A Minor “Sensation”
Blasphemy in art is as common as dirt.

By Roger Kimball, managing editor, The New Criterion
June 30-July 1, 2001

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lenty of people have lamented the degradation of morals and intellectual standards in our culture. Forget about that for the moment. What worries me even more are the many threats to the art of parody. If things continue on their present course, a lot of comic writers are going to be out of business.

Successful parody depends on being able to distinguish reliably between the parody and the thing being made fun of, between the spoof and the thing being spoofed. Can you, Dear Reader, manage the feat?

If you had just come back from a long vacation in Siberia and I told you that a young black artist made himself into an art-world celebrity by exhibiting a picture of the Virgin Mary covered with pornographic pictures and clumps of elephant dung, you'd probably shift into Dorothy Parker mode and say, "Sure, and I am Marie of Roumania."

Fortunately, you haven't been wasting time in Siberia, so you know all about the exhibition called "Sensation" and Chris Ofili, who really did secure a lucrative place in the annals of fatuousness with his dung-and-porno-covered picture of the Virgin.

But try this one: In January, 2000, Jonathan Yegge, a 24-year-old student at the San Francisco Art Institute, performed "Art Piece No. 1" on an open-air stage in front of some 20 fellow students, two professors, and various passersby. According to an Associated Press wire story, this performance "involved unprotected oral sex and exchanging excrement with a bound and gagged classmate." Truth or parody?

True, alas. The combination of San Francisco, art, and excrement was a dead giveaway for anyone who follows the contemporary art scene. (Will future art historians investigating the "advanced" art of our period have to be specialists in excrement the way connoisseurs of early Renaissance painting have to bone up on gold leaf? I wonder.)

The melancholy question that exhibitions like "Sensation" and performances like that of Mr. Yegge raise is, "What's left?" What else can a self-respecting neo-performance NEA-grant-receiving transgressive artist do to distinguish himself from the crowd of bodily-waste wielding competitors? After all, Andres Serrano already has the market for crucifixes-submerged-in-artist's-urine cornered; what's an aspiring young celebrity artist to do?

Turn the world upside down. And that is just what the Brooklyn-based artist Miguel Nunez, has done with "Jesus Rising #4" — a painting of Jesus Christ that has sparked outrage in the art community precisely by being "a non-controversial, non-feces-smeared painting that in no way defiles or blasphemes."

According to one report, since its June 6 debut at the Whitney Museum of American, Art Nunez's painting has been "picketed nearly around the clock by angry protesters, who say they are stunned by its lack of obscene imagery metaphorically conveying a provocative, highly charged theopolitical message." The news report quotes Diana Bloom-Mutter, curator of New York's Rhone Gallery, who spoke for many when she observed that, "It's the duty of all artists to expose Judeo-Christian brutality through images of Christ engaged in acts of masturbation, rape, and torture. When I look at a painting of Christ, it's supposed to make me say to the person standing next to me, 'Yes, this is obscene, but do you know what's really obscene? Two thousand years of white, male oppression in the name of God.'"

Sound familiar? You betcha. So it pains me to admit that neither Nunez nor his painting exists. Both are the creation of some clever person at The Onion, a satirical website that recently posted a hilarious fake news story under the headline "Non-Controversial Painting Under Fire From Arts Community." It's a minor masterpiece of parody. Perhaps — perhaps — you wouldn't find a cutting-edge sculptor asking, "Why isn't this [painting] splattered with donkey semen?" Or the complaint that a portrait of Christ "does not appear to be an enraged howl against Christian patriarchal hegemony at all. Frankly, I'm shocked." And anyone who has had the misfortune of reading Michael Kimmelman's cringing art criticism in the New York Times will appreciate the letter-perfect recreation of his low-octane, I'm-all-for-it-if-everyone-else-is prose.

I heartily recommend "Non-Controversial Painting Under Fire From Arts Community." It's a hoot. But after I stopped laughing I couldn't suppress a troubled sigh. For what makes this exercise in negative parody funny is also what makes the reality it sends up so depressing — the reality, that is to say, of the contemporary art world. We really do live at a time when a straight portrait of Jesus Christ would either be ignored or ridiculed by the so-called "arts community," when obscenity is regularly used like salt to spice up art works, and blasphemy in art is as common as dirt.

None of this is new. None of it is genuinely "challenging" or "transgressive." All the moves — sexual, putrid, and anti-religious — were made long ago by the Surrealists and Dadaists. But the fact that these reflexive gestures have now become common coin — that mainstream galleries and museums and even schools sanction and produce the stuff by the yard — means that what once occupied a place on the benighted fringe of human experience now occupies center stage. The outré has been domesticated, the outrageous brought into living rooms on Main Street.

The Onion's brilliant parody is a late-autumn production: It succeeds by a startling reversal of expectations. That sort of thing only works late in the cultural game, and it really only works once. When it comes to established anti-establishmentarianism — a.k.a. the contemporary avant garde — we have come to the end of the line. The excrement-wielding, religion-bashing, perverted-sex-selling charlatans littering the artistic landscape — and filling the art columns of cheerleading publications like the New York Times — have nothing to offer us but degradation. The question is how long we will be willing to acquiesce in our own infantilization. The Onion's brisk parody gave us a glimpse of some naked emperors. But so many other elements in our culture continue to collude in providing the illusion of raiment. It will end only when Bob Dole's plaintive question — Where's the outrage? — gets a loud and definitive answer.