The 9 News link came to me via my Google alert for ‘September 11’. As you will see, the museum also contains a gallery on that subject.
In a city-owned museum in Loveland, Colorado, where school children often make field trips, there is a 12-panel lithograph entitled “The Misadventures of the Romantic Cannibals” which the artist defends and the city refuses to remove. Not everyone there is amused.
“It depicts clearly a picture of our Lord Jesus Christ engaging in an oral sex act with another person,” says Deacon Ed Armijo of St. John’s The Evangelist Catholic Church. Deacon Armijo and several members of the community went to the gallery to voice their opposition to the exhibit.
The exhibit has raised a question society and the legal system have wrestled with for years: When does art go too far?
“I think people need to come in and see it for themselves. It is hard to take one piece in isolation. It is in the context of an exhibit and this one particular piece is not a stand alone piece,” says Susan Ison, cultural services director for the City of Loveland.
I Googled the work’s title and found it online. It is far sicker and more disgusting than the article describes. The second panel appears to have the cut off head of a soldier in a basket along with other “fruits,” in keeping with the sexual theme. The fourth panel appears to portray a Holy nun in a “maid’s” outfit (some sort of sacrifice is depicted in the background and I’m loathe to speculate what the sub-panels portray). Panels 5 through 7 apparently are of Christ on his road-trip. (The images are a bit small so I am only guessing that is Barack Obama in the sombrero and someone is in a turban. What either has to do with it all is beyond me). The eighth panel has Christ’s head, more accurately his holiness, literally on fire in a bedroom praying to be delivered from the temptation of two “pigs” on the bed. In pane1 12, a cross-dressing transgender Christ is shown having oral sex performed on him/her with the word ‘orgasm’ above them. You need not be Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart to recognize the pornography.
It offends me so BE WARNED BEFORE clicking on this link.
Ground Zero mosque developer Sharif El-Gamal told the Today Show’s Matt Laurer on Wednesday, “In order to be a Muslim, you have to be a good Jew and good Christian at the same time.” Sharif El-Gamal was arrested during his mid-20’s for soliciting a prostitute (one of seven arrests in his “youth”) so there is plenty in “The Misadventures of the Romantic Cannibals” for him to recognize and be offended by. Maybe he will ask Imam Rauf to issue a fatwah, mention during his next State Department funded tour to the Muslim world that perhaps Allah was depicted, and go on Larry King Live to say if Loveland does not take it down, they’ll be another 9/11.
Where’s the outrage? Why aren’t all the “good Christian” Muslims out rioting, killing the innocent, and burning down churches?
Update: Someone pointed out to me the guy kneeling in the eighth panel is also wearing a turbin. So, the artist is surely not depicting Christ. That should earn Imam Rauf some more TV time and tells me this particular piece will soon make an early exit from the museum but it was okay when the artist was only offending Christians and potentially exposing children to smut.
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