Podcasts about Piss Christ

“Art is a form of prayer … a way to enter into relationship.”Artist and theologian Bruce Herman reflects on the sacred vocation of making, resisting consumerism, and the divine invitation to become co-creators. From Mark Rothko to Rainer Maria Rilke, to Andres Serrano's “Piss Christ” and T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, he comments on the holy risk of artmaking and the sacred fire of creative origination.Together with Evan Rosa, Bruce Herman explores the divine vocation of art making as resistance to consumer culture and passive living. In this deeply poetic and wide-ranging conversation—and drawing from his book *Makers by Nature—*he invites us into a vision of art not as individual genius or commodity, but as service, dialogue, and co-creation rooted in love, not fear. They touch on ancient questions of human identity and desire, the creative implications of being made in the image of God, Buber's I and Thou, the scandal of the cross, Eliot's divine fire, Rothko's melancholy ecstasy, and how even making a loaf of bread can be a form of holy protest. A profound reflection on what it means to be human, and how we might change our lives—through beauty, vulnerability, and relational making.Episode Highlights“We are made by a Maker to be makers.”“ I think hope is being stolen from us Surreptitiously moment by moment hour by hour day by day.”“There is no them. There is only us.”“The work itself has a life of its own.”“Art that serves a community.”“You must change your life.” —Rilke, recited by Bruce Herman in reflection on the transformative power of art.“When we're not making something, we're not whole. We're not healthy.”“Making art is a form of prayer. It's a form of entering into relationship.”“Art is not for the artist—any more than it's for anyone else. The work stands apart. It has its own voice.”“We're not merely consumers—we're made by a Maker to be makers.”“The ultimate act of art is hospitality.”Topics and ThemesHuman beings are born to create and make meaningArt as theological dialogue and spiritual resistanceCreative practice as a form of love and worshipChristian art and culture in dialogue with contemporary issuesPassive consumption vs. active creationHow to engage with provocative art faithfullyThe role of beauty, mystery, and risk in the creative processArt that changes you spiritually, emotionally, and intellectuallyThe sacred vocation of the artist in a consumerist worldHow poetry and painting open up divine encounter, particularly in Rainer Maria Rilke's “Archaic Torso of Apollo”Four Quartets and spiritual longing in modern poetryHospitality, submission, and service as aesthetic posturesModern culture's sickness and art as medicineEncountering the cross through contemporary artistic imagination“Archaic Torso of Apollo”Rainer Maria Rilke 1875 –1926We cannot know his legendary head with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso is still suffused with brilliance from inside, like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low, gleams in all its power. Otherwise the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could a smile run through the placid hips and thighs to that dark center where procreation flared. Otherwise this stone would seem defaced beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur: would not, from all the borders of itself, burst like a star: for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.About Bruce HermanBruce Herman is a painter, writer, educator, and speaker. His art has been shown in more than 150 exhibitions—nationally in many US cities, including New York, Boston, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Houston—and internationally in England, Japan, Hong Kong, Italy, Canada, and Israel. His artwork is featured in many public and private art collections including the Vatican Museum of Modern Religious Art in Rome; The Cincinnati Museum of Fine Arts print collection; The Grunewald Print Collection of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; DeCordova Museum in Boston; the Cape Ann Museum; and in many colleges and universities throughout the United States and Canada.Herman taught at Gordon College for nearly four decades, and is the founding chair of the Art Department there. He held the Lothlórien Distinguished Chair in Fine Arts for more than fifteen years, and continues to curate exhibitions and manage the College art collection there. Herman completed both BFA and MFA degrees at Boston University College of Fine Arts under American artists Philip Guston, James Weeks, David Aronson, Reed Kay, and Arthur Polonsky. He was named Boston University College of Fine Arts Distinguished Alumnus of the Year 2006.Herman's art may be found in dozens of journals, popular magazines, newspapers, and online art features. He and co-author Walter Hansen wrote the book Through Your Eyes, 2013, Grand Rapids, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, a thirty-year retrospective of Herman's art as seen through the eyes of his most dedicated collector.To learn more, explore A Video Portrait of the Artist and My Process – An Essay by Bruce Herman.Books by Bruce Herman*Makers by Nature: Letters from a Master Painter on Faith, Hope, and Art* (2025) *Ordinary Saints (*2018) *Through Your Eyes: The Art of Bruce Herman (2013) *QU4RTETS with Makoto Fujimura, Bruce Herman, Christopher Theofanidis, Jeremy Begbie (2012) A Broken Beauty (2006)Show NotesBruce Herman on Human Identity as MakersWe are created in the image of God—the ultimate “I Am”—and thus made to create.“We are made by a Maker to be makers.”To deny our creative impulse is to risk a deep form of spiritual unhealth.Making is not just for the “artist”—everyone is born with the capacity to make.Theological Themes and Philosophical FrameworksInfluences include Martin Buber's “I and Thou,” René Girard's scapegoating theory, and the image of God in Genesis.“We don't really exist for ourselves. We exist in the space between us.”The divine invitation is relational, not autonomous.Desire, imitation, and submission form the core of our relational anthropology.Art as Resistance to Consumerism“We begin to enter into illness when we become mere consumers.”Art Versus PropagandaCulture is sickened by passive consumption, entertainment addiction, and aesthetic commodification.Making a loaf of bread, carving wood, or crafting a cocktail are acts of cultural resistance.Desire“Anything is resistance… Anything is a protest against passive consumption.”Art as Dialogue and Submission“Making art is a form of prayer. It's a form of entering into relationship.”Submission—though culturally maligned—is a necessary posture in love and art.Engaging with art requires openness to transformation.“If you want to really receive what a poem is communicating, you have to submit to it.”The Transformative Power of Encountering ArtQuoting Rilke's Archaic Torso of Apollo: “You must change your life.”True art sees the viewer and invites them to become something more.Herman's own transformative moment came unexpectedly in front of a Rothko painting.“The best part of my work is outside of my control.”Scandal, Offense, and the Cross in ArtAnalyzing Andres Serrano's Piss Christ as a sincere meditation on the commercialization of the cross.“Does the crucifixion still carry sacred weight—or has it been reduced to jewelry?”Art should provoke—but out of love, not self-aggrandizement or malice.“The cross is an offense. Paul says so. But it's the power of God for those being saved.”Beauty, Suffering, and Holy RiskEncounter with art can arise from personal or collective suffering.Bruce references Christian Wiman and Walker Percy as artists opened by pain.“Sometimes it takes catastrophe to open us up again.”Great art offers not escape, but transformation through vulnerability.The Fire and the Rose: T. S. Eliot's InfluenceFour Quartets shaped Herman's artistic and theological imagination.Eliot's poetry is contemplative, musical, liturgical, and steeped in paradox.“To be redeemed from fire by fire… when the fire and the rose are one.”The collaborative Quartets project with Makoto Fujimura and Chris Theofanidis honors Eliot's poetic vision.Living and Creating from Love, Not Fear“Make from love, not fear.”Fear-driven art (or politics) leads to manipulation and despair.Acts of love include cooking, serving, sharing, and creating for others.“The ultimate act of art is hospitality.”Media & Intellectual ReferencesMakers by Nature by Bruce HermanFour Quartets by T. S. EliotThe Archaic Torso of Apollo by Rainer Maria RilkeWassily Kandinsky, “On the Spiritual in Art”Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil PostmanThings Hidden Since the Foundation of the World by René GirardThe Art of the Commonplace by Wendell BerryAndres Serrano's Piss ChristMakoto Fujimura's Art and Collaboration

Tom O'Mahony (Beneath the Skin, Lions Led by Donkeys) and the lads grab their rosary blades and make for the miraculous city of Cvstodia as they cover The Game Kitchen's gothic 2023 Metroidvania: Blasphemous II. Topics include the game's Sevillian origins, the literal Piss-Christ, and the importance of gamifying Catholicism as a merciless, guilt-ridden bloodbath. Tom O'Mahony: Twitter Beneath the Skin: A podcast chronicling the interconnected history of the world through the complicated history of tattooing. Hosted by Art History professor, museum curator, and tattoo historian Dr. Matt Lodder, and podcast producer, and tattoo collector Thomas O'Mahony. The show is trying to tell the history of tattooing as it interweaves with politics, society, and the weirdest corners of the world. So why don't you join us, and take a journey beneath the skin. Spotify // Apple Podcasts // Patreon // Twitter // Instagram Lions Led By Donkeys: A military history podcast for laughing at the worst military failures, inept commanders, and crazy stories from throughout the history of human conflict. Spotify // Apple Podcasts // Patreon // Twitter // Instagram Glue Factory Podcast: A new comedy podcast from the creators of Trashfuture, BudPod and more. Milo Edwards, Olga Koch, Pierre Novellie and Riley get together with guests and pour out the contents of their addled minds. Spotify // Apple Podcasts // Patreon // Twitter // Instagram // Youtube Media Referenced in this Episode: Blasphemous 2. The Game Kitchen/Team17, 2023. Blasphemous. The Game Kitchen/Team17, 2019. “Blasphemous: 16th-17th Century Andalucía Nightmare Fuel for the Soul—now in Spanish!” by Tiffany Funk. VGA Gallery. September, 2020. “Blasphemous: How Spanish Art & History Inspired The World of Cvstodia.” The Lore Hunter. October 21st, 2019. “Blasphemous II, EP02: Touring Cvstodia | Dev Diaries” The Game Kitchen. 2023 “Blasphemous II, EP03: “The Art and the Miracle” | Dev Diaries” The Game Kitchen. 2023. Landing Blasphemous: The Making of Blasphemous 1 (Full Documentary). Dir. Rodri Vazcano. The Game Kitchen. 2021. “La historia de Blasphemous 1 y 2 explicada – Análisis a fondo del ‘lore'” by Julián Ramírez. GamerFocus. October 21st, 2023. “Feeling History in Blasphemous: Monstrosity and Spectacle through Time” by Jack Orchard. Play the Past. February 22nd, 2022. “Spain's dwindling knife sharpeners” by Tom Burridge. BBC News, Madrid. January 8th, 2014. TWOAPW theme by Brendan Dalton: Patreon // brendan-dalton.com // brendandalton.bandcamp.com

