even when they had no connection whatsoever to the Jewish community.
Does religious art really belong in museums, asked more than 100 Buganda traditionalists, who stormed the Uganda Museum and demanding icons and body parts of their war god Kibuuka. “We want a decent, ceremonial burial for our god,” they said. “We are not here to stare at his remains and go away.” [allAfrica.com]
Hindu “extremists” are trying to force Hindu culture on Indian Christians, particularly the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh,. which “alleges that the Hindu religious tradition is inseparable from the Indian culture, thereby equating being Indian with complete conformity to the Hindu way of life.” [Christian Today]
(Above) A newly discovered cave that might be the one where a wolf suckled Romulus and Remus. According to the Guardian, “What the grotto beneath the Palatine is not, obviously, is “proof” that the mythic Romulus existed, let alone evidence of an actual she-wolf. Rome’s founding myth is just that, a myth. But it’s one of Europe’s central myths, and this may well be the shrine that commemorates it.”
The Harold Green Jewish Theatre Company in Toronto is so new that it doesn’t yet have a website, though it does have a $1m budget. [The Globe and Mail]
Chris Weitz, director of “The Golden Compass,” has promised more anti-religious themes in his sequel, which includes a deicide. [Christian Post]
Rebecca Honig Friedman writes on the theology of being hot in “Should Jewish Women Look Frumpy or Hot?” in the “What’s Behind Jewish Beauty?” issue of Brandeis’ 614 HBI eZINE.
Rebecca points out towards the end of the piece that Jewish women’s attractiveness to men “is not necessarily what drives women to look good. It is a widely acknowledged phenomenon that, in many circumstances, women dress up for each other more than they do for men. It’s perhaps less about looking ‘good’ than looking ‘right.’”
But the entire discussion is also relevant to Jewish aesthetics. Women are of course not the same as paintings, but one would expect a consistent aesthetic of beauty in Judaism, which would hold for men, women and paintings. Rebecca concludes, “We should acknowledge, as the Bible does, that beauty is powerful, but that that power can be used for good or bad, for or against the beautiful.” This applies to art as well, so long as we swap “Paint accordingly” for Rebecca’s “Dress accordingly.”
Above: A particularly beautiful Jewess (and modestly dressed in this image at least), Scarlett Johansson. Image:timeinc.net
But the image above, usually called “Jacob and Esau,” is problematic.
The mainstream interpretation (e.g. the Art Institute of Chicago’s notes here) seems to be that the central figure is Isaac sending Esau out to hunt. The dogs, and the figure’s close resemblance to the Esau figure exiting the scene in the middle of the right side of the piece, supports this interpretation. But the Esau figure going off to hunt has no dogs, whereas the central one does. Further, the group of women standing in the bottom left corner don’t fit. Why would this piece celebrate Esau, rather than the righteous Jacob? Who are the women?
The four women could conveniently be Rachel, Leah, Bilha and Zilpa, Jacob’s future wives, but they don’t seem to fit in with the rest of the narrative. For that reason, I’d posit one of two interpretations:
1. The central figure is Jacob talking to Laban, and the women foreshadow his trip to Haran to flee Esau.
2. Or, the central figure is Jacob talking to Isaac (perhaps receiving the blessing before he flees), and the women are again his future wives.
I understand what I am up against. The figure I’m calling Jacob carries a hunting bag (the same Esau does on stage right), and the dogs seem to dictate hunting. But since Jacob fits better with the women, and since Jacob dressed up like Esau (thus the dogs and similar clothing), I still would rather see him center stage than Esau. But I may of course be all wrong, and the women are mere convention, as in say David’s Oath of the Horatii.
The Dallas Morning News Religion Blog posts a fascinating Reuters story on religion reporters losing their faith. The Reuters piece concludes with a question for readers: “Do you think a journalist has to be a believer to be a good religion reporter?” The piece seems to identify uncovered religious scandals as the culprit, so religious art reporters should be safe for the most part.
