The term “culture war” derives from the German Kulturkampf, coined in the time of Bismarck for the conflict between the Catholic Church and the Prussian state. It seems to have entered the American vocabulary largely through the sociologist James Davison Hunter’s 1991 book, “Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America,” and historians have been refining the story ever since.
~ Louis Menand via The New Yorker
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Religious iconography was on Andres Serrano’s palette from the start. He collects religious artifacts and uses church pews as living-room couches. Like many nonobservant Catholics, he appears to be anticlerical but not anti-Christian.
~ Louis Menand via The New Yorker
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“Piss Christ” isn’t the most sophisticated art work ever made. But it was made by an artist, for artistic reasons.
~ Louis Menand via The New Yorker
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Convinced he had little talent as a painter or a sculptor, Andres Serrano borrowed a friend’s camera and began taking pictures. He insists he isn’t a photographer, and he doesn’t develop his own prints. He thinks of himself as an artist who uses a camera.
~ Louis Menand via The New Yorker
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Robert Mapplethorpe, a student of photographic history, wasn’t conferring dignity on a taboo subculture; he was after great photographs, although he understood that one of the things that can make a photograph great is the charge of the forbidden. What unified his work, across subjects, was what the French call le glacis de la lumière — a polished, technically exacting finish.
~ Louis Menand via The New Yorker
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“Piss Christ” may also nod to Gauguin’s “The Yellow Christ.” Andres Serrano first tried his wife’s urine, then switched to his own, judging it yellower.
~ Louis Menand via The New Yorker
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