Well, moot or not, I’d still like to hear your answer to the question.
Anyway, from the rest of this post, it seems I have failed to make my position clear, so let me see if I can rectify that.
I understand perfectly well why many Christians were offended by this picture: because they were told to be offended by it.
Certainly, it didn’t take much convincing - it’s a representation of their God, covered in urine. The obvious and easiest interpretation is that the artist is trying to insult their god. The problem is, that interpretation is fatally flawed. It doesn’t stand up to analysis, because (among other reasons) the image itself actually looks quite reverent. Serrano is a visual artist - his primary message is going to be delivered visually, and the visual here is quite lovely. If he wanted to deliver a message that was disrespectful, he probably would have gone with something like this. But he didn’t. While he may have used profane materials, the product appears quite reverent.
This creates an interesting contrast. Urine is generally regarded as unclean, but it can be used to produce something that’s quite beautiful. And that’s a central part of Christian theology, isn’t it? Christ was God cloaked in the profane material of our fallen world, so that he could offer us a message of spiritual salvation. In this interpretation, the urine is representational of the physical world as a whole, which is still unable to conceal the glory of Christ.
Now, as to the question of whether Serrano intended this image to be insulting: As a general rule, I don’t like to speculate about the intentions of artists. I prefer to let the work speak for itself. In this case, though, I don’t think Serrano intended the picture to be insulting at all. I think he was well aware of the *potential *for insult, and I think a big part of the painting relies on that potential. Serrano was certainly well aware of the values most people attach to the two subjects of this photograph, and how most people would interpret their interplay. I think he not only anticipated that, but incorporated and subverted it. Instead of the piss recontextualizing the crucifix as something being defiled, the crucifix recontextualizes the piss as something beautiful and holy.
At the same time, Serrano was probably also aware that most people wouldn’t be interested (or able) in doing that level of analysis on his picture. But then, Serrano also never expected most people to ever see the damn thing. Which brings us back to what I said up top about Christians being insulted by this thing because they were told to be. Serrano was working with some volatile subject matter, in a way that could easily be misread as insulting. But he was presenting it in a venue where he had a reasonable expectation that most people seeing it would be receptive to the idea that understanding a work of art can sometimes require one to reexamine or abandon their immediate assumptions; that they would be people who, at least intuitively, understand the concepts of contrast and recontextualization, and are amenable to those concepts being applied to controversial subjects. In short, he made a picture that was intended to hang in modern art galleries, where it would be viewed by fans of modern art. If he was trying to insult people, he was showing his pictures to the wrong crowds. The only reason he became a national figure is because a couple of politicians picked his painting out as an example of Evil Liberal Elites trying to destroy Our Christian Nation. And people got outraged, because rather than look at the picture and think about it for themselves for five minutes, they just went with whatever Jesse Helms told them about it.
Which I find mildly contemptible.
), a work is properly judged as a whole or not at all. It doesn’t really get more basic than this.