The Catholic Church in India is protesting Shekhar Kapur’s “Elizabeth: The Golden Age,” on the grounds that it “portrays the Catholic Church in a negative light and sharpens the denominational divide.” The director insists it is “anti [all] extreme forms of religion.” [Christian Post]
Shalom Auslander “has done his best to rid himself of what he sees as a crippling legacy” (that is his Jewish legacy), but “God haunts him like an incubus.” He writes, “The teachers from my youth are gone, the parents old and mostly estranged … The Man they told me about - he’s still around. I can’t shake him. I read Spinoza. I read Nietzsche. I read National Lampoon. Nothing helps. I live with Him every day, and behold, he is still angry, still vengeful still - eternally - pissed off.” [The Globe and Mail]
A great item from NPR: “The Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, which houses exhibits about the Holocaust, racism and human rights, would like to add space it could rent for weddings and bar mitzvahs. But neighbors have signed a petition asking the city to reject the museum’s plans, citing worries about noise.”
We talked about Jewish artists such as Mailer and Levin, and have retrospectives coming up on Shemp and Zeppo. All the celebs, all the artists, all the cultural figures (and all the real people) who are Jewish will be obituarized (is that a word?) on our new site.
However great his message is, senior minister Jon Weece, pictured, makes a point of hypocritically, though humorously, trashing preachers of abundance like Joel Osteen, whom he doesn’t mention by name, even as he preaches his main message to “love your enemies.” To be fair, he does not chase after Osteen nearly to the extent that Mars Hill Church, Seattle, pastor Mark Driscoll does in his podcast, and Driscoll does mention Osteen by name. One wonders though why even the greatest voices calling for love and respect see a need to put down their own colleagues and their messages even within sermons about love.
In his column “Uganda: Culture Must Be Censored” in The Monitor (Kampala) (via AllAfrica), Pastor Mugabi writes that “we must have the courage to renounce all that, which is inconsistent with the universal truth. … Jesus declared that when we discover the truth, the truth shall grant us total freedom. If our culture does not promote the glorious freedom of God, then I insist it should be censored.”
The Dallas Morning News Religion Blog posts on the spaghetti monster (see image). Pastor Mugabi would certainly have demanded the monster be censored.
On the ruins of the gothic St. Kolumba church, destroyed during WWII save a wooden Madonna, Peter Zumthor — “even his non-religious buildings tend to evoke a sort of spiritual awe” — has built a museum. [The Guardian]
Joe Carter over at Evangelical Outpost humbly submits, “Even on a good day I’m not much of a speaker,” but his talk “Identifying Impact Points In Culture” is well worth reading. Here’s one quote: “Our primary responsibility as culturally concerned Christians is not to critique culture (although that is an essential task) or to consume culture (an unavoidable part of being human) but to be creators of culture.”
Laura U. Marks argues that “Islamic influence on 17th-century Dutch art was one of the first bursts of algorithmic, non-figurative expression that slowly led European art to abandon figuration, and in turn to release the living, performative qualities that are typical of contemporary computer-based art.” [Telepolis]
Why is the oldest Christian artifact a Roman coin dating 200 years after Jesus’ death? “Scholars suspect that converts to the new religion may not have had the means to create works that bore images of their faith. In addition, the earliest Christians were often persecuted and had no legal protection; it was not in their best interest to call attention to their religion,” writes Gaile Robinson. “But once people of wealth and social standing joined the Christian ranks, biblically inspired art became more common.” [Star-Telegram]
Stanley Meisler’s column on the Turner show at the NGA (which doesn’t weigh in on the controversial plague painting) tracks Turner’s opposition to the sort of old school praise of “history painting as the highest achievement of artists.” Histories included “mythology, the Bible and literature. Landscape occupied a lower place in the hierarchy of art, but Turner was determined to elevate its standing, both by the sheer brilliance of his work and by melding landscapes with the subjects of history painting.” [LA Times]
Reviewing the same Kimbell exhibition as the Star-Telegraph mentioned above, Scott Cantrell writes “Every Sunday school kid knows what Jesus and God look like, with beards and flowing hair. But although those images have been fixed in centuries of art and illustration, it wasn’t always so. Indeed, not until two centuries after Jesus’ death did artists and artisans really begin to create a Christian iconography. And God the Father and Son were actually fairly rare visitors to the earliest Christian art, which inclined more toward pivotal scenes from the Old Testament.” [Dallas Morning News]
“I can’t imagine the pain she is going through — no success can ever compensate for having your own children taken away from you,” Boteach said in an interview with FOXNews’ Pop Tarts. “She is in such a bad place. Her bizarre behavior used to be interesting, but now it’s just tragic.” So tragic in fact, that Boteach invoked Michael Jackson: “Britney has been out and about shopping for lots of things from chandeliers to expensive clothes, using material objects to make up for what is missing in her life very much the same way Michael did when he was buying big properties and giraffes.”
