... for he had great possessions.

Watts Gallery

Death of irony, and some remarks made at the wake

On April 17, 2011, two of (Serrano's) works, Piss Christ and The Church, were vandalized. The gallery director plans to reopen the museum with the damaged works on show "so people can see what barbarians can do"... (Wikipedia)

/facepalm.

Huh? What do I think? Oh - this:

The culture war over Piss Christ is really a battle of competing egos: the ego of the artist and the egos of the offended observers. What more could it be? Consider, after all, what Piss Christ is. It is the "aesthetic equivalent of a temper tantrum," Rev. George Rutler, a Catholic leader in New York, told me in an e-mail. 

"Since Christ survived a crucifixion, Christianity will not be harmed by some man's display of his own arrested development," Rutler wisely remarks. 

[...] 

"Sneering at religion is juvenile, symptomatic of a stunted imagination," writes Camille Paglia, an atheist, in her new book Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars. She is referring directly to Piss Christ. 

I interviewed Paglia last Thursday about her new book at the museum of art in Philadelphia, and she made the point that religion lies at the heart of all great art. One of the reasons why the art world is spiritually and intellectually hollow today, she said, is because it continues to "sneer" at religion and think, mistakenly, that doing so is still avant-garde. It's not. It's old news. 

Serrano's work is not so much anti-Christian as it is anti-intelligent. So why not let the Piss Christ, and the juvenile imagination that gave birth to it, die in the light of sunlight?

- from an article at Catholic Education Resource Center by Emily Esfahani Smith.

The Crucifixion - earliest-known depiction?

Well, according to the page from which I have borrowed this image, it is.

This is one of the carved panels in the 5th century cypress-wood door of the Basilica of Santa Sabina, the oldest extant Roman basilica.

Since 1222, Santa Sabina has been the conventual church of the mother-house of the Dominicans, the Order of Preachers, on the Aventine Hill in Rome.