The world as we know it is against Jesus. Because of this, we might face hard questions, attacks, and more that challenge our faith. In today's episode, we answer the question: How Should Christians Respond to Bold Opposition? --The PursueGOD Truth podcast is the “easy button” for making disciples – whether you're looking for resources to lead a family devotional, a small group at church, or a one-on-one mentoring relationship. Join us for new episodes every Tuesday and Friday. Find resources to talk about these episodes at pursueGOD.org.Help others go "full circle" as a follower of Jesus through our 12-week Pursuit series.Click here to learn more about how to use these resources at home, with a small group, or in a one-on-one discipleship relationship.Got questions or want to leave a note? Email us at podcast@pursueGOD.org.Donate Now --How Should Christians Respond to Bold Opposition? Define bold opposition: enemies of God, the crossThreats against our values, the truth of the BibleOlympic ceremony's 'Last Supper' sketchThe segment… resembled the biblical scene of Jesus Christ and his apostles sharing a last meal before crucifixion and featured drag queens, a transgender model and a naked singerHugo Bardin, whose drag queen character Paloma took part in the tableau, was disappointed Paris 2024 had felt compelled to apologise. "An apology means recognising a mistake, recognising that you deliberately did something to harm, which was not the case," Bardin said. "What bothers people isn't that we're reproducing this painting," Bardin continued, "what bothers people is that queer people are reproducing it."Other examples in recent years:Andres Serrano's Piss Christ (1987): controversial photograph depicting a crucifix submerged in urineAuthors like Richard Dawkins [The God Delusion (2006)] and Christopher Hitchens [God Is Not Great (2007)] Comedians like George Carlin and Bill Maher Criticism of Christian stances on social issues (such as LGBTQ+ rights, abortion, and contraception) has often been accompanied by mockery, portraying Christians as outdated or intolerant.Philippians 3:18-19 (NLT) 18 For I have told you often before, and I say it again with tears in my eyes, that there are many whose conduct shows they are really enemies of the cross of Christ. 19 They are headed for destruction. Their god is their appetite, they brag about shameful things, and they think only about this life here on earth.Bold enemies of the cross. Getting bolder every year. This makes me mad. How should we respond to this?We are told to be tolerant, inclusive, kind - yet we are mocked for our belief in Biblical values and our desire to follow JesusMany Christians want to curse them: pray for their destruction, call down God's judgment like James and John did in Luke 9Summarize story: Luke 9:51-54 (NLT) 51 As the time drew near for him to ascend to heaven, Jesus resolutely set out for Jerusalem. 52 He sent messengers ahead to a Samaritan village to prepare for his arrival. 53 But the people of the village did not welcome Jesus because he was on his way to Jerusalem. 54 When James and John saw this, they said to Jesus, “Lord, should we call down fire from heaven to burn them up?” They thought this was God's MO(Pillar...

In this week's Justice with John podcast, John announces the winner of the Justice Centre's annual George Jonas Freedom Award. Later, John talks about what led him to write a column on the rise in school absenteeism in Canada. We also discuss an op-ed in the Toronto Star supporting the Online Harms Act. The show ends with a bonus clip from 2008 in which we hear our 2024 George Jonas Freedom Award recipient address a controversial issue in defense of free speech.Justice Centre: George Jonas Freedom Award--The annual recognition of a Canadian advancing and preserving freedom.The National Post, Feb 29, 2024: The history of Section 13, the controversial hate speech law the Liberals just revivedRebel NewsCBC, Feb 16, 2016: Rachel Notley's NDP bans The Rebel from Alberta government news conferencesThe Hill Times, Nov 25, 2019: Rebel Media, banned by press gallery ‘for years,' vows to continue to cover parliamentary news ‘with or without' gallery approval, says LevantCBC, Jan 9, 2024: Rebel News personality arrested after an encounter with Chrystia FreelandLinda Slobodian in The Western Standard, Apr 2, 2024: Elections Canada couldn't get Chinese spies, but nailed the RebelNew York Times, Nov 3, 2004: Dutch Filmmaker, an Islam Critic, Is KilledThe Guardian, Sep 28, 2012: Andres Serrano's controversial Piss Christ goes on view in New YorkCBC, Mar 27, 2024: Kids missing more school since pandemic, CBC analysis findsOttawa Citizen, Jan 1, 2022: Ottawa teachers' unions call on Ottawa Public Health to keep schools closedSupriya Dwivedi in The Toronto Star, Mar 28, 2024: Have you heard the one about Justin Trudeau attacking your free speech online? Trust me: That's just rage farmingPeter Menzies on X, Mar 28, 2024: "the same people who approved the Online Harms Act decided it would be a cool idea have a staffer write an oped for The Star..."Ezra Levant human rights complaint videosTheme Music "Carpay Diem" by Dave StevensSupport the show