So what is a fallen “artist” to do?
Your friends aren’t your friends; they let you do troublesome things and don’t try to stop you. Find a spiritual center, some sort of organized religion that is mainstream. Find yourself a spiritual guide and when you are ready and have gone through all of this, you will be ready to re-enter the celebrity world.
Sounds like another trip to the Kabbalah Centre is in order.
Munich archdiocese officials are “not enthusiastic” about a proposed “gigantic” 180-foot statue of Jesus in Germany, according to the KIA news agency. Though the statue is a “private initiative,” the officials prefer the funds be used to construct a chapel. This seems to indicate the sad fact that said officials do not see much value to monumental, public Christian art. [Catholic World News]
What would the Prophet Mohamed drive? A Malaysian automaker, Proton, is teaming up with Iran and Turkey to build a “Muslim car.” The cars will boast a compass pointing to Mecca and compartments for a Koran and head scarfs. “The marriage of ancient religion and newfangled gizmo can work well. Motorola had a hit in Israel last year when it began marketing the J-Phone, which blocks text messages, Internet access, voice mail and all phone sex and dating lines.” [Religion News Blog]
The Berlin Philharmonic turns 125 this year, and it seems to be exhibiting a guilty conscience about its Nazi-endorsed youth, suggests Anna Bawden. “The Nazi era activities, however should not preclude the Berlin Philharmonic from highlighting its positive legacy. The orchestra should be trumpeting its positive achievements more loudly.” [The Guardian Unlimited: Arts Blog]
Since it is tough to find a prom dress “that keeps cleavage, knees and arms covered,” Modest by Design, “a Murray, Utah, company that helped pioneer the modesty fashion push,” will market dresses with “a matching veil, or hijab, for Muslim customers.” [Women eNews]
The Museum of Biblical Art, New York, has received an $85,000 grant from the Henry Luce Foundation for “a two-day symposium and publication on medieval art.” The symposium, “Visualizing Medieval Realms of Faith Today,” is scheduled for May 30-31, 2008, co-sponsored with the Center for Religion and Culture at Fordham University.
Here’s a great blurb:
The conference will focus on the Middle Ages when, like today, politics were often driven by religion and religious conflicts. In the symposium, participants will see how past societies worked in regards to religion, and thus may be better able to recognize how such politics continue to work today. The chief aims of the symposium will include asking how medieval art resonates in the twenty-first century (what it teaches us about contemporary society and, conversely, how our contemporary views can uncover/rediscover essential elements of the Middle Ages). The interdisciplinary understanding of medieval art will open a window onto the past and offer a nuanced understanding of this complex society, war-torn and full of prejudices but also the source of timeless works of architecture, art and literature.
Money quote from an article titled “Exhibit devoted to blondes will be more fun“: “It’s about illicit pleasure and, contrarily, it’s about purity. Roman prostitutes had to wear blond wigs, or bleach their hair, to make them identifiable. Yet in Christian art, the Virgin is often depicted as having golden hair,” says Kemper Art Museum curator Catharina Manchanda. [St. Louis Post-Dispatch]
As it gets colder, one person who isn’t hibernating for the winter is Chocolate Jesus. And he seems to be surprisingly comfortable in a wide range of temperatures. [The Pace Press]
Money quote: “Surfing the internet is not better than surfing the Lord, or strengthening the family.” From today’s LDS Voices podcast titled “Good, Better, Best,” with Dallin H. Oaks, Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.
