December 14, 2023

For most of Western history, art was used as a way for patrons to showcase achievements, propagandize citizens, or lionize individuals. Maybe the single greatest artist in human history, Michelangelo, created his greatest works for patrons of various sorts. He created David for the Florentine Guild of Wool, the Pieta for the French ambassador to the Holy See, and the Sistine Chapel and St Peter’s Basilica for popes. Art was, in one way or another, an homage to something greater than its creator.

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Fast-forward about three centuries, and the art world begun to change. The idea of art as an indulgence of artists, who paint whatever they want, with or without a desire that someone pay for it, is largely a child of the late 19th century. That’s when Impressionism, that distinctly unconventional, nontraditional form of painting, emerged. In a very short time, the art world went from the uber-traditional world of Bouguereau to the anything-but-traditional world of Monet, Renoir, and Van Gogh. Suddenly, art was no longer a vehicle for vanity or the celebration of greatness or storytelling. It was something else.

In 1917, Marcel Duchamp, a French artist, unveiled a urinal on a wooden box and called it “Fountain.” A hundred years later, art had “evolved” so much that a banana taped to a wall with duct tape (an actual banana…not plastic or paper mâché) would sell for $120,000 in 2019.

It is in this universe of art that we find what is supposed to be cutting edge and courageous, in the form of the Pietà by German designer Harald Glööckler. The revisualization of the classic piece features a tattooed Christ and a trans-Mary. And what’s courageous about this piece? It stands up to those vicious, hateful…Christians.

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In the cacophony of 2023, while there are other issues that are of far more import than this, this one might be a bit illustrative.

1Image: Michelangelo’s Pieta by Stanislav Traykov. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Having the “courage” to stand up to Christians by defiling Christian traditions and symbols doesn’t actually require any courage because there’s no danger of anything bad actually happening besides some chastising words from a few of the offended. No one is going to issue death threats against you, no one is going to put a bounty on your head, and mobs of people aren’t going to start riots and kill others because of you, as was shown in 1986 with The Holy Virgin Mary by Chris Ofili and 1987 with Piss Christ, by Andres Serrano. Of course, there is another religion where that’s exactly what happens if one were to criticize it or its symbols…but the same “courageous” artists aren’t assailing that religion.

This is a symbol of the bizarro world we find ourselves living in. Other things that are counted as courageous today include a man announcing that he’s a woman, flaunting one’s morbid obesity in public, or wrapping oneself in the flag of victimization for being black or gay or some other category.

None of those things takes courage in 2023 America, where being anything but a patriotic heterosexual Christian white male accords hero worship. It doesn’t take courage to assail someone or something without threat of consequences.

Heterosexual Christian white males built most (but not all) in which we live today. It’s far from perfect, but no time or place in history has been perfect. But it’s not those males’ DNA that somehow makes them better citizens or better people. No, it’s the culture they built.

We’re told that Western culture is bad because a multicultural collective did not craft it. That makes no sense. Virtually every culture in human history has been built by members of a single race. There weren’t a lot of whites helping to craft the Mali Empire in Africa, a lot of blacks at the center of the Chinese Middle Kingdom, a lot of yellow people helping to build the Inca Empire or a lot of brown people helping to build Russia or the Russian Empire. No, most of human history has been dominated by monochromatic empires, nations, and cultures.