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For the last couple of years, cultural critic lian Stavans and analytic philosopher Jorge J. E. Gracia have been engaged in a series of dialogues on aesthetics, ethnicity, and power. The result is the book Thirteen Ways of Looking at Latino Art, to be published by Duke University Press in February 2014. Each of their discussions rotates around a different canonical work of art, from photographs to graffiti, from paintings to lithographs, by figures such as the brothers Einar and Jamex de la Torre, Jean-Michel Basquiat.José Bedia, Martín Ramírez, and Mariana Yampolsky. The following excerpt considers Andrés Serrano's controversial photograph Piss Christ, which was at the heart of a furious debate in 1987 on the United States government's funding of works of art.
JORGE J. E. Gracia: Serrano's Piss Christ is perhaps one of the most controversial pieces of art that have been produced in recent times, and for reasons that are quite different from the reasons that other works of art have proved controversial in the past. Picasso's Les demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) was controversial because it revolutionized the art of the early twentieth century. A representation of a wild assemblage of women, with faces that emulated African masks and painted in the style that later developed into Cubism, engaged in some primitive rite, was more than the art world at the time could take, used as it was to the relatively harmless canvases of the Impressionists, dealing frequently with landscapes and flowers. It created an uproar and changed forever the course of painting in particular and art in general. One can easily speak of art before and after this work. And then we have the scandal caused by the pictures by Mapplethorpe. His explicitly sex- ual nudes, documenting ideas that the bourgeoisie hardly dared to dream, were again too much for the art world to absorb quickly. It took considerable digestion, aided by plenty of antacid medication, to get the art community to accept them-the general public is still hostile. But the case with the Serrano was different.
Not that Serrano did not innovate in the purely artistic dimension in his work. He specializes in humors, liquids, secretions, and the like, and Piss Christ follows this original line. But in it he went beyond...