(Image) Joseph Mallord William Turner. “The Fifth Plague of Egypt,” (1800). Oil on canvas. Indianapolis Museum of Art, Gift in memory of Evan F. Lilly
On exhibit in the National Gallery of Art’s Turner show is Turner’s “Fifth Plague.” The NGA wall text claims that Turner made a mistake in the title and meant instead the seventh plague: hail, not pestilence. The NGA argument presumably arises from the dramatic sky, which seems to indicate a coming hailstorm. This argument also surfaces in “Self-Representation in Byron and Turner” by James A. W. Heffernan and an article on ArtProfessor.com. (Vivien Raynor’s NY Times column “A Bounty of Egyptian Imagery” doesn’t discuss any error.)
But I think Turner was correct. Firstly, Turner would often include a dramatic sky even where it did not exist (much like the Hudson River School painters).
Further, the horses on the ground are already dead, which seems to refute a hailstorm, as Moses is still outside summoning the storm (which hasn’t arrived, as there is no hail). This suggests that Turner was likely referring to pestilence, and the stormy sky is simply a red herring. Finally, one look at Turner’s sketch in the Tate Modern collection reveals that the sky was more of an afterthought to the larger picture.
UPDATE: Some commentators on the Bible address the question how animals could have died in the seventh plague if they were all killed in the fifth plague. They respond that some Egyptians evidently feared for their flocks and kept their cattle inside for pestilence (which only struck animals outdoors), but mysteriously stopped believing in God’s might for the seventh plague and moved their animals outdoors. Perhaps Turner was painting already dead animals in his depiction of the seventh plague, but I still think my explanation above is more plausible…
In a story that broke a few days ago, computer technician Giovanni Maria Pala claims Jesus’ and the Apostles’ hands and the loaves of bread in Da Vinci’s Last Supper each represent a note in a 40-second composition. The Telegraph quotes Alessandro Vezzosi, of Tuscany’s Leonardo museum, who said it’s “plausible,” but “There’s always a risk of seeing something that is not there, but it’s certain that the spaces [in the painting] are divided harmonically … Where you have harmonic proportions, you can find music.”
“This is not another spin-off of Dan Brown’s novel. It’s real … I’ve always been intrigued by the possibility of finding a (piece of) music in the Last Supper, but I would have never imagined to find myself decoding a secret message by Leonardo.”
“I was first struck by the tablecloth, which features horizontal lines but also vertical lines in correspondence with the pieces of bread. This made me think immediately of music notes on a pentagram. I tried to play the notes, but it did not work. Looking at single details wasn’t the correct approach.”
“I marked the pieces of bread on the table and the Apostle’s hands as music notes. Then I drew a pentagram over the scene between the tablecloth and Jesus’ face. I couldn’t believe my ears when I played the music. It sounded really solemn, almost like a requiem.”
Ira Levin has died at 78, according to the AP. Levin wrote “the Nazi thriller ‘The Boys from Brazil,’” which “detailed a South American underground where the infamous Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele tried to clone Adolf Hitler.” The idea “came from a newspaper article on cloning, which suggested Hitler and Mozart as examples of the disparate possibilities for the new technology.” Stephen King said Levin was “the Swiss watchmaker of suspense novels, he makes what the rest of us do look like cheap watchmakers in drugstores.”
Here at Iconia, we assume only that Frida Kahlo is Jewish, so here’s the scoop on Levin. None of the obituaries mention that he was Jewish, but he is listed on Wikipedia’s List of Jewish American playwrights, and NNDB, “an intelligence aggregator that tracks the activities of people we have determined to be noteworthy, both living and dead,” calls him a Jew.
The L.A. Mayer Museum of Islamic Art, Jerusalem, has recovered dozens of the 100-something clocks and watches that were stolen from its collection, including Marie Antoinette’s pocket-watch. Though the clocks are not Islamic, they were donated by Sir David Salomons, the first Jewish Lord Mayor of London, whose daughter founded the museum. [Reuters]
When Ryan Berk was 14, he began photographing while he worked at Benjarong, a Thai restaurant in Redlands, where he developed an interest in Asian culture and Buddhism. Berk says, “I want to show that we’re all in this world together.” [San Bernardino County Sun]
Jose Alvarez (not the baseball player), whose works explores how “belief—artistic, religious, political, and scientific— intersect” according to a Whitney catalog, “became the Stephen Colbert of art, laying bare the foibles of psychics, preachers, and faith healers by embodying them.” But according to Daniel Kunitz, his “thoroughness feels like overkill,” and he sometimes “overindulges his arty side … Achieving a perfectly balanced meal of enchantment and doubt proves a difficult trick.” [Village Voice]
Guardian: “He was a son of Jewish immigrants made good–an inspiration to all,” from a comment to the article. Another writes, “Of Amis’ Big Four (’the Great Jews plus Updike’) Mailer was the greatest.”
