NY Slimes Won't Publish Danish Cartoons, But Re-Plays Mary In Dung Picture

[Annie]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/08/arts/design/08imag.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

A Startling New Lesson in the Power of Imagery
Muhammed Muheisen/Associated Press

Demonstrators in the West Bank town of Aram yesterday protested a Danish newspaper's publication of cartoons depicting Muhammad.
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
Published: February 8, 2006

They're callous and feeble cartoons, cooked up as a provocation by a conservative newspaper exploiting the general Muslim prohibition on images of the Prophet Muhammad to score cheap points about freedom of expression.

Chris Ofili's "Holy Virgin Mary" was at the center of controversy when shown at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999.

But drawings are drawings, so a question arises. Have any modern works of art provoked as much chaos and violence as the Danish caricatures that first ran in September in the newspaper Jyllands-Posten?

The story goes back a bit further, to a Danish children's author looking to write a book about the life of Muhammad, in the spirit of religious tolerance, and finding no illustrator because all the artists he approached said they were afraid. In response, the newspaper commissioned these cartoons, a dozen of them, by various satirists. And like all pictures calculated to be noticed by offending somebody, the caricaturist's stock in trade and the oldest trick in the book of modern art, they would have disappeared into deserved oblivion had not their targets risen to the bait.

The newspaper was banking on the fact that unlike the West — where Max Ernst's painting of Mary spanking the infant Jesus didn't raise an eyebrow when recently shown at the Metropolitan Museum — the Muslim world has no tradition of, or tolerance for, religious irony in its art...

 

[dilloduck]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/08/arts/design/08imag.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

ah--so the newspaper really WAS trying to insult the muslim world into a frenzy. Nice try Slimes.