Rachel Maddow, WTF?
Rachel Maddow, who’s usually fierce and tenacious about going wherever a story leads, covered yesterday’s attack on and destruction of Andres Serrano’s infamous Piss Christ art photograph in a curiously timorous fashion. Not only did she refuse to name the photo while describing the attack on it, she didn’t mention a word about its storied history. Wikipedia has just the barest outlines; my own memory is that the painting was at the center of a national firestorm, in 1989, at the peak of that particular great wave of the conservative war on popular culture. Its mere existence was trumpeted as a justification for defunding public art at all levels, and the National Endowment For The Arts came under massive attack for having been in some manner supportive of the work (I don’t recollect the exact details).
Although the specific conservative buttons pushed by Piss Christ have more to do with religion than sexuality, the culture war of the late 1980s got a lot of its oxygen from sexual issues, especially those surrounding gay culture and homophobia. (See also: Robert Mapplethorpe.) Given Rachel Maddow’s sensitivity to and ready willingness to stir into culture-war issues affecting the gay community, I find it astonishingly unlikely that the name Piss Christ doesn’t trip as easily off her tongue as it does mine when she views the footage of the destroyed photo. I suppose it’s theoretically possible she’s ignorant of the history; after all, she’s some younger than me, and was only 16 or so in 1989 when the photo first rose to national political prominence. Theoretically possible, yes … but wildly unlikely.
How, then, to explain her curiously tepid coverage of the destruction? Why was the destruction news? You and I know it’s because of the photograph’s history; Rachel must have known, or there was no story. But she didn’t tell her viewers who didn’t already know … not a word, not even a gesture to the fact that the history exists. I expect better journalism from her, and normally get it.
One possibility, I suppose, is that MSNBS, General Electric, or the FCC simply won’t let her say “Piss” on cable. That seems unlikely, and anyway, Rachel routinely circumlocutes around awkward vulgarities that are central to her stories, using graphics with asterisks and “a word I can’t say that rhymes with” phrasings. So no explanation there.
We’ve already covered the faint possibility that Rachel is too young to remember; but she has staff, and they can’t all be younger than her. And everybody on that show, Rachel included, knows how to Google.
So an icon in the culture wars gets destroyed with a hammer and spray paint. Rachel chose to cover the destruction without naming the work or even hinting that it ever was an icon in the culture wars, even though that iconic status is what made the destruction into an international news story.
I’m scratching my head here. It doesn’t make any sense. I know the photograph is horribly controversial, but it’s not like Rachel to blink like this and let an important story pass without saying why it’s important.
I suppose I could just shrug and say “old media, it all sucks anyway…” but that’s too facile, and doesn’t (usually) apply to The Rachel Maddow Show. There’s got to be a reason I’m not spotting.
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Good questions – art critic Robert Hughes had a good roundup on Piss Christ and Mapplethorpe including criticism of the religious right in his book “Culture of Complaint”
One reason that occurred to me after reading this entry is this: Rachel was raised in a conservative Catholic household, maybe – despite her sexual orientation, Rachel wasn’t a fan of the piece or the statement in the first place.
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As much as I think Serrano’s “art” should be left alone, I’d feel a lot better about the left’s antagonism to religion if Serrano, or someone like him, would do a work called Piss Mohammad. I assume no one in the art community of Europe or North American as the balls to do that. I’m an atheist and I don’t give a shit about Jesus, but I’d like to see some equal time blasphemy from the left on the asshole who founded Islam. They will do things like Piss Christ because they know there aren’t any Christians around ready to decapitate them.
There aren’t?
I’m sure that will be a comfort to Doctor Tiller’s heirs.
You are just starting to notice that the “mainstream media” has blind spots?
Huh? “Just starting to?” WTF are you talking about?
This is a post about one specific media event. I normally don’t do mainstream media commentary here, so you’ve got zero information on what I notice or when I started noticing it.
Vance, if I understand Serrano’s intent correctly, it was at least in part to call attention to the way in which our society treats the crucifix as something of a, well, a cheap commercial fetish. It wasn’t just being offensive for its own sake.
Were that the case, your cry for equal opportunity religious desecration might be reasonable. Or perhaps it might be fair to look for art coming out of the Muslim world making a comparable cultural critique. As it stands though, your comment strikes me as an ignorant knee-jerk attempt to tar leftist artists as cowards and Muslims as irrationally angry and violent.
Vance, I feel you’re asking for a depiction of Mohammed for political reasons, not the kind of philosophical and personal motivation I associate with most artistic religious critiques.
I don’t think that you’d find iconic depictions in Islam because they don’t use depictions for worship practices. So the artistic expression of someone with personal religious experience with Islam, not the politicized version I feel most Westerners know and would relate to, wouldn’t jump to a literal depiction.
