The ultimate power: visual images

So you thought the visual arts were a luxury item? As several recent controversies suggest— again— there's nothing quite as powerful as a visual image.

Last year, for example, the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery mounted an exhibit titled, "Difference and Desire in American Portraiture." Some of the artists included were gay, some straight. The show included A Fire In My Belly, a video by the late David Wojnarowicz. To express his mourning for his lover and mentor, who had died of AIDS a few years earlier, Wojnarowicz filmed ants crawling frantically over a crucifix.

Interpret this image as you please. Does it represent the living seeking redemption from the Savior? Or is a desecration of a religious symbol? Such differences in interpretation are the nature of all art.

But after one blogger objected to the Wojnarowicz video on a web site, a wave of Internet protest descended on the museum, demanding the removal of this work, and in December the curators meekly complied.

Russia's giant penis

Similarly, within the past year, curators in Russia were tried, fined and almost imprisoned for exhibiting art works that appeared to ridicule the Orthodox Church. The Chinese government recently destroyed the million-dollar Shanghai studio complex of the artist Ai Weiwei because his art dared to criticize the Communist government.

Or consider the Russian government's current vendetta against the art collective Volna. Two of its leaders are in pre-trial detention and a third might lose custody of her son. Aleksei Plutser-Sarno, the last of the group's inner circle, has vanished. Their offense? Their group has been staging acts and artworks protesting police corruption and the material luxury enjoyed by Russia's oligarchy. They painted a 210-foot penis on a St. Petersburg drawbridge so that, when the bridge was raised, the giant penis pointed at the offices of the FSB, the security service. A picture worth a thousand words, indeed.

Sarah Palin: TV vs. books

Why are visual images perceived as such a threat? Why are films and TV programs about, say, Sarah Palin or Mumia Abu-Jamal greeted with such controversy while far more substantive books and articles on the same subjects are accepted with little more than a shrug? Why such uproar over the public display of Andres Serrano's photographic Piss Christ, but such little uproar over a book like Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything?

Much of the answer lies in the nature of the medium. Words must be read, which requires time as well as hard work: The mind must form abstract symbols— letters— into words and sentences. Music may touch the soul, but pictures are explicit, needing only a moment to imprint themselves on your memory. That's why images are feared, hated, worshipped and used.

Governments and pressure groups that attack art understand very well what they're doing. They perceive, correctly, that one picture really is worth a thousand words. Even Plato feared the arts and advocated severe censorship of artists for that reason. In the Internet age as in ancient Greece, artists are hardly superfluous players at society's fringes. On the contrary, their work is at the very center, and so their security can never be taken for granted.♦


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