Dallas Morning News: ” Norman Mailer was born Jan. 31, 1923 in Long Branch, N.J. His father, Isaac, a South Africa-born accountant, and mother, Fanny, who ran a housekeeping and nursing agency, soon moved to Brooklyn – later described by Mailer as ‘the most secure Jewish environment in America.’”
CNN: “Norman Kingsley Mailer was born January 31, 1923, in Long Branch, New Jersey, and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. He describes his family — his father was an accountant, his doting mother an assistant in running a trucking company — as a ‘typical middle-class Jewish family,’ but other accounts refer to the clan as working-class.”
Times Online: “His most recent novel, The Castle in the Forest, imagined Hitler as a bed-wetting adolescent coopted by the Devil. The book outraged German and Jewish critics, one of whom described it as ‘clumsy and embarrassing.’ The fuss provoked a characteristic response from Mailer, who showed that even in his eighties he still relished a scrap. ‘What’s the point of being a writer if you can’t irritate a great many people? … Mailer was born to a Jewish family in Long Branch, New Jersey in 1923.’”
Chesler Chronicles: “Norman Mailer, one Tough Jew, is dead … Shades of a falling-down-drunken Dylan Thomas at the White Horse Inn, Mailer was adored for being outrageous (and smart too, of course). His drunken womanizing proved that he was ‘not gay’—maybe even ‘not too Jewish.’”
Bloomberg: “The hipster, even as Mailer defines him, has developed a cool that’s beyond caring, but Mailer cared. He wanted to win — he wanted approval. And knowing how much he did shamed him, which is why he admitted that of all the many sides of his character, ‘the one personality he found absolutely insupportable'’ was ‘the nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn.’”
Salon: Marlon Brando on Mailer: “‘It was protective coloration,’ he said, ‘because if you were a Jew in the army, they called you all kinds of names, teased you and made it hard on you. So I pretended to be a Texan.’ He said he had been out of the army for about eight months, but still hadn’t broken the habit. Then we introduced ourselves. He told me his name was Norman Mailer… (New York, 1943)’”
Several days ago, Kittredge Cherry, author of “ART THAT DARES: Gay Jesus, Woman Christ and More” (which I reviewed here), emailed me a tip about her blog post on the controversy of the “Leather Last Supper” poster (see below) at the Folsom Street Fair. In her post “Queering the Last Supper,” Cherry writes, “I certainly endorse freedom of speech and gay culture photographer Fred Alert’s right to make the Leather Last Supper. But the image raises questions that go far beyond whether it’s OK for Jesus to be gay.” She poses the important questions, “Is it good theology?” and “Is it good art?”
In a follow up post, “Leather Last Supper Debate Continues,” Cherry records some of the responses to the poster. I posed four questions to Cherry via email. The conversation is below. Please click on the link after the first answer to continue reading the entire interview.
MW: Some would say that public images should not offend people. This poster offends people with a traditional interpretation of the bible. Why does it belong in public?
KC: The Leather Last Supper belongs in public because we live in a society where everyone has a right to freedom of speech — even if others are offended. There are some legal limits to free speech, such as laws against “hate speech” that defames or incites violence, but this poster isn’t that inflammatory.
I agree with U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who defended the poster by saying, “I’m a big believer in the First Amendment. I do not believe Christianity has been harmed by the Folsom Street Fair.”
"Iconia has been on my blogroll from the very beginning" -Sincerae
Iconia
Iconia is a blog about religion and art by Menachem Wecker.
Contact: E-mail/AIM
Iconia is part of the Canonist network of religion blogs.
Search
Advertisements
WordPress database error: [Table './db6196_iconia/wp_comments' is marked as crashed and last (automatic?) repair failed] SELECT comment_ID, comment_post_ID, comment_author, comment_author_url FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved = '1' ORDER BY comment_date_gmt DESC LIMIT 10