That being said, I find this post interesting, especially since I was too young at the time to be aware of the history behind the piece.
dob, Theo van Gogh tweaked Islam & was butchered on the street in Amsterdam. A moronic preacher in Florida burned a Koran. He did not kill anyone, yet the action inflamed a crowd in Afghanistan and 20 people were butchered in a UN mission building. I do not condone what happened to Dr. Tiller, but he was not an artist expressing his concern about images of Christ being used for cheap commercial purposes.
“ignorant knee-jerk attempt to tar leftist artists as cowards and Muslims as irrationally angry and violent.”
Ok wise guy-what upstanding artist of any political persuasion has similarly mocked Muslims and lived to tell about it???
Vance, you just tried to duck out of your own argument. First, you claimed that people behave differently vis-a-vis Muslims and Christians because they “know” there aren’t any vengeful murderous Christians out there; and then, when the vengeful murderous Christians were pointed out to you, you tried to hide behind a “that’s different” because the particular examples identified to you weren’t outraged about art in particular. Nice try, doesn’t sell.
Also, is there anybody left on the internet who does not recognize a chilly “I do not condone” as code for “I can’t be seen to approve of this, but actually I do, or at least it doesn’t bother me very much”?
If you genuinely disapprove of something, there are so many more credible ways of expressing it!
“what upstanding artist of any political persuasion has similarly mocked Muslims and lived to tell about it”
First, you should distinguish between critique and mockery. Piss Christ doesn’t seem to have been intended as mockery.
Second, do you really think you have a broad exposure to art across the Muslim world? Do you really think you hear about the internal debates within that culture? Come off it, man. You hear about the sensational bullshit and are quick to use it to tar all of Islam, while dismissing sensational acts of violence in the more culturally familiar Christian world as acts of an extreme minority. You don’t get to have it both ways.
Examples of artists critiquing Islamic culture could include Muslim stand-up comics, some of the Iranian new wave film directors, and Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepolis. I’m no expert, there are almost certainly better examples, but those are some with which I’m familiar.
I listened to the report after I saw your piece. I think there is something going on there and it may well be some pressure from above.
However, she turned it into a piece on the pressures put on Art of all kinds by the Religious Right, Catholic and Protestant, so it was not quite the whitewash I thought it might be. You are right this deserved specific mention as well as naming. The reason for the controversy to begin with was sidestepped and I was disappointed in her. I do expect more from her but this is the same network who fired Keith Olbermann, so there is that.
Maybe she thinks a softer voice is better than no voice at all. I liken this to President Obama’s decision to not push for a Budget last term because of a threatened filibuster. Never a good idea to not fight just because a win is not guaranteed.
Credit to the Instapundit for the following lessons learned:
(a) “Be a religion that violently responds to blasphemy (i.e. Islam), and you are respected. If not, you are mocked. (i.e. Christianity)”
(b) “when you cave so easily to Muslims’ complaints about blasphemy, you send a signal to everyone else about what kind of behavior is rewarded. May you have joy in the incentive structure you’ve created.”
The problem with bringing up it’s history is that there is currently an attempt to rewrite that history.
With the current inability of our country to spend within it’s budget, each line item has to be defended as to it’s purpose. The Purpose of the NEA has now been retroactively redefined to bring art to communities that can’t afford it AND create art communities that drive commercial centers. Under that redefinition, funding that went to figures such as Andres Serrano has to have “never happened” because it destroys the desired reframing.
It’s pretty hard for the left to defend the money spent on Piss Christ just after taking the government to the Supreme Court for letting the Boy Scouts use an unused part of a military base for their National Jamboree. So, the best thing to do is sweep all that under the rug.
It is a puzzler that Maddow would lean back on the history of “Piss Christ.” A little relevant background on the piece would have just been good journalism, something her show touts itself as possessing. I find she’s easily distracted by whatever the story of the day is, like most news shows. Dylan Rattigan is the only MSNBC commentator that strikes me as having a good focus on what’s going on, at least, economically. I find Maddow very personable and a better journalist than most, but frankly I like online news discussion boards for news analysis, especially the ones with visitors from both the right and the left, so that any obfuscation, omission, or outright lie is immediately challenged. Nothing like instant truth squadding to keep everybody honest.
Bill Maher’s TV show Politically Incorrect was cancelled due to a group of people half of which were too ignorant to understand what he was trying to say, and half of which were bent on twisting what he had said into something that this other half would deem offensive.
Half of the people upset over Piss Christ, really don’t understand what the artist was trying to say (but they think that they do), and the other half are just scared of what they don’t understand.
B.T.W., I’m not so certain it’s fair to judge Ms. Maddow by speculating on what may or may not have been in her mind, without at least considering first what her employers may or may not have instructed her to say or do.