Watch out Virginia Beach, your ignorance is showing - Virginian Pilot writer calls for defunding of public arts after "anti-Catholic" image is shown - RVA Mag

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Watch out Virginia Beach, your ignorance is showing – Virginian Pilot writer calls for defunding of public arts after “anti-Catholic” image is shown

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The new MOCA (Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art) exhibit Turn the Page, 10 Years of Hi-Fructose Mag is bringing over 50 artists from around the world to Norfolk in a truly unique show. It also, it seems, is bringing about calls to pull city funds from the arts after images from the exhibit showed up online showing what one local writer believes to be anti-Catholic in nature.

A recent editorial by one of the area’s largest papers The Virginian Pilot is calling for an end to public funding for the project over this “controversial” work.

The new MOCA (Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art) exhibit Turn the Page, 10 Years of Hi-Fructose Mag is bringing over 50 artists from around the world to Norfolk in a truly unique show. It also, it seems, is bringing about calls to pull city funds from the arts after images from the exhibit showed up online showing what one local writer believes to be anti-Catholic in nature.

A recent editorial by one of the area’s largest papers The Virginian Pilot is calling for an end to public funding for the project over this “controversial” work.

“Neither the government nor anyone else should dictate to an artist what he or she can create. And galleries shouldn’t be told what they can and cannot display,” wrote The Pilot’s Kerry Dougherty.

Hey look, we’re agreeing on some things. But then she proceeds to go off the rails a bit claiming her issue with the art isn’t about censorship, but rather the use of tax dollars.

Dougherty goes on to claim there is a “legitimate question” being raised by local officials about grant money going to the MOCA and its display of “profoundly anti-Catholic work[s] of art.”

“Tax money shouldn’t subsidize bigotry, even when it’s in a fancy frame and hanging on a gallery wall,” she writes. “In fact, art lovers should use their personal checkbooks to support the arts and leave the taxpayers out of it.”

That’s a great idea, but much like other conservative/Catholic viewpoints like abstinence only education, it doesn’t really work out that way in real life. We’d all love to live in a city where the wealthy poured dollars into public art and 14-year-olds didn’t have sex. But sadly, as any artist or High School teacher can attest, that is simply not the case.

And the real irony here is she calls this art “bigotry,” meanwhile we continue to give tax exempt status to religious organizations like the local Catholic college Regent University – run by Pat Robertson – which preaches harmful anti-LGBTQ doctrine regularly.

As one Pilot commenter put it: “Many of you don’t think your tax dollars should go towards art. Many of us don’t think churches should get away with not paying taxes. Many billions of tax dollars are lost to churches not paying any. It is a way that churches are subsidized.”

Meanwhile MOCA is getting a mere $345,000.

The work in question is “Rosie’s Tea Party,” by Mark Ryden. Dougherty claims, and is probably right in her interpretation (and it’s always good to see art being well study and interpreted), that the piece is anti-Catholic as it features “a little girl in a First Communion dress at a table loaded with meat.”

She’s sawing away at a ham inscribed “Mystici Corporis Christi”: the mystical body of Christ. A piece of meat is on the floor and rats are eying it. A bottle of booze is on the table, with a likeness of the Sacred Heart on the label and the word “Jesus.” A bunny is pouring what appears to be blood from a teapot.

Check out the image below via Hi-Fructose’s Twitter:

“To some, this is splendid art. Go figure,” Dougherty writes finishing up her rant.

And while she might have learned enough in school to find herself accurately interpreting an artist’s work, she obviously didn’t pick up any tips on how to appreciate it.

Art exists to challenge people – their views, their beliefs, their morals and their ideas. From paintings of little girls eating dinner to Jesus Christ smeared with human feces – it’s the statements being made and the reactions to it that really show a work’s impact.

Dougherty’s words have only increased the impact of Ryden’s work. Go figure.

While Dougherty and friends might have their way over this fairly innocuous work – Norfolk and VA Beach’s conservative base is pretty massive – the good news is the world is getting smaller thanks to the internet, LGBTQ rights, and the evaporating religious right.

Feel free to add your opinions on the issue below.

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