In this episode of the podcast, I talk to and Gary Kornblau about the 30th anniversary edition of Dave Hickey's seminal 1993 book The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty. Blake is currently a fellow with the Center for Advanced Study in Sofia, Bulgaria, as well as the author a great (which is to say, very flattering) review of my 2021 book on Hickey, and he was a stalwart participant in the Substack “book club” I organized on the new edition of Dragon. Gary is faculty at the ArtCenter College of Design. More pertinently, he was Dave's great editor, having plucked him out of obscurity to write for art Issues, the small LA-based journal that Gary founded and edited. He was the one who gave Dave just the right amount of rein to do his best work, and also the one who conceptualized and edited both Invisible Dragon and Dave's subsequent book Air Guitar. The episode covers a lot of ground, including the impact of the original version of the book, the reasons why Gary decided to put out a 30th anniversary edition, and Gary's decision to use the opportunity to try to “queer” Dave. It's a blast. I hope you listen. I also wanted to take the opportunity to run the below excerpt from my book on Dave. It covers the background to the writing and reception of Invisible Dragon, and is, IMO, a mighty fine piece of writing in its own right. Hope you enjoy.On June 12, 1989, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, announced that it was cancelling Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment, its scheduled exhibition of photographs by the celebrated American photographer, who had died of AIDS in March. The Corcoran's primary motive in cancelling was fear.Only a few months before, a long-simmering debate about the role of the federal government in funding the arts had boiled over in response to Piss Christ, a photograph of a small icon of Jesus on the cross floating in a vitrine of urine. Its creator, Andres Serrano, had received a small chunk of a larger grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and the offending photograph had been included in a touring exhibition that was also funded by federal money. During that tour, the photograph caught the eye of the American Family Association, a conservative Chris­tian advocacy group dedicated to fighting what it saw as anti-Christian values in entertainment and the arts. They rang the alarm.Soon after, New York Senator Alfonse D'Amato called out Piss Christ from the floor of the Senate. He tore up a reproduction of the photo and denounced it as a “deplorable, despicable display of vulgarity.” North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms, who would soon lead the charge against Mapplethorpe, added: “I do not know Mr. Andres Serrano, and I hope I never meet him. Because he is not an artist, he is a jerk. . . . Let him be a jerk on his own time and with his own resources. Do not dishonor our Lord.” Patrick Trueman, president of the American Family Association, testified to Congress that governmental support of work like Piss Christ would make it less likely that prosecutors would pursue or win cases against child pornographers.The ensuing congressional battle, over funding for the NEA, became the first in a series of broader cultural and political battles that would come to be known, in retrospect, as the “culture wars” of the 1990s. These battles would range not just over sex and politics in the arts, but also over issues like gays in the military, federal funding for abor­tion, and control over history and social studies curricula in the public schools. It was “a war for the soul of America,” as Pat Buchanan framed it at the 1992 Republican Party convention, a contest over whether the nation would continue to secularize and liberalize or would return to a more conservative social equilibrium.The full contours of the conflict weren't immediately evident in the aftermath of the Serrano affair, but it was very clear, right away, that the Mapplethorpe exhibit was another grenade ready to go off. Its orga­nizers at the University of Pennsylvania had received NEA money, and the Corcoran Gallery, walking distance from the White House, was too visible an institution to slide by the notice of people like Helms and D'Amato. So the Corcoran begged off, hoping to shield themselves from the shrapnel and avoid giving conservatives another opportunity to question the value of federal funding for the arts.Instead, they got fragged by all sides. By fellow curators and museum administrators, who believed the Corcoran's appeasement would only encourage more aggression from haters of contemporary art. By civil lib­ertarians, who saw the Corcoran's actions as an example of how expres­sive speech was being chilled by the culture war rhetoric of the right. By a major donor, a friend of Mapplethorpe, who angrily withdrew a promised bequest to the museum of millions of dollars. And, of course, by the conservatives they had been hoping to appease, who accurately recognized the blasphemy in Mapplethorpe's federally funded portraits of sodomites doing naughty things to each other and themselves.Piss Christ had been useful to the conservative cultural cause as an example of how homosexual artists were taking taxpayer money to spit on the values that decent Americans held dear, but it wasn't ideal. How blasphemed could a good Christian really feel, after all, by an image of Jesus as reverential as what Serrano had in fact made? His Christ was bathed in glowing red-orange-yellow light, the image scored by dots and lines of tiny bubbles that come off almost like traces of exhumation, as if the whole thing has been recently, lovingly removed from the reliquary in which it's been preserved for thousands of years.“I think if the Vatican is smart,” Serrano later said, “someday they'll collect my work. I am not a heretic. I like to believe that rather than destroy icons, I make new ones.”Mapplethorpe's pictures, though, were something else entirely, a real cannon blast against the battlements of heterosexual normativity. Where Serrano was mostly using new means to say some very old things about the mystery of the incarnation and the corporeality of Christ, Mapplethorpe was using orthodox pictorial techniques to bring to light a world of pleasure, pain, male-male sex, bondage, power, trust, desire, control, violation, submission, love, and self-love that had been ban­ished to the dark alleyways, boudoirs, bathhouses, and rest stops of the West since the decline of Athens. And he was doing so masterfully, in the language of fine art, in the high houses of American culture.There was Lou, for instance, which could have been a photograph of a detail from an ancient bronze of Poseidon except that the detail in question is of Poseidon's muscled arm holding his cock firmly in one hand while the pinky finger of his other hand probes its hole. In Helmut and Brooks, a fist disappearing up an anus plays like an academic exercise in shape and shadow. And in the now iconic Self-Portrait, Mapplethorpe has the handle of a bullwhip up his own rectum, his balls dangling in shadow beneath, his legs sheathed in leather chaps, his eyes staring back over his shoulder at the camera with a gaze so full of intelligence and vitality that it almost steals the show from the bullwhip.In response to these kinds of beautiful provocations, the outrage, which had been largely performative vis-à-vis Serrano, became rather genuine, and the whole thing escalated. By July, a month after the exhibition at the Corcoran had been cancelled, Congress was debating whether to eliminate entirely the $171 million budget of the National Endowment for the Arts. By October, a compromise was reached. The NEA and its sister fund, the National Endowment for the Humanities, would get their usual rounds of funding, minus a symbolic $45,000 for the cost of the Serrano and Mapplethorpe grants. They would be pro­hibited, however, from using the monies to support work that was too gay, too creepy in depicting children, or just too kinky. Exceptions were made for art that violated these taboos but had “serious literary, artis­tic, political, or scientific value.” But the point had been made, and the enforcement mechanism, in any case, wasn't really the articulated rules. It was the threat of more hay-making from the right and, ultimately, the implied promise that if NEA-supported institutions kept sticking their noses (or fists) where they didn't belong then it wouldn't be too long before there wouldn't be any NEA left.A few months later, in April 1990, the Contemporary Arts Cen­ter in Cincinnati, Ohio, took up the Mapplethorpe baton by opening their own exhibition of The Perfect Moment. Hoping to head off trouble, they segregated the most scandalous of the photos in a side room, with appropriate signage to warn off the young and the delicate. They also filed a motion in county court asking that the photographs be preemp­tively designated as not obscene. But the motion was denied, and the separate room proved insufficient buffer. When the exhibit opened to the public, on April 7, its attendees included members of a grand jury that had been impaneled by Hamilton County prosecutors to indict the museum and its director for violating Ohio obscenity law. Of the more than 150 images in the exhibit, seven were selected out by the grand jury for being obscene. Five depicted men engaged in homoerotic and/ or sado-masochistic acts, and two were of naked children.The trial that followed was symbolically thick. Motions were filed that forced the judge to rule on fundamental questions about the mean­ing and political status of art. Art critics and curators were called in to witness, before the largely working-class members of the jury, to the artistic merit of Mapplethorpe's photography. The indictment read like an update of the Scopes trial, captioned by Larry Flynt, in which “the peace and dignity of the State of Ohio” was being ravaged by bands of cavorting homosexuals.The jury issued its verdict in October 1990, acquitting the museum and its director. It was a victory for the forces of high art and free expres­sion, but a complicated one. The exhibition could go on. And Map­plethorpe's photographs—indeed, the most outrageous of them—had been designated as art by the State of Ohio and by a group of decent, law-abiding, presumably-not-gay-sex-having American citizens. But the cost had been high. Museums and galleries everywhere had been warned, and not all of them would be as willing as the Contemporary Arts Center of Cincinnati to risk indictment and the threat of defunding for the sake of showing dangerous art.Perhaps most significantly, the National Endowment for the Arts, and its new director, announced a shift in funding priorities in order to take the institution out of the crossfire of the culture wars. Less and less of their money, it was decided, would go to individual artists and exhibitions, and more of it would go to support arts enrichment—to schools, outreach programs, arts camps, and educational campaigns. Mapplethorpe and Serrano were out. Sesame Street was in.For Dave Hickey, a critic and ex-gallery owner, it was, finally, all too much. Not the opportunism of the Hamilton County sheriff and his allies. Not the predictable huffing from the bow-tied brigades, who took to the pages of their tweedy magazines to bellyache, as always, about what a precipitous decline there had been in cultural standards since the 1960s ruined everything. Not even the rednecking of the senator from North Carolina was the problem for Hickey.Each of these parties was performing its assigned role in the passion play of American cultural politics. Narrow-minded prosecutors would always try to run dirty pictures out of town. New Criterion-ites would avert their eyes from new art. Senators from North Carolina would dem­agogue about queers from New York City. You could be angry at having to contend with these actors, but you couldn't genuinely feel betrayed. You knew where they stood from the get-go, and half the joy of art, and of the artistic life, lay in trying to figure out how to shock, outwit, or seduce them.The betrayal, for Hickey, came from his colleagues, from the crit­ics, curators, gallerists, professors, and arts administrators with whom he had been uneasily mixing since the late 1960s when he dropped out of his doctoral program in linguistics to open an art gallery in Austin, Texas. They had been handed a rare opportunity to represent for all that was queer and decadent and artsy-fartsy in American life, to make the case that this—beautiful pictures of men seeing what it felt like to shove things up their asses—wasn't the worst of America but the best of it. And they had whiffed.“The American art community, at the apogee of its power and privi­lege, chose to play the ravaged virgin,” wrote Hickey, “to fling itself pros­trate across the front pages of America and fairly dare the fascist heel to crush its outraged innocence. . . . [H]ardly anyone considered for a moment what an incredible rhetorical triumph the entire affair signi­fied. A single artist with a single group of images had somehow managed to overcome the aura of moral isolation, gentrification, and mystifica­tion that surrounds the practice of contemporary art in this nation and directly threaten those in actual power with the celebration of margin­ality. It was a fine moment, I thought . . . and, in this area, I think, you have to credit Senator Jesse Helms, who, in his antediluvian innocence, at least saw what was there, understood what Robert was proposing, and took it, correctly, as a direct challenge to everything he believed in.”The Corcoran had been bad enough, throwing in the towel before an opponent had even stepped into the ring. But far worse, for Hickey, were the ones who had shown up to fight but had misread the aesthet­ical-political map so badly that they had gone to the wrong arena. The fight, he believed, should have been over whether it was okay or not in our culture to make beautiful the behaviors that Mapplethorpe had made beautiful. The fight should have been over what Mapplethorpe had done with his art. Instead, the public got bromides about free expression and puritanical lectures about the civilizing function of arts in society. Worst of all, in Hickey's eyes, was how quickly the art experts ran away from the rawness of Mapplethorpe's work, characterizing him as though he were a philosopher of aesthetics, rather than an artist, as though he chose and framed his subjects for the sake of what they allowed him to say, propositionally, about the nature of light and beauty and other such things.“Mapplethorpe uses the medium of photography to translate flowers, stamens, stares, limbs, as well as erect sexual organs, into objet d'art,” wrote curator Janet Kardon in her catalogue essay for the exhibition. “Dramatic lighting and precise composition democratically pulverize their diversities and convert them into homogeneous statements.””When it came to it on the witness stand in Cincinnati, even the folks who had curated the exhibition, who surely knew that Mapplethorpe would bring the people in precisely because he was so titillating—Look at the dicks! Hey, even the flowers look like dicks!—couldn't allow them­selves even a flicker of a leer. So Hickey called them out.In a series of four essays written between 1989 and 1993, which were assembled into the sixty-four-page volume The Invisible Dragon, he launched a lacerating critique of American art critical and art historical practice. It was so unexpected, and so potent, that by the time he was done, his own intervention—a slim, impossibly cool, small-batch edi­tion from Art issues Press—would be as transformative in the art critical realm as Mapplethorpe's photographs had been in the photographic.The Invisible Dragon began with a story. It wasn't necessarily a true story, but it was a good one. So good, in fact, that it has conditioned and, in significant ways, distorted perceptions of Hickey ever since.“I was drifting, daydreaming really,” wrote Hickey, “through the wan­ing moments of a panel discussion on the subject of ‘What's Happening Now,' drawing cartoon daggers on a yellow pad and vaguely formulating strategies for avoiding punch and cookies, when I realized I was being addressed from the audience. A lanky graduate student had risen to his feet and was soliciting my opinion as to what ‘The Issue of the Nine­ties' would be. Snatched from my reverie, I said, ‘Beauty,' and then, more firmly, ‘The issue of the nineties will be beauty'—a total improvisatory goof—an off-the-wall, jump-start, free association that rose unbidden to my lips from God knows where. Or perhaps I was being ironic; wishing it so but not believing it likely? I don't know, but the total, uncompre­hending silence that greeted this modest proposal lent it immediate cre­dence for me.”Hickey, an experienced provocateur, had been expecting some kind of pushback. (Beauty?! That old thing? The issue of the '90s? You gotta be kidding me.) When he got none, he was intrigued. His fellow panelists hadn't jumped in to tussle. The moderator didn't seem ruffled. No one from the audience harangued him after he stepped down from the dais. Rather than setting off sparks, he had soft-shoed into a vacuum, which meant he had misjudged something, and in that misjudgment, he sensed, there lay potential. (“I was overcome by this strange Holme­sian elation. The game was afoot.”) He began interrogating friends and colleagues, students and faculty, critics and curators for their thoughts on beauty and its role in the production, assessment, and consump­tion of art. What he got back, again and again, was a simple and rather befuddling response: When asked about beauty, everyone talked about money. “Beauty” was the surface glitz that sold pictures in the bourgeois art market to people who lacked an appreciation for the deeper qualities of good art. It was a branding scheme of capitalism and the province of schmoozy art dealers, rich people, and high-end corporate lobby deco­rators. Artists themselves, and critics and scholars, were more properly concerned with other qualities: truth, meaning, discourse, language, ideology, form, justice. There were high-brow versions of this argument in journals like Art Forum and October, and there were less sophisticated versions, but the angle of incidence was the same.Hickey was stunned. Not by the content of such an argument— he knew his Marx and was familiar with left cultural criticism more broadly—but by the completeness of its triumph. He hadn't realized the extent, almost total, to which beauty had been vanquished from the sphere of discursive concern.“I had assumed,” he wrote, “that from the beginning of the sixteenth century until just last week artists had been persistently and effectively employing the rough vernacular of pleasure and beauty to interrogate our totalizing concepts ‘the good' and ‘the beautiful'; and now this was over? Evidently. At any rate, its critical vocabulary seemed to have evap­orated overnight, and I found myself muttering detective questions like: Who wins? Who loses?”The quest to reconstruct what had happened to beauty soon evolved for Hickey into a more fundamental effort to understand what even he meant by the term. What was he defending? What was he trying to res­cue or redeem? The critical vocabulary and community he had assumed were there, perhaps fighting a rearguard battle but still yet on the field, had winked out of existence without even a good-bye note. It was left to him, in the absence of anyone else, to reconstitute its concepts and arguments, restock its supply chain and armament.So he did, and he called it The Invisible Dragon. The issue, he wrote, is not beauty but the beautiful. The beautiful is the visual language through which art excites interest and pleasure and attention in an observer. It is a form of rhetoric, a quiver of rhetorical maneuvers. Artists enchant us through their beautiful assemblages of color, shape, effects, reference, and imagery, as a writer ensnares us with words and sentences and para­graphs, as a dancer enthralls us with legs and leaps, as a rock star cap­tures us with hips and lips and voice. The more mastery an artist has of the rhetoric of the beautiful, the more effectively he can rewire how our brains process and perceive visual sense data. It is an awesome power.Beauty, in this equation, is the sum of the charge that an artist, deploy­ing the language of the beautiful, can generate. It is a spark that begins in the intelligence and insight of the artist, is instantiated into material being by her command of the techniques of the beautiful, and is crystal­lized in the world by its capacity to elicit passion and loyalty and detes­tation in its beholders, to rally around itself constituencies and against itself enemies. Like all arks and arenas of human value, beauty is his­torically grounded but also historically contingent. In the Renaissance, where The Invisible Dragon begins its modern history of beauty, masters like Caravaggio were negotiating and reconstructing the relations among the Church, God, man, and society. They were deploying the tools of the beautiful to hook into and renovate primarily theological systems of meaning and human relation. In a liberal, pluralistic, commerce-driven democracy like America, the primary terrain on which beauty was medi­ated, and in some respects generated, was the art market.To dismiss beauty as just another lubricant of modern capitalism, then, was to miss the point in a succession of catastrophic ways. It was to mistake the last part of that equation, the creation and negotiation of value on and through the art market, for the entirety of it. It was to mistake the exchange of art for other currencies of value, which was a human activity that preceded and would persist after capitalism, for capitalism. It was to believe that the buying and selling of art in modern art markets was a problem at all, when, in fact, it was the only available solution in our given historical configuration of forces. And it was to radically underestimate the capacity of beauty to destabilize and reorder precisely the relations of politics, economy, and culture that its vulgar critics believed it was propping up.Beauty had consequences. Beautiful images could change the world. In America, risking money or status for the sake of what you found beautiful—by buying or selling that which you found beautiful or by arguing about which objects should be bought or sold on account of their beauty—was a way of risking yourself for the sake of the vision of the good life you would like to see realized.The good guys in Hickey's story were those who put themselves on the line for objects that deployed the beautiful in ways they found per­suasive and pleasure-inducing. They were the artists themselves, whose livelihoods depended on participation in the art market, who risked poverty, rejection, incomprehension, and obscurity if their work wasn't beautiful enough to attract buyers. They were the dealers, who risked their money and reputation for objects they wagered were beautiful enough to bring them more money and status. They were the buyers, who risked money and ridicule in the hopes of acquiring more status and pleasure. They were the critics, like Hickey, who risked their rep­utations and careers on behalf of the art that struck them as beautiful and on behalf of the artists whose idiosyncratic visions they found per­suasive or undeniable. And finally they were the fans, who desperately wanted to see that which they loved loved by others and to exist in com­munity with their fellow enthusiasts. The good guys were the ones who cared a lot, and specifically.The villains were the blob of curators, academics, review boards, arts organizations, governmental agencies, museum boards, and fund­ing institutions that had claimed for themselves almost total control of the assignment and negotiation of value to art, severing art's ties to the messy democratic marketplace, which was the proper incubator of artis­tic value in a free society. The blob cared a lot, too, but about the wrong things.“I characterize this cloud of bureaucracies generally,” wrote Hickey, “as the ‘therapeutic institution.'”In the great mystery of the disappeared beauty, the whodunnit that fueled The Invisible Dragon, it turned out that it was the therapeutic institution that dunnit. It had squirted so many trillions of gallons of obfuscating ink into the ocean over so many decades that beauty, and the delicate social ecosystems that fostered its coalescence, could barely aspirate. Why the therapeutic institution did this, for Hickey, was simple. Power. Control. Fear of freedom and pleasure and undisciplined feeling. It was the eternally recurring revenge of the dour old Patriarch who had been haunting our dreams since we came up from the desert with his schemas of logic, strength, autonomy, and abstraction, asserting control against the wiles and seductions of the feminine and her emanations of care, vulnerability, delicacy, dependence, joy, and decoration. It was the expression of God's anger in the Garden of Eden when Eve and Adam defied Him to bite from the juicy apple of knowledge and freedom.In one of the most extraordinary passages in the book, Hickey turned Michel Foucault, a favorite of the blob, back on the blob. It was Fou­cault, he wrote, who drew back the curtain on the hidden authoritarian impulse at work in so many of the modern institutions of social order, particularly those systems most committed to the tending of our souls. Such systems weren't content with establishing regimes of dominance and submission that were merely or primarily external. Appearances canbe too deceiving. Too much wildness can course beneath the facade of compliance. It was inner consent, cultivated therapeutically through the benevolent grooming of the institutions, that mattered. Thus the disciplined intensity with which the therapeutic institution had fought its multi-generational war to crowd out and delegitimize the market, where appearance was almost everything and where desire, which is too unpredictably correlated with virtue, was so operative.“For nearly 70 years, during the adolescence of modernity, profes­sors, curators, and academicians could only wring their hands and weep at the spectacle of an exploding culture in the sway of painters, dealers, critics, shopkeepers, second sons, Russian epicures, Spanish parvenus, and American expatriates. Jews abounded, as did homosexuals, bisex­uals, Bolsheviks, and women in sensible shoes. Vulgar people in manu­facture and trade who knew naught but romance and real estate bought sticky Impressionist landscapes and swooning pre-Raphaelite bimbos from guys with monocles who, in their spare time, were shipping the treasures of European civilization across the Atlantic to railroad barons. And most disturbingly for those who felt they ought to be in control— or that someone should be—‘beauties' proliferated, each finding an audience, each bearing its own little rhetorical load of psycho-political permission.”After getting knocked back on their heels so thoroughly, wrote Hickey, the bureaucrats began to get their act together around 1920. They have been expanding and entrenching their hegemony ever since, developing the ideologies, building the institutions, and corralling the funding to effectively counter, control, and homogenize all the unruly little beauties. There had been setbacks to their campaign along the way, most notably in the 1960s, but the trend line was clear.In this dialectic, Mapplethorpe proves an interesting and illustra­tive figure. He was so brilliant in making his world beautiful that the therapeutic institution had no choice but to gather him in, to celebrate him in order to neutralize him, to pulverize his diversities and convert them into homogeneous statements. But it turned out that he was too quicksilver a talent to be so easily caged, and the blob was overconfident in its capacity to domesticate him. It/they missed something with Map­plethorpe and made the mistake of exposing him to the senator from North Carolina and the prosecutor from Hamilton County, who saw through the scrim of institutional mediation. All the therapeutic testi­mony that followed, in the case of Cincinnati v. Contemporary Arts Center, wasn't really about defending Mapplethorpe or fending off conservative tyranny. It was about reasserting the blob's hegemony. In truth, Senator Helms and the therapeutic institution were destabilized by complemen­tary aspects of the same thing, which was pleasure and desire rendered beautiful and specific.“It was not that men were making it then,” wrote Hickey, “but that Robert was ‘making it beautiful.' More precisely, he was appropriating a Baroque vernacular of beauty that predated and, clearly, outperformed the puritanical canon of visual appeal espoused by the therapeutic institution.”Confronted by this beautiful provocation, the conservative and art establishments, whatever they thought they were doing, were, in fact, collaborating to put Mapplethorpe back in his place. The ostensible tri­umph of one side was the secret triumph for both. It was beauty that lost. The Invisible Dragon was a howl of frustration at this outcome. It was also a guerrilla whistle. Not so fast . . .Eminent Americans is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

