Big, brave artist somehow fails to do painting ridiculing Muhammad and Islam.

Zitat

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A non-profit art museum in Virginia Beach that receives federal, state and local taxpayer funding is opening a new exhibit this weekend that includes a controversial painting by Los Angeles artist Mark Ryden mocking the Catholic Mass.

The painting, entitled “Rosie’s Tea Party” (which can be seen here on the museum's website) [see below], features the image of a little girl in a white dress with a crucifix around her neck slicing a ham labeled “Corpus Christi” – the Latin term for “Body of Christ.” The painting also depicts a rabbit pouring blood out of a tea pot into a tea cup with the Latin words “Sanguis Christi” (“Blood of Christ”) written on the saucer.

“The offensive nature of this painting is clear on several levels,” said Michael Hichborn, president of the Lepanto Institute, a group “dedicated to the defense of the Catholic Church”.

“It mocks the Sacrament of Holy Communion, it mocks the Catholic belief in transubstantiation, and in fact, it mocks the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass,” he said, calling the painting “outright blasphemy”.

The painting is part of the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art’s (MOCA) Turn the Page: The First 10 Years of Hi-Fructose exhibit honoring the San-Francisco-based arts magazine, which opens on Sunday and runs through December. It will feature “51 of some of the foremost contemporary artists of this decade,” according to a MOCA press release.

But Ben Loyola, a commissioner on the Virginia Beach Arts and Humanities Commission, which provides local taxpayer funding to MOCA, said that the painting was “anti-Catholic” and asked: “Is this the sort of thing we want to be subsidizing?”

“This is very anti-Christian and anti-Catholic. I was shocked to see this,” Loyola told WAVY-Channel 10 after previewing the exhibit. “Look at this, she’s got a saw in her hand cutting off a piece of ham with the words on the ham ‘Corpus Christi.’ That is Latin for body of Christ, and the hand is dropping down and eaten by rats.”

When the local TV station asked MOCA executive director Debi Gray to respond to Loyola’s complaint, she unapologetically responded that “art is intended to be controversial. To some degree it’s intended to spark dialog, and I am delighted it has fulfilled our mission.”

But in a letter to Gray, Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, suggested that Gray exhibit a similar work featuring “a young Muslim girl in a hijab” and then tell outraged Muslims that “art is intended to be controversial."

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http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/barb...ocking-catholic



I expanded this image but it is still difficult to see the writing.