{"id":23616,"date":"2010-12-07T11:44:01","date_gmt":"2010-12-07T15:44:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.firstthings.com\/blogs\/theanchoress\/?p=23616"},"modified":"2017-03-09T22:01:04","modified_gmt":"2017-03-09T22:01:04","slug":"ants-on-jesus-the-voice-of-one-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/theanchoress\/2010\/12\/07\/ants-on-jesus-the-voice-of-one-man\/","title":{"rendered":"Ants on Jesus & the Voice of One Man! UPDATED"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

<\/p>\n

My Tuesday Column<\/strong> is up over on the home page<\/a>. Today I am looking at the \u201cAnts on Jesus\u201d story, and the reaction of Washington Post Art Critic Blake Gopnik to poor old Norman Rockwell, whose \u201cart\u201d he hates. (Gopnik likes the scare quotes. He uses them to describe the \u201chard work\u201d of realism, too!)<\/p>\n

While I happen to agree with the notion that art, as free speech, should not be censored, I could not help but be struck by the fact that Gopnik is so out of touch with the \u201ccommon man\u201d he does not even realize that what he ridicules is a depiction of precisely what he himself has freely done: stood alone to make his argument, without fear of reprisal.<\/p>\n

Gopnik really does hate Rockwell\u2019s art<\/strong>, too. He goes after it with a lot of scare quotes, and jeers at the \u201chard work\u201d of realist painting, which apparently is less arduous than laying a crucifix on the ground and opening an ant farm upon it. His real wrath, however, is reserved for the content of Rockwell\u2019s painting:<\/p>\n

Rockwell\u2019s vision of \u201cFreedom of Speech,\u201d . . . doesn\u2019t invoke a communist printing his pamphlets or an atheist on a soapbox. It gives us a town hall meeting of almost interchangeable New Englanders, no doubt agreeing to disagree about something as divisive as the rates for those new parking meters. For this, the Founders risked powder and ball?<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Well, actually, Mr. Gopnik, yes.<\/strong> The truth is, the freedom of a small-town man\u2014one so unremarkable as to be \u201cinterchangeable\u201d with any other\u2014to stand up amongst his neighbors and air his thoughts without fear of reprisal is precisely what the Founders risked everything for. They lived not in a world of expansive travel and myriad, largely-anonymous media, but in places where people knew each other for all of their lives, and interacted with each other every day.<\/p>\n

The Founders understood that it was a singular and authentic act of bravery for a man or woman to stand amid such neighbors and opine against the conventional wisdom or the zeitgeist. They understood that the ability and willingness of one mainstream, rather conventional person to stand against a tide is as edgy as it gets; it is a demonstration of individual courage that extrapolates outward; it is the foundation that supports the freedom of the \u201ccommunist printing his pamphlets or an atheist on a soapbox,\u201d paintings of which, by 21st century trends, would\u2014ironically\u2014be considered less courageous or unusual than Rockwell\u2019s vision.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You can read the rest, here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Perhaps Gopnik simply can\u2019t see himself<\/strong> in the common man of Rockwell\u2019s painting because, well\u2026the man is so common!<\/em> Or perhaps Gopnik doesn\u2019t really know who and what he hates, after all, and he\u2013being gentry\u2013 cannot see the quiet heroism of the yahoo!<\/p>\n

UPDATE:<\/strong> By happy co-incidence Tim Muldoon is also writing about the Smithsonian, and Hide\/Seek<\/a>, but he brings DaVinci into it:<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think that Wojnarowicz\u2019s work is likely to be a classic. It certainly carries an excess of meaning; otherwise people wouldn\u2019t be any more interested in it than the average anti-Christian graffiti. It is certainly not the case that every Christian in the world will be equally offended; Christian respondents to the Washington Post story indicate as much. I suspect that at this moment what is giving the work legs is precisely the fact that it is now an object of complaint by a group claiming religious authority, and so it sets off the usual \u201ccensorship\u201d and \u201creligious bigotry\u201d bells in opposing camps. To be frank, I do find ants crawling over a crucifix pretty offensive, but there are plenty of other things I as a Catholic find offensive that I simply don\u2019t wish to call attention to. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read it all here<\/a><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My Tuesday Column is up over on the home page. Today I am looking at the \u201cAnts on Jesus\u201d story, and the reaction of Washington Post Art Critic Blake Gopnik to poor old Norman Rockwell, whose \u201cart\u201d he hates. (Gopnik likes the scare quotes. He uses them to describe the \u201chard work\u201d of realism, too!) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":112,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[107],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-first-things"],"yoast_head":"\nAnts on Jesus & the Voice of One Man! UPDATED<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"My Tuesday Column is up over on the home page. 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