Today's video is entitled: Conservatives Outraged Over Chocolate Jesus Art and is an interview with the
artist who sculpted a life-sized, naked Jesus for a Holy Week exhitibition. The piece was entitled "My Sweet Lord".
Bill Donohue, head of the watchdog Catholic League, said it was "one of the worst assaults on Christian sensibilities ever." I'd love to ask Bill - "HOW!?" I think it's an assault on the freedom of the artist and freedom of speech if anything.
As an artist and an atheist this is really revolting. Did you notice how he was turning to violence and deliberate assaults. "I want to make him financially bankrupt," and "you're going to lose more than your head." He is ready to act out in acts of vengeance and physical retaliation over a form of art that the artist openly denies as an attack on Christianity. Cosimo says that he himself is a Christian and did this for the sweetness of Jesus. I have a strange feeling that he won't be a Christian for much longer.
This is a great example of what Richard Dawkins was talking about in Chapter 1 of his book, The God Delusion, where he said that religion seems to be in a field of its own. You can criticize artists, politicians, ideologies, but as soon as you bring up religion everyone explodes and takes offence. Why?
And the question of 'Why?' is particularily curious here because, in my opinion, the artist didn't do anything that hasn't already been done before. Artists have portrayed Jesus with a naked body before...
Mmm... Chocolate Jesus. Perhaps Tom Waits was a prophet.
"Well its got to be a Chocolate Jesus
Make me feel good inside
Got to be a Chocolate Jesus
Keep me satisfied"
The artist is a bit of a wacko, I agree, but it's all in the name of art. Can
you make an anatomically correct, life-size sculpture of a person out of chocolate? How about "repainting a Manhattan hotel room in melted mozzarella, spraying five tons of pepper jack cheese on a Wyoming home, [or] festooning a four-poster bed with 312 pounds of processed ham."
Catholics...
