I'm not sure why it's so hard for the Glenn Reynolds crowd to get their head around the idea that it's contextual: 1) that we expect different behavior from the U.S. government than from private citizens and 2) that outrage over the presumed Qu'ran defamation is not over the blasphemy itself but in the ideocy of fueling anti-American sentiment so unnecessarily. I hardly mind that artists (Salman Rushdie, for instance) produce blaspheming art; there's just no reason for U.S. prison camps to confirm the Muslim world's biggest fears. I honestly don't see where the hypocrisy is supposed to lie in that position.

we expect different behavior from the U.S. government than from private citizens

My conservative relatives claim to be most upset about the piss-Christ because the exhibit was federally funded through the National Endowment for the Arts, which they all hate anyway. So I'm not sure they'd acknowledge this distinction.

Not that it's not valid. I certainly think it is- not all things funded by the NEA are direct expressions of American views.

The most obvious difference between PC and Koran pissing is that I can guarantee no incarcerated people of faith were harmed in the making of the former.

A secondary difference is that blasphemy isn't the same as desecration. A crucifix is a powerful symbol, but most Christians don't believe that every representation of the cross or corpus christi is divine in and of itself. Whereas, the standard Islamic line is that all Koran-tokens partake in the divine essence of the Koran-type, being representations of the word of God.

Pissing on the Koran is the symbolic equivalent of pissing on the consecrated Eucharist, a far greater transgression in the eyes of Christian believer than snapping a pic of a crucifix in some urine.

And one is art and the other was used for the sport of humiliating or torturing another human.

I was an Arts Administration Fellow at the NEA in 1990, when the Serrano controversy was at its height. First, to quell a misconception: the NEA did not fund a Serrano exhibition. Rather, they gave a grant to the organization that exhibited his work. The grant was not to exhibit his work, but to offer additional operating funds. The Right would love to connect the dots in ways they think best fits their causes.

Second, there is a difference between an artist making a statement about how his religion effects him and the US military using religious symbols as interrogation tools.

In 1991 I wrote in A Thousand Points of Light, A Thousand Shades of Gray:

Andres Serrano's Piss Christ has been portrayed as blasphemous by many politicians and the religious Right. Yet, there has been little discussion (outside the art world) of the context in which Serrano made this photograph. Rather than vilifying the Church, this image, with its plastic, dime store crucifix sitting in a container of the artist's urine, comments on the commercialization of religion. Interestingly, if Serrano hadn't told anyone what gave his image its orange color, no one would have known and the controversy probably would never have occurred. Context is important. Yet, without fur questioning Serrano's intent and his background (he grew up in a Puerto Rican family, where culture and Catholicism are often synonymous) it is hard to give a fair and balanced reading of this piece. His work has become a symbol for what is wrong with this society, but for the wrong reasons.

Despite a few abuses for which noone should be happy for, our prisoners are the best treated prisoners in the entire world, including at Gitmo.

Kriston, your heading for this post has to be one of the funniest ever.

Even if one were to buy the Religious Right's contention that Serrano's photograph is in the same league as the Abu Ghraib abuses (which I don't), it's good to remember that they used Piss Christ as one of their excuses for gutting the NEA and eliminating funding for individual artists. Their argument was that taxpayers' money shouldn't be used to create or display works that are offensive.

I guess their current belief is that offensive behavior isn't necessarily wrong, as long as it's funded by the proper branch of the government.

The strategy Jeff describes has been deployed against the NEA since the 1989–91 culture war, too: In 1994 the Christian Action Network drummed up a manufactured outrage about a $100,000 NEA grant to an HIV+ performance artist, Ron Athey; in fact, Athey was granted somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 by the Walker in Minneapolis— which had been granted the $100K. If I recall the name correctly, it was a group called the Christian Action Network that orchestrated a media campaign featuring thousands of alerts that Athey had drenched the audience in his AIDS-infected blood. Which he didn't (and couldn't have).

Not only did the NEA not directly fund Serrano's award, it wasn't even entirely responsible for the grant given to the organization (SECCA (Southeast Center for Contemporary Art)) that awarded Serrano. His award included money from dozens of private and corporate donors and several charitable organizations. It was the American Family Association that manufactured the story and then brought it to Helms and D'Amato's attention.

LOL

I agree the US should not send a message an any way that we condone torture. We are the example of the world

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