Exclusive: Photos of the Gay Jesus Last Supper Orgy Exhibit

Posted by Brian Fairbanks

 

"Our country can do without scribblers and agitators like Hrdlicka." So says a guestbook entry at Vienna, Austria's Dommuseum, parked next to a church and owned by the city's archdiocese. The uproar?

Alfred Hrdlicka, is celebrating his 80th birthday this year with a retrospective of his art at the Dommuseum, although various Catholics and censors are outraged that Jesus is depicted in one drawing as having some sort of crudely-rendered orgy after a wine-soaked Last Supper. And here we were thinking that it was usually a Gladiator battle and grapes on a vine that kickstarted a good old-timey sexfest....

(The offending images are including below; they are unavailable elsewhere due to the museum having taken down the most objectionable drawing.)

There are other drawings, including one of Jesus getting groped while nailed to the cross, all included in the following video.

Hrdlicka defended himself by saying that there were no women in Leonardo's rendering of the Last Supper, so he just had to depict men doing the pleasuring of other men. That's about as convincing as the following statement on how taking the picture down is not censorship:

The museum took down the Last Supper piece at Cardinal Schoenborn's request just over a week after the 'Religion, Flesh and Power' exhibition opened, leaving a blank black wall at the entrance to the display.

"This has nothing to do with censorship, rather corresponds with the understood "reverence for the sacred," the Cardinal's spokesman said in a statement.

 

Via the AP.


Comments

profrobert said:

"Censorship" implies governmental action to restrict speech (in this case, art) other than to reasonable times, places and manners.  What is happening here is called "editorial (or curatorial) discretion."  No governent action is involved.  A museum owned by the Catholic Church is not legally or ethically obliged to put up depictions of Jesus that it finds offensive, anymore than the Jewish Museum is obliged to display anti-Semitic art, anymore than the Met is obliged to display my drawings from second grade.  If you believe otherwise, then I expect Scanner to start running every link I send along with my commentary -- otherwise, you're "censoring" me, right?

April 8, 2008 1:34 PM

About Brian Fairbanks

Brian Fairbanks, the Senior National Political Correspondent for Nerve, is a filmmaker living in Brooklyn or New Orleans, depending on the season. He is a heavily-armed advocate of gun control.

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