This episode starts with a frothing vat of piss. And the story set in the 1980s, sorry guys, that is history now. Worse than all of that, this episode is about FINE ART. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Eight cardinals are discussed. Two are declared Eminent. Six are excremmunicated.   THIS MONTH'S CARDINALS: Marengo Silva Costa Nzapalainga Mendonça Gambetti Lojudice Krajewski THIS MONTH'S GUESTS: -Roberto and Brendan of Tsar Power and The History of Saqartvelo Georgia   The modern art piece discussed is called "Piss Christ". Sister Tinny of the Holy Innocents would not permit the title to be said on air and also does not recommend you look into the matter further.   IMAGE DESCRIPTION: The Last Judgment (1537–1541). Fresco, 13.7 × 12.0 m (539.3 × 472.4 in). Sistine Chapel, Vatican City Via Wikimedia Commons (extensively cropped): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Last_Judgement_(Michelangelo).jpg 

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit public.substack.comThis morning, Matt Taibbi asked a question that we've long been struggling with ourselves here at Public: Where have all the liberals gone?The old-school leftists who protested Tipper Gore's parental advisory warnings on records and CDs in the 1980s, the ones that were outraged by the efforts of the late Senator Jesse Helms and then-Congressman Al D'Amato in 1989 to pull funding for the artist who created “Piss Christ,” those that stood with the Dixie Chicks when they became the prototypical victims of cancel culture for their opposition to the Iraq War: Where are all these people now as the government forms an unholy cabal with the social media platforms to censor regular Americans' views on everything from public health to the war in Ukraine?Ruy Teixeira, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributor at The Liberal Patriot, has an answer to this question. The Democratic Party, he argues, has abandoned its traditional working-class base and become a party of college-educated elites. For decades, the party has been hemorrhaging white working-class voters. But in recent election cycles, it has suffered big losses among Latinos without a college education, and has started to slide with non-college-educated Asian and even black Americans as well. The Republicans have capitalized on that loss by embracing these exiled voters, creating an inverted political dynamic that has left those of us old enough to remember the traditional pro-worker, anti-war left with our heads spinning.

