This is genuinely subversive art:
To me it doesn't matter that Serrano, when he shot the insipidly stupid Piss Christ, intended, in his low cunning way, to provoke controversy, and perhaps even thought among Roman Catholics and the Orthodox about the practice of using cruciform sculptures to invoke the Deity, while Rachel Stieringer was just playing a stupid Facebook joke.
Serrano sought to get rich from his photograph, and he succeeded. It was a commercial effort from start to finish, produced on the understanding that museums, and millionaires, will buy anything that halfwit art critics tell them is important because it's transgressive.
Rachel Stieringer, on the other hand, created her art, which is a thousand times more transgressive than anything Andres Serrano ever dreamed of, with no hope of commercial gain. She's suffering for her art. And she will continue to suffer.
I pass no judgment on whether Rachel Stieringer should be jailed for her art. I leave that judgment to the viewer, and to posterity.
Thanks to Reid Sartin for the pointer.
Last 5 posts by Patrick Non-White
- Guest Post: The New York Times War On Drugs - July 31st, 2019
- Bad News From Donald Trump - August 24th, 2016
- Ask Stalin - July 11th, 2016
- Ask Popehat! Joe Manchin Edition - June 16th, 2016
- Stellaris - May 13th, 2016
not at the table, carlos.
The fuck? It's a bottle, a stupid bottle, and he's playing with it. Big deal! There are bong shops that advertise on the radio an hour's drive from where I live. The kid has his finger in the hole, do you honestly think there is anything in it? Are YOU high?
Oh, and also, marijuana go down the hoooooooole.
They're not trying to jail her for taking the picture. The charge has nothing to do with the kid or the picture. It's a simple paraphernalia charge. She's suffering for her idiocy, not her art.
GOD DAMN BROOKS!!! YOU'VE CRACKED THIS CASE WIDE OPEN!
Ms. Stieringer's "idiocy" consists primarily in failing to anticipate the mind-boggling idiocy of others, specifically purse-clutching grannies, boot-licking copfans, and the prosecutors who live to serve their every prejudice.
It's wonderful to see that law enforcement authorities in Florida have eliminated so much rape, murder, child molestation, theft, fraud, prostitution, perjury, obstruction of justice, tampering with elections, and drug trafficking that they can choose to file a misdemeanor charge for possession of a device that can be used for both legal and illegal purposes against a 19-year-old mother of an adorable baby who has demonstrably not been exposed to any illegal narcotics. Must be just a regular law and order paradise down there.