.
The point about high art versus low art, the former suitable for a museum and the latter suitable for *spit* the funny pages, is meaningless. No one at the Times would dare suggest in any other context that cartoons require recognition by a museum to qualify as “significant artwork.” The Danish Mohammed cartoons and Hebdo Mohammed cartoons were vastly more significant than this standard Piss-Christ-esque goof on the Pope in terms of the global reaction they provoked, yet the Times blacked out both of them. Even in the best-case scenario here, where Corbett’s not transparently bullsh*tting, he’s telling you that whether artwork is worthy of publication in the New York Times turns not on its
news value but on whether elite opinion deems it aesthetically meritorious. As for the distinction between intending to offend, as the Hebdo cartoons supposedly did, and raising a “social question,” as the Pope portrait supposedly did, those are two sides of the same coin. The Mohammed cartoons raise a question too — “should a society that purports to defend free speech make exceptions under threat of violence for blasphemy?” — and that question has lots more currency in the west right now than what a former Pope thinks about condoms. Besides, who gets to judge on whether an artist’s intent was to offend or not? If all it takes to get a Charlie Hebdo cartoon into the NYT is for the editors to lie and say, “No, really, we didn’t think it’d provoke anyone,” they might as well do it. It means nothing.
The point about “different reactions” is as close to the truth as he gets. Back in January, when the Times was taking heat for not printing the Hebdo cartoons despite having printed anti-semitic cartoons in the past, editor
Dean Baquet rambled on about how the worst of the Mohammed cartoons were
especially offensive because they featured Mohammed in sexually explicit acts. How would the average Muslim family in NYC feel seeing an image like that in the paper of record, he wondered. A Politico reporter responded to him that the average Jewish family in NYC probably wouldn’t feel jazzed to see an anti-semitic cartoon in the paper either, yet the Times would run that. To which Baquet
said this:
“I would really do some reporting — I did — to make sure these parallels are similar for the two religions. You may find they are not. In fact they really are not.”
The Mohammed image is more offensive to the Muslim than the Nazi image is to the Jew. Why? Because of the “very different reactions” that Corbett referenced in responding to Becket Adams. He’s not willing to be fully candid about what those “reactions” entail — Corbett mentions only protests, not jihadis shooting up the Charlie Hebdo newsroom — but we’re getting closer to real candor from western media types as the double standard between offending Muslims and offending Christians gets starker. (Some papers are already
admirably candidabout it.) Why keep pretending when everyone but everyone recognizes that fear, not “religious sensitivity,” is driving this? Better to admit it and earn a few points with readers for being honest about your motives than to keep dancing around the issue. In fact, despite the glaring hypocrisy of running the Pope photo, I’m glad the NYT went that route instead of censoring the photo out of an impulse to be “evenhanded” in censoring blasphemy towards all religions just because they’re afraid to offend Islam. The more they’re wiling to defend blasphemy of non-Islamic faiths, the harder it’ll be for blasphemy to become a wider cultural norm and the more a new generation of editors might be willing to rethink the aversion to Islamic blasphemy.