Pope Francis publicly honored the blasphemous “artist” named Andres Serrano, who created the sacriligious image of a crucifix of Jesus immersed in human urine. Watch this new podcast episode by clicking here: If the audio player does not show up in your email or browser, please click here to listen. Dr. Taylor Marshall's newest book: Antichrist […] The post 999: Pope Francis Honors evil PISS CHRIST Artist at Vatican [Podcast] appeared first on Taylor Marshall.

In this episode:Patriarch Kirill backs Putin during Wagner uprisingIs the Pope's new anti-abuse framework working?‘Piss Christ' artist invited to Vatican: why?Can the Italian State survive Jubilee 2025?‘Vatican Girl': Pope offers family words of comfortPriests and laity facing sanctions for 'hatred'?Support the show

Follow-up: OK approves Virtual religious charter school @2:16 AG agrees it's bad Ethics committee rules against hiding bibles @4:19 Tucker on Twitter @6:39 Politics: NV Gov veto @8:40 SCOTUS surprise @10:11 Trump seal is broken @12:48 Reddit talk @15:46 Trump @18:35 Charges @20:01 GOP @21:20 Classified Information Procedures Act @29:46 Miller's take @29:54 News: Protestors outside Disney @31:22 CFI urges support of NY AB 5074 @36:04 Robertson @39:21 PGA/Liv @42:25 TX buoy border @47:34 IGWT in LA @49:12 Religious Nonsense: Modi's “Fact Checking Unit” @50:33 “Piss Christ” @52:30

On this week's episode the boys talk about our favorite art, the Arnolfini portrait, Piss Christ, Rembrandt, Picasso and Hannah Gadsby. 

De allra flesta svenskar skulle nog aldrig komma på tanken att bränna en koran. Många tycker säkert det är olämpligt. Men brännandet av koranen har blivit ett lackmustest, ett sätt att se om Sverige har kraft att sätta något bakom de fina orden om yttrandefrihet och sekulär lagstiftning.Provokatören Rasmus Paludan brände nyligen en koran utanför Turkiets ambassad, vilket fick turk- och arabvärlden att rasa. Muslimer runt om i världen, och yttrandefrihetsskeptiska krafter i Sverige, krävde att Sverige skulle införa blasfemilagar. Kanske är de nu halvt om halvt redan på plats?Den åttonde februari valde Polismyndigheten nämligen att avslå en ansökan om demonstrationstillstånd där det skulle brännas en koran. Man hänvisar till en dialog med Säkerhetspolisen, och talar om en “förändrad hotbild mot Sverige” och att en sådan – i sig helt laglig – sammankomst, “bedöms kunna orsaka allvarliga störningar av den nationella säkerheten”. Vad man än tycker om brännandet av böcker eller skändandet av religiösa symboler, så är Polismyndighetens beslut en stor skandal. Det handlar i det här läget inte om att “respektera religion” eller att skydda någons känslor, utan om att man viker sig för våld och hot orkestrerat av utlänningar och främmande makt. I Sverige har vi haft utställningar som “Piss Christ” av Andres Serrano där Jesus sänks ned i urin, och “Ecce Homo” av Elisabeth Olsson Wallin där han framställs som homosexuell. Båda dessa ledde till häftig kritik och sårade känslor inom kristenheten, och även ett antal mindre sabotage. Men aldrig var det tal från myndigheter och politiker om att stoppa dessa utställningar. Tvärtom ställdes Ecce Homo till och med ut i Sveriges riksdag. Något sådant skulle bara kunna motsvaras av att Muhammedkarikatyrer och brända koraner också visades upp i riksdagen, men det känns väl ganska långt borta.När Polismyndigheten nu ger vika för muslimers krav på särbehandling och ytterligare inskränkningar i svensk yttrandefrihet är det ett allvarligt steg mot pöbelvälde. Den signal som nu skickas till den muslimska världen är att om de bara använder tillräckligt med våld och hot så kommer Sverige göra som de önskar, en bokstavligen livsfarlig väg att vandra!Det fria Sverige har full förståelse för att människor blir ledsna när något de håller heligt behandlas på ett sätt som de tycker är fel. Men en stat kan inte ge vika för att en intressegrupp känner sig “kränkt” och hotar med våld, utan måste istället stå rakryggad och principfast för de idéer som staten säger sig vila på — i det här fallet yttrande-, mötes- och demonstrationsfriheten.En svensk stat måste alltid sätta svenskarna först, och aldrig anpassa sig till andra folks föreställningar, vare sig de bosatt sig inom vårt lands gränser eller bor kvar utanför dem. Det kan innebära att internationella relationer kärvar, och det kan tillfälligt öka hotbilden mot vårt land och vårt folk. Men alternativet är en principlös stat som låter sig hunsas av utlänningars nycker, och det är en dödsdans där vi aldrig är den som för.Det grundläggande problemet är det mångetniska, mångkulturella samhällsexperimentet som i sig kräver extremt hög tolerans grupper emellan, men vars inneboende dynamik på sikt gör toleransen omöjlig. Det är nämligen enkelt att tala om tolerans när du har en väldigt tydlig majoritet och en eller flera små minoriteter. Men när minoriteterna växer sig större kommer också kraven på anpassning efter deras världssyn och livsstil, vilket vi nu ser utspelas framför ögonen på oss genom de muslimer som kräver lagar anpassade efter Sharia.Sverige måste välja väg. Antingen anpassar vi oss efter islam och bereder oss på att gå ett liknande öde till mötes som Libanon och Kosovo. Eller så konstateras att Sverige är svenskarnas land, och då måste andra folk som lever inom våra gränser respektera vårt sätt att leva och respektera våra lagar, och aldrig någonsin kräva att vi anpassar oss efter dem.

This week we chat dead haircuts, the Mars invasion, India's greatest comic book heroine, and the science of Nickleback I don't know art but I do know Piss Christ!

Season 3 kicks off with John Carpenter's other 1978 horror classic. Written by JC (then rewritten almost a dozen times) Eyes is a fun, if flawed, psychological thriller starring Faye Dunaway, Tommy Lee Jones and Chucky himself Brad Dourif. Ryan and I discuss TLJ's college football horseneck, movies terrifying children, and the art installation The Piss Christ. Join us in The Confessional.  Follow Ryan here This American Life episode - Magically Malicious Wikipedia article on The Piss Christ Follow me here Support the show on Patreon Artwork by Cap'n Mikey Theme song by Taylor Fox, follow her here

For additional notes and resources check out Douglas' website.In this final lesson in the sub-series on Christ as understood through the course of the history of the church, we will focus on the period  from the Reformation onward. Listen to 500 Years of Alternative Christs (25 minutes).Christ as depicted in theology, practice, and artTheology -- often tends to follow practice (trends)ActionArtIconography -- from aniconic art to depictions of DeityIncreasingly powerful imagery -- from Shepherd to Greek god to warriorAnd in our modern period, Christ is even insulted in art. (See, e.g., Andres Serrano's 1987 Piss Christ.)This could easily be another podcast series!The ReformationA more biblically balanced view, yet (eventually)…Ritual and empty motions deemphasized.Faith and individual obedience stressed.Yet Christ is still a political figureLuther, Calvin, and othersRadical Reformation (Anabaptists) tend to be apolitical.The end result, especially in the absence of critical thinking about government and society, and the increase of individualism, is a more permissive ChristFrom Reformation & Modern Christs: Jesus Hijacked in the absence of scriptural controlsChe Jesus (Liberation Theology)Gay Jesus (LGBT agenda)Guru Jesus (Eastern religion)ET JesusChrist in EvangelicalismEvangelicals hold to 3 central teachings:Christ is the Son of GodThe Bible is the Word of GodWe are not born Christians, but must willingly be born again.Yet most evangelicals today go beyond what is written, in subscribing to the Sinner's Prayer.Revelation 3:20 becomes a proof-text on how to be saved, even though it isn't addressing outsiders, but insiders.Christ is shivering in the cold; please let him in! We are to ask him into our lives by means of a prayer.Most evangelicals and other Protestants teach a tame, non-judgmental Christ—one who is “nice."We worship a "nice" God (not too judgmental), and a "nice" Christ (one who won't be too radical or rock the boat).We need to find a "nice" church.We need to be "nice" people.Favorite verses in evangelicalism:John 3:16 -- but what about vv.5 and 21?Ephesians 2:8 -- but what about v.10?Romans 10:9 -- but what about v.13 (Acts 22:16), and 6:3?Revelation 3:20 -- but what about vv.15-19?Specific study: Revelation 3:14-22Divine (v.14)Demanding (vv.15-16)Challenges materialism (vv.17-18)Disciplining (v.19)Desires connection (v.20)Christus Victor but not in the medieval sense (v.21)One standard for all followers of Christ (v.22)ConclusionThe Jesus of the N.T. is the only true Christ.He has promised to live in us (John 14)—which has significant lifestyle implications.It's up to us to show the world the true Christ: through our lives and our teaching.Final 3 podcasts -- Christ Refracted in the World: Polytheists, Monotheists, Atheists

