letter to the editor

The Therapist, on artistic responsibility. The key concept:

I’ve repeatedly seen my God put to the rack in the artistic arena. I’ve seen Him smeared with human feces for artistic effect. I’ve seen Him dropped in a vat of the artist’s urine and photographed with a backlit aura—only to receive increased federal funding from the NEA. I’ve seen Him portrayed in cinema as a hapless, Hollywood-caliber nitwit without resurrective power. I’ve seen Him crucified as an incoherent hippie—complete with a Superman sweatshirt.

I’ve also seen the same, high-profile defenders of such rubbish do their dead-level best to throw a two-by-four into the spokes of Mel Gibson’s private life, merely because he dared to portray the crucifixion for what it was—a brutal setup by politicians and weak leaders not unlike those who’ve funded the heretofore listed pieces of garbage. Yet, somehow, those of us who have been offended by such things appear to have overcome the base desire to torch Martin Scorcese’s house, or run Andre Serrano through a textile shredder.

But let some marginally-creative hack stick a finger in Mohammed’s eye, and I’m supposed to now start drawing an exclamatory chalk line around the edges of artistic propriety? I think not. In order for me to join such a malignant cadre, I’d have to trip over the mountain of DaVinci Code books between me and the brain-dead queue ready to take up the gun and ride against a couple of Danish cartoonists. It just isn’t worth my time and effort to think that tolerant artwork begins at the house of Allah.