http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/wamc/local-wamc-977491.mp3
Albany, NY – In today's Academic Minute, Dr. Brent Plate of Hamilton College explores the point at which art becomes blasphemy.
Brent Plate is a visiting associate professor of religious studies at Hamilton College where his research focuses on the creation and interpretation of religious imagery. His interdisciplinary approach draws from cultural anthropology, art history, film studies, and increasingly cognitive science. In 2006 he published, Blasphemy: Art that Offends.
Dr. Brent Plate - Art and Blasphemy
In the 1930s, TS Eliot bemoaned living in "a world in which blasphemy is impossible." The start of the 21st century has shown us how profoundly wrong he was.
An ant-covered Jesus. Cartoons of Muhammed. A crucifix in urine.
Condensed phrases that conjure international uproars traversing social and political institutions, cultural values, and religious experiences. And the images themselves? Simple uses of color and contrast, line and form that trigger responses. You don't have to believe in magic to register the power of images on human life.
Stepping back from the rants and raves of poets, politicians, and preachers, we can trace the tangled webs and find blasphemous images to be a goldmine for cultural analysis. Blasphemy -- by which I mean an artwork and the accusations made of it -- is a contested, fluid, and dynamic category of meaning that reveal the public's lusts, longings, fears, and repulsions. And it is not only religious images that strike, for modern secular citizens show forth their own dearly held values when attacks on freedom of speech are made, as the flip side of the "cartoon controversy" demonstrated.
George Bernard Shaw once spoke of the evolution of truth: "New opinions often appear first as jokes and fancies, then as blasphemies and treason, then as questions open to discussion, and finally as established truths," Every society has its taboos, and the categorical concept of blasphemy allows us to look to the forbidden symbols of our past. In so doing we stumble across the structures and strictures of our current culture.