Did you know Cardinal Pell once sued the National Gallery of Victoria on a charge of blasphemy?  What does it mean for something to be blasphemous?  In this episode, Professor Brent Rodriguez-Plate joins me to talk about blasphemy in law, art, and religion. The court case discussed is captioned Pell v The Council of the Trustees of the National Gallery of Victoria, [1998] 2 V.R. 391.  A 1998 note on the case by Bede Harris can be found in Volume 22(1) of the Melbourne University Law Review starting at page 217. A photograph of Serrano's "Piss Christ" can be found at the artwork's own Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piss_Christ You can find out more about Professor Rodriguez-Plate on his website, http://www.sbrentplate.net/  The Association for Public Religion in Intellectual Life has a new website at  https://www.aprilonline.org/ The new Australian Journal of Law and Religion is at www.ausjlr.com Questions or Comments?  You can get in touch with me at jeremy.patrick@usq.edu.au Theme Music: "Sunbeams in the Stained Glass" Oleksandr Viktorovych Lukyanenko, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early! (https://www.patreon.com/topiclords) Lords: * Brad * @bradspendlove on Twitter * Check out https://twitter.com/so_writing, especially episode 6 * Quil Topics: * What superpowers like shrinking and invisibility suggest about how we conceptualize reality * Is there a point where you can call the silly things you make "art" and not feel like an absolute tool about it? Not a debate about what is vs is not art. But I feel weird if I make a bunch of bad music and call it "my art" * Stinky meat and stinky feet * http://www.stinkymeat.net/ * https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hamilton-if-it-was-sung-entirely-by-adam-sandler/id1382504305 * Hope is a Thing with Feathers, by Emily Dickinson * https://poets.org/poem/hope-thing-feathers-254 * Visual novels are neat, but I'm never sure whether they belong in my video game queue or book queue and therefore I rarely play them because I always think I could be playing a "real" video game or reading a "real" book * Cortical homunculus * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corticalhomunculus * https://www.etsy.com/listing/509252848/angry-little-friend-taxidermy-monster * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homunculusloxodontus Microtopics: * Accidentally agreeing to be on the show. * Doing nothing in Chicago. * Computer creativity. * Making an argument that a computer program is creative. * "Honey I Shrunk The Kids" as a philosophical text. * Using a set of mirrors to give yourself 360 degree vision. * Imagining additional colors. * Assuming the listener knows what cellular automata is. * A platonic dude in the way you would conceive of a dude. * Trying to find a game that uses cellular automata but it's occluded by search results for Conway's Life and Nier Automata. * The top four Live 'em Ups. * A game that left the world when Flash stopped being a thing. * Putting tremendous creative effort into a project but not being willing to call it your art because that would be pretentious. * Calling your bad music your "works" because they make ye listeners despair. * How you conceptualize the things that you make. * Attaching a label to the semiotic representation of a thing and thereby changing the nature of the thing. * Making a song in the amount of time the song takes to elapse. * Having done NaNoWriMo once and then being able to tell people you're working on your second novel. * Wanting to have the identity of being a creator. * Something that is cool to be and do. * How to make art that feels meaningful when you are surrounded by art that is way better than yours. * Ancient handwriting samples. * Doing psychic damage by singing the wrong words to a song. * Leaving a plate of meat in your neighbor's yard. * Deciding it's time to stop your science experiment and go to a doctor. * A storied history of people screwing up their bodies for the sake of internet points. * The melding of art and science. * Piss Christ and other works that are intended to annoy. * Trying to elicit a strong emotion but not caring too much which emotion it is. * What it takes to know Bennett Foddy. * The idea that heavy metal bands were trying to get listeners to kill themselves. * The euphemism treadmill and the inverted euphemism treadmill. * How come there are still kids if kids keep growing up?? * Slurs in various stages of reclamation. * How there are stupid people out there and they're not bad people, they're just stupid. * Jabroni origins. * Replacing all your pejoratives with "ridiculous." * Mario running up the infinite euphemism treadmill saying successively more watered down swears. * The purpose of comparing an emotion to a bird. * What is a poem? A pile of lines about a bird. * Conceiving of hope as a bird sitting outside your window and waking you up way too early. * Enclosing poems in letters to your friends. * Making art for a person and sharing it just with that person. * Reading "Hope is the Thing with Feathers" in the Sick Sad World announcer voice. * Reading poems in a sarcastic voice and analyzing how it makes you feel. * Reading Emily Dickinson poetry in the voice of somebody begging for their life. * Whether Poe's Law is the sarcasm thing. * Whether Machiavelli was doing a bit. * A performance of the entirety of Hamilton in the Adam Sandler voice. * Getting famous for singing "All Star" and having to sing it for the rest of your life. * The realm between video games and books. * How the phone would be the perfect venue for a visual novel if it weren't for all the phone games. * Approaches to consuming media. * Watching half a movie and then falling asleep and eventually realizing that now there are at least five movies you've watched half of. * A library book from 2019 that you still haven't returned. * Mapping the size of your body parts to how much space they take up in your brain. * A Cortical Homunculus Funko Pop. * Shrimp Obama Magnet. * T-shirts about adrenal cancer. * Angry Little Friend Taxidermy Monster Sculpture Oddity. * Too good an idea to just let be a joke. * Symbolizing the emotions of people who wait at the dentist's office. * Max Rebo, the popular jizz-wailer. * Seeing the two tabs but not knowing the difference between them.

Today we swear off fish, learn about a new school of art, and then we take a trip to a local department store to find out if ghosts know they are creepy!   Patreon  https://www.patreon.com/user?u=18482113 MERCH STORE!!! https://tinyurl.com/y8zam4o2   Help Promote Dead Rabbit! Dual Flyer https://i.imgur.com/OhuoI2v.jpg "As Above" Flyer https://i.imgur.com/yobMtUp.jpg “Alien Flyer” By TVP VT U https://imgur.com/gallery/aPN1Fnw   Links: EP 32 - Grand Soy Unified Theory (Soy Sauce Helmets episode) https://deadrabbitradio.libsyn.com/ep-32-grand-soy-unified-theory EP 634 - The Lady Gaga/Oreo Cookie/9-11 Conspiracy! (Marina Abramović episode) https://deadrabbitradio.libsyn.com/ep-634-the-lady-gagaoreo-cookie9-11-conspiracy EP 693 - They Are Waiting For You To Fall Asleep (Shot Dog Film episode) https://deadrabbitradio.libsyn.com/ep-693-they-are-waiting-for-you-to-fall-asleep Yin Yang fish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yin_Yang_fish Zhu Yu (artist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhu_Yu_(artist) Chinese eating LIVE fish https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E--Tm5oAImA&t=22s&ab_channel=ABT-YouTube Yin and Yang Fish – A Controversial Dish That's Both Dead and Alive https://www.odditycentral.com/foods/yin-and-yang-fish-a-controversial-dish-thats-both-dead-and-alive.html Piss Christ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piss_Christ Are Human Fetuses ‘Taiwan's Hottest Dish'? https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fetus-feast/ No, this photo shows a piece of performance art created by a Chinese artist in 2000 https://factcheck.afp.com/no-photo-shows-piece-performance-art-created-chinese-artist-2000 Zhu Yu - Eating People https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuIRClbBPOM&t=195s&ab_channel=zczfilms Rick Gibson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Gibson JC Penney Department Store Dreams https://archive.md/WiVHX#selection-1759.0-1759.6   Listen to the daily podcast anywhere you listen to podcasts! ------------------------------------------------ Logo Art By Ash Black Opening Song: "Atlantis Attacks" Closing Song: "Boys Don't Cry" Music By Simple Rabbitron3000 created by Eerbud Thanks to Chris K, Founder Of The Golden Rabbit Brigade Dead Rabbit Archivist Some Weirdo On Twitter AKA Jack YouTube Champ Stewart Meatball The Haunted Mic Arm provided by Chyme Chili Special Thanks to Fabio N. Pintrest https://www.pinterest.com/basque5150/jason-carpenter-hood-river/ http://www.DeadRabbit.com Email: DeadRabbitRadio@gmail.com Twitter: @DeadRabbitRadio Facebook: www.Facebook.com/DeadRabbitRadio TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@deadrabbitradio Jason Carpenter PO Box 1363 Hood River, OR 97031 Paranormal, Conspiracy, and True Crime news as it happens! Jason Carpenter breaks the stories they'll be talking about tomorrow, assuming the world doesn't end today. All Contents Of This Podcast Copyright Jason Carpenter 2018 - 2021

Stijn is terug met misschien wel het controversieelste kunstwek tot nu toe, Piss Christ! Een foto van een crucifix in een bak met urine. Klinkt smerig, maar stiekem is het wel een fantastisch mooi werk.Geproduceerd door: Tonny MediaZie het privacybeleid op https://art19.com/privacy en de privacyverklaring van Californië op https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

WARNING: This episode discusses some offensive and politically charged material. For people who would like to avoid the guess-work The Whole Rabbit, despite our bizarre sense of humor, is aligned strongly to the values of liberty and inclusion. We discuss how aesthetics is an important component of fascist movements which weaponizes beauty and cultural norms to commit violence against those who do not conform with its narrow ideas. If that sounds like too messy of a topic for you today we suggest maybe going to a jazz club, burlesque or museum near you.Break out your canvas, hot dog water and some yellow paint made of mustard and possum tears because this week we are going deep into the world of Modern Art, the CIA's involvement in proliferating it and what it all has to do with the evils of fascism.On this episode we discuss:-Origins of Modern Art-Escape Rooms-David Bowie's on Fascism-Thelema and Mainstream Religion-The Importance of Cultural Diversity in Art-Hip Hop-Videogames and Abstraction-The Aesthetics of Evil-The “Degenerate Art” display-The Great German Art Exhibition-Adolf's Art School Rejection-A Clockwork Orange-Laibach and Wendy Carlos-How Fascism uses Aesthetic-The SwastikaIn the extended episode available at http://www.Patreon.com/TheWholeRabbit we discuss:-Art movements in pre-Nazi Germany-Piss Christ-The Vietnam Wall-Federal Building Mandates-Who's afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue-CIA Modern Art Psyop-My Little Pony Jar-The Big Bad Wolf-German Expressionism and Star Wars-Disney Antisemitism-Thanking France for the Statue of LuciferSpecial thanks to j4ckrabbit, Heka Astra for contributing exquisite research and notes which benefited the episode.Where to find The Whole Rabbit:Online Emporium: https://shop.spreadshirt.com/thewholerabbit/Stickers, t-shirts, hoodies and more!Twitter: https://twitter.com/1WholeRabbitLet's get the conversation started!Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0AnJZhmPzaby04afmEWOAVThe best place for ALL devices.Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_whole_rabbit_/Like, subscribe and comment to see all our weird artsy stuff.Sources:Piss Christhttp://100photos.time.com/photos/andres-serrano-piss-christWhy David Bowie can't be on Twitter:https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/rock-star-david-bowie/Big Bad Wolf:https://jewishweek.timesofisrael.com/when-disney-cancelled-an-anti-semitic-cartoon-character/Modern Art was CIA weapon:https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-weapon-1578808.htmlArt in Nazi Germany:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degenerate_Art_Exhibitionhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_in_Nazi_GermanyWho's Afraid of RedSupport the show (https://www.patreon.com/thewholerabbit)

Den 18 mars 2021 bjöd Studentafton in Lars Vilks till en afton om den konstnärliga frihetens gränser. Moderator var Dan Jönsson, författare, kulturjournalist och kritiker vid flera svenska tidningar samt medarbetare på Sveriges Radio.   Lars Vilks är känd för sitt skulpturala projekt Nimis i nordvästra Skåne och för Mohammed-karikatyrerna där profeten Mohammed tecknas som rondellhund. I podden pratar han bland annat om sin syn på konst som en mångtydig process där betraktarna är medskapare, om varför konst inte kan vara gränsöverskridande ständigt och om när frågan om konstens gränser förlorar sin poäng.    Aftonen finns att se i sin helhet på Youtube.   Tack till denna studentaftons sponsor – Broder Jakobs Stenugnsbageri.   Under aftonen visas några bilder och konstverk. Nedan anges vilka bilder som visas vid respektive tidsangivelse. Vid intresse kan bilderna finnas antingen via Google eller via YouTube-klippet av denna afton.  12.19: Fotografi av Lars Vilks vid litet Nimis 12.53: Fotografi av Nimis 43:44: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon av Pablo Picasso 44:39: Fountain av Marcel Duchamp 45:40: Bed av Robert Rauschenberg 45:46: Warhol's Brillo Boxes på Stable Gallery (fotografi av Fred W. McDarrah) 46:48: Statement of Intent av Lawrence Weiner 47:10: On May 9, 1969 Postcard (recto verso) 10,2 x 15,2 cm Private collection av Jan Dibbets (fotografi av Tom Haartsen) 47:59: Telegram från serien I Am Still Alive av On Kawara 48:29: Stillbild från videon Human Mask av Pierre Huyghe 50:15: Fotografi på konstnären Nina Canell 51:09: Brief Syllable (Skewed) av Nina Canell 51:24: Piss Christ av Andres Serrano

Authors Kelby Losack, Lucas Mangum, and J. David Osborne dissect the video for Rihanna's "Bitch Better Have My Money" and pivot to a discussion about edgy art in general. Bottom line: edgelords are cool, gratuity of sex and violence is subjective, bad taste is a bad take, and don't fuck with people who have money. Shoutouts to the film CHEAP THRILLS, the work of Takashi Miike, Piss Christ and the transgressive photography of Andres Serrano. What is the space for provacation in art, in particular why violent sexuality? Can even a Burger King commercial inspire a mass shooting? Plus, fearing your own darkness, Wall Street Bets, telling on yourself by cringing, the open dialogue of art vs the elitism of criticism, art as the ultimate safe space, the most extreme scene Lucas has ever written, the dystopian nature of cat videos, why discourse should be more like wrestling, kayfabe, hip hop personas, and summoning demons. VIDEO VERSION HERE.

Cancel Culture is roaring in America. George Washington and Abraham Lincoln are now considered to be bad guys. Dr. Seuss and Looney Toons are being hidden and yet a gay pornographer who used a government grant to exhibit a crucifix in a jar of urine is being celebrated. Which is more offensive? A cartoon skunk or Christ in a jar of urine? Who is in charge of this cancel culture anyway?

Hey, y'all! We are back and, you know when you think to yourself "this sounds like it'll just be a goofy weird time" and then things get serious in ways you've never expected? Sort of like a night of Fireball shots? Well, this one is an episode that is going to be a whole lot like that and end up getting particularly heavy.This week we will be discussing the dadaist campaign of the Unabomber for President, as well as the performance artists behind it, Chris Korda and Lydia Eccels.

One of our seniors, Caitlyn, presents a phenomenal brain-bending tour of Existentialism- where it originated, who the big contributing thinkers were, and how it permeates our culture today. Originally recorded on February 23, 2021. NOTE: The photograph I referenced that shows a crucifix submerged in a jar of the photographer's urine is actually from 1987. It was photographed by Andres Serrano and is often called "The Piss Christ."

What is blasphemy? Thanks for asking!An act of blasphemy is an insult or offence committed towards a deity. Blasphemy is often a sensitive subject, and one which can lead to tragic consequences. So should insulting God or a religion be a crime or recognised as a basic right? The Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam have long condemned blasphemy. In the Middle Ages, the notion was written into law in certain places. It was feared that insults to god would anger him into causing natural disasters and contagious diseases. Is blasphemy still illegal in this day and age?It is indeed in some places, such as Italy where blasphemy is clearly outlawed. gavel Meanwhile in Germany, Poland and Greece among other countries, there are laws against religious defamation which could apply to blasphemy. In Saudi Arabia or Iran, blasphemy is punishable by the death penalty. Other countries have actually gone the other way and scrapped previously existing blasphemy laws, like Denmark in 2017. That was the case in France too as far back as 1881, when a law on freedom of the press was introduced. Sometimes, the legal distinction can be subtle. While it may not be illegal to make general criticism of a religion, it is usually a criminal offence to insult somebody based on their faith.There has long been a tradition of drawing religious figures in satirical cartoons or works of art. Think about the Piss Christ painting created by Andres Serrano back in 1987, or more recently the French magazine Charlie Hebdo, which has frequently published cartoons depicting the Muslim prophet Mohammed.Such works make national or even international headlines, generating significant public debate. Amid the controversy, there is often a violent backlash from religious extremists.If national laws are clear on the subject, why is there still so much debate around blasphemy? In under 3 minutes, we answer your questions!To listen the last episodes, you can click here: What is mental health?What is antimicrobial resistance?What is K-Pop? See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this episode we discuss Piss Christ by Andres Serrano. Who would have thought dunking Jesus in a jar of urine could be offensive? It turns out that behind the obvious first impression caused by this piece is a fascinating artist and body of work that involves a lot of other ... bodily fluids. Seriously, though, there's more here than meets the eye.www.andewsserrano.orghttps://sufferingfromartism.buzzsprout.com

durée : 00:53:51 - Affaires sensibles - par : Fabrice Drouelle - Aujourd'hui dans Affaires sensibles la colère d'une partie des catholiques face à une exposition et deux spectacles de théâtre mettant en scène le Christ : "Piss-Christ", "Sur le concept du visage du fils de Dieu" et "Golgota Picnic". Invité Jean-Michel Ribes directeur du Rond-Point. - invités : Jean-Michel Ribes - Jean-Michel RIBES

In this episode, we discuss the long history of bathing, bathrooms, toilets, and bodily functions portrayed in Western Art. We touch on latrinalia, Immersion (Piss Christ) by the American artist and photographer Andres Serrano, and a rather unusual painting by 16th-century Venetian painter Lorenzo Lotto. We interview some of you about what kind of art you have in your bathroom and why, and we have a fascinating conversation with art historian Sarah Kleinman of Virginia Commonwealth University.

Cee L. Kyle joins Kate to talk about the epilogues, mental health, and our community. Topics: Mob behavior. 4chan. How our actions impact the creation of independent art and survivors of abuse. Kate's personal story of growing up online. Piss Christ. Issues with Homestuck's ending. Sadstuck. The Homestuck Cinematic Universe. Trans narratives. Psychosis. Essentiality. Ownership of characters. Jane. Dirk and self-harm. Vrisrezi. Catharsis. Manic pixie dream girls.We discuss this thread by Pip D and Overcast.Music: “perfectly generic” and “Another Noir” by GoomySupport the show on Patreon and get access to exclusive the exclusive bonus [I]ntermission podcastwww.perfectlygenericpodcast.comFollow the podcast on Twitter.Follow the podcast on Tumblr.Join the podcast Discord.Play Snowbound Blood: A Vast Error Story and support Cee. L Kyle on Patreon.

On this episode, we take a left turn and talk about Christianity in pop culture. Deb, Craig and I list the movies, songs and other pop culture references that references God (the Piss Christ artwork of Andres Serrano; Madonna's Like a Prayer, the musicals Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar) and how movies and music has viewed God though the years, from On The Waterfront and the epics like The Ten Commandments of the early '50s to modern movies like First Reformed. Tell us the movies, television shows and songs that reference Christianity and resonates with you.

Christina Rees and Rainey Knudson discuss the week's art news. "One of the protest signs said 'When Did Blasphemy Become Art?' and I just had to have a chuckle."

Andres Serrano: Works 1983-93 opened at The New Museum of Contemporary Art in Soho in early 1995. It was a mid-career retrospective, and I went there to interview the controversial artist for the PBS station WNYC TV. His infamous “Piss Christ”, among other ecclesiastical subjects, was prominently featured, as well as images of Ku Klux […] The post Andres Serrano @ The New Museum of Contemporary Art appeared first on ThoughtCast®.

Discussing why we hate public bathrooms, What comedy coaches do NOT want you talking about while people are eating nachos. Why Comic Mom is grossed out with poop, something about Burbank to Vegas that I forgot, white rappers and a visit to the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit at the Getty including the famous "Man in a Polyester Suit." Comic Mom remembers the controversial artist Andres Serran and his Piss Christ piece of art. Next we talk about Tipper Gore and her music labeling idea, Comic Mom's tenure as a fag hag trolling gay bars, the documentary Welcome to Leith, and world famous racist Craig Cobb who says he may have Aspergers. Finally we close with a chat on the Haunted Hollywood Hills, Ghost stories and something even more frightening than that, comedy coaches.

How dare you say that my spray-painted self-portrait from the boardwalk in Santa Cruz is less "meaningful" than that French sad-sack impressionist's bowl of sunflowers? Don't you know the old saying, "to each their own," or "beauty is in the eye of the beholder," or how about, "suck it." Is there some objective truth to what makes "good" art? We give sorting that out our best shot during this avant-garde episode. Oui, oui!

The arts are littered with examples of censorship of one kind or another - Chloe, Rabelais, Salo, Piss Christ, Baise Moi, the list goes on. Which production will be the Ballet Frankfurt of this year's Melbourne Festival and whose moral sensibilities will be outraged? Will a new, more conservative world tolerate increased freedom of artistic expression? How do we strike a fair balance? What's the role of the media? Speakers: Associate Professor Louise Adler (MC), Adrian Martin , Kate MacNeill, Dr David Bennett, Terry Lane Date recorded: 21/10/2002

Ett 33 centimeter högt krucifix i plast och trä placerat i konstnärens urin. Ljussatt så att Kristusbilden tycks bada i ett bärnstensgyllene skimmer. Utan titeln är bilden bara vacker. Vi backar bandet till 1980-talet. En tid då många konstnärer experimenterade med kroppsvätskor. Så också Andres Serrano. Blod, urin och sperma fick ny politisk innebörd i och med AIDS-epidemins spridning.Men som om det inte räckte tog Andres Serrano kroppsvätskorna in i en religiös bildvärld. Stoppade ned alltifrån reproduktioner av Leonardos Nattvarden till Madonnafigurer i Urin. Men inget verk blev så hatat och omdebatterat som just Piss Christ.Cecilia Blomberg om ett av den samtida konstens mest omdebatterade konstverk som inte minst retat upp den kristna högern i USA.

Marockanskt kulturcenter mot radikalisering av unga, det ryska kulturlivet under allt hårdare tryck och diskussionen om Andres Serranos krucifix i urin fortsätter att väcka starka känslor i USA.  I tredje programmet i serien besöker vi Moskva och Casablanca, talar med gruppen Teateretablissemanget om prekariatet och otryggheten på den moderna arbetsmarknaden samt med Andres Serrano om frihetens gränser i fotokonsten. I över 25 år har det stormat kring bilden "Piss Christ", den amerikanske konstnären Andres Serranos foto av ett krucifix nedsänkt i konstnärens eget urin. Efter terrordåden i Paris i januari i år drog debatten igång med ny förnyad kraft. "Om det är så känsligt med bilder av Muhammed, hur kan den där Serrano få hålla på med det han gör?" citerar Andres Serrano ur en tv-intervju med en företrädare för en katolsk lobbygrupp i USA efter terrordådet mot bl a "Charlie Hebdo" i Frankrike. Den distinktion Andres Serrano själv gör att han är troende katolik. "Den kristna bildvärlden är min" säger han. Andres Serrano tycker sig däremot inte ha rätt att göra bilder om en religion som inte är hans egen och han har också sagt att han drar en gräns vid barn. Debatten om frihetens villkor och pris har varit intensiv efter de dödliga attackerna i Paris i januari mot satirtidningen Charlie Hebdo och en judisk butik. Diskussionen tog ny fart efter terrordådet i Köpenhamn i februari när bland andra svenske konstnären Lars Vilks skulle framträda. Och i Ryssland strax därpå blev mordet på oppositionspolitikern Boris Nemtsov en signal om att insatserna för oliktänkande höjts ytterligare. Kulturreportaget ger sig i en serie på fem program ut i världen för att undersöka frågan "Var slutar friheten?". Följ med till Tunisien, Marocko, Ryssland, Frankrike, Turkiet, USA och Sverige för en diskussion om våra föreställningar om vad frihet är. Medverkande i det andra programmet: Anastasia Patlay, Andres Serrano, Nabil Ayouch, Roland Paulsen, Guy Standing, medlemmar ur gruppen Teateretablissemanget, m fl Reportrar: Cecilia Blomberg, Fanny Härgestam, Katarina Wikars och Fredrik Wadström.

Dr. Joshua Graves returns to the show to discuss being a Jesus person who loves Muslims, life after 9/11 for Muslims, earning a technical foul in a college basketball game, Piss Christ and burning the Koran, present day Good Samaritan situations and his newest book How Not To Kill a Muslim.For more information on this episode's sponsor, The Work of The People, click here.

Freedom of Expression. Green's view: The Charlie Hebdo cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad should not have been published in the first instance, as the initial cartoons in the Danish newspaper should not have been published. When creating an image of Muhammad is a major insult to many Muslims, why do so? When Andres Serrano created his piece of "art" described as Piss Christ it was condemned by many Christians and was ultimate destroyed by French Catholics in, France! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The American media chickens out, CNN ABC AP & FOX won't be showing the Charlie Hebdo cartoon of the prophet, in response to the attack by muslims in France, the AP pulls the 28 year old picture of Piss Christ from its image library to avoid attacks from Christians; Brad Pitt & Angelina Jolie meet the Pope, Britney Spears' sister pulls a knife; Funkhouser only takes meds as a last resort.

The American media chickens out, CNN ABC AP & FOX won't be showing the Charlie Hebdo cartoon of the prophet, in response to the attack by muslims in France, the AP pulls the 28 year old picture of Piss Christ from its image library to avoid attacks from Christians; Brad Pitt & Angelina Jolie meet the Pope, Britney Spears' sister pulls a knife; Funkhouser only takes meds as a last resort.

This week: Our faithful correspondent Patricia Maloney sat down with former US Congressman Pat Williams and his son Griff Willams at Gallery 16 in San Francisco earlier this month to discuss the turbulence of the Culture Wars during the late '80s and early '90s. Patricia finally learned how legislating works in a conversation that ran the gamut from explaining Piss Christ to conservative parents and why Poker Jim Butte is the best place to catch some Shakespeare to how the NEA is vital to cultural production in rural communities and why now might be the moment to demand the return of federal grants for individual artists.   Rep. Pat Williams, who served Montana as its U.S. Congressman for nine terms, from 1979-1997, was Chairman of the House Committee that oversaw fiscal authorization for the NEA. He was one of the most vocal champions for Federal Arts Funding and has been credited for saving the NEA at a time when it was threatened with extermination by the religious Right. When the National Endowment for the Arts came under attack for subsidizing what some legislators considered sexually explicit art, Williams led the fight to save the agency. “As long as the federal government can support the arts without interfering with their content, government can indeed play a meaningful part in trying to encourage the arts,” Williams told The New York Times. “The genius of the NEA has been that the peer- review panels, made up of local folks, chose art and artists by using criteria based upon quality and excellence, never touching subject matter.”   “He was a tireless and fearless supporter of the arts,” reports John Frohnmayer, who served as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts during that tumultuous era. “He risked his political career in doing so.” Frohnmayer recalls that Williams “called out the congressional critics of the Endowment for their duplicity and moral posturing.”  

Kosmo handlar om Jesusgestalten. Vem skulle han vara idag och hur får man gestalta honom? James Frey är kanske mest känd för ha suttit hos en kränkt Oprah Winfrey och förklarat varför han ”ljugit” i sin bok Tusen små bitar. TV-stjärnan Oprah Winfrey hade verkligen gillat  James Freys bok och hösten 2005 blev boken utvald till Oprah´s Book Club, vilket ledde till toppnoteringar för James Freys roman på New York Times bästsäljarlistor. Boken som marknadsfört som helt sann och självupplevd visade sig bitvis vara god fiktion. Frey hotades att stämmas, jagades av paparazzifotografer och kände sig tvingad att med sin familj lämna landet och leva i Europa under en period. Nu är han åter aktuell med romanen Sista testamentet, där han tagit på sig uppgiften att skildra en slutgiltig version av en Messias han själv skulle kunna tro på. En Jesusgestalt på New Yorks gator, utrustad med samma övermänskliga krafter som den Jesus vi känner från Nya Testamentet. Men Freys Jesus är drogliberal, bisexuell, med en uteliggares attribut och med ett kärleksbudskap som inte på något vis utesluter ett vilt, fritt sexliv. Marie Lundström har träffat James Frey på plats i New York, där han jobbar och bor. Patricia Lorenzoni är idéhistoriker vid Göteborgs universitet och aktuell med boken Mama Dolly - bilder av moderskap från jungfru Maria till Alien. Anneli Dufva tog tåget till Göteborg för att träffa henne och höra hennes tankar om moderskap, kön, helighet och om Jesus som gestalt. Hur förhåller man sig till bilderna av Jesus ur ett feministiskt perspektiv? 1989 var startskottet för en av vår tids mest långdragna konststrider. Konstnären Andres Serrano hade placerat ett litet plastkrucifix med Jesus i en behållare som han fyllt med sin egen urin. Fotografiet har kantats av konstpolitiska bråk och skandaler, inte minst i Serranos hemland USA där frågan nått ända in i senaten.  Så sent som förra året vandaliserades också fotografiet på en utställning i Avignon i södra Frankrike. Anders Serrano som själv är född katolik har sagt att han gjorde Piss Christ som en kommentar till hur religion så ofta missbrukas. Cecilia Blomberg berättar Piss Christs historia. Och så rapporterar Sveriges Radios kulturkorrespondent Gunnar Bolin från Zürich där Elfride Jelinek har haft världspremiär med sin tolkning av en av de stora klassikerna: Faust. Prodgramledare: Anneli Dufva Producent: Marie Liljedahl

Celebrated artist Andres Serrano became the centre of controversy in 1989 for Piss Christ, a graphic image that combined Catholic iconography and body fluids. The scandal that this work - alongside Mapplethorpe's homo erotic imagery - provoked, resulted i