I like and highly respect Eve Tushnet

She's one of the most original thinkers I know and seems to me to be obviously committed to trying to be a serious disciple of Jesus in the Catholic Church. I think the Church could use a million like her, but I also think God doesn't bless us with folks like her all that often, alas.

I say all that because I don't want the following to be taken as some sort of criticism of her. Rather I want it to be read as the crie de coeur it is intended to be toward the "arts community". I empathize with her desire to see good art and I will take her word for it that there was more to the Smithsonian's recent display than was seen through the ideological filters of the press. But still... well, here's the conversation from the combox on this blog entry:
Eve writes:

OK, since I've actually seen the exhibit twice, a few points:

1. How is it a "Christmas season" exhibit? It opened before Advent and IIRC closes after Epiphany. Anyway, would CNS approve of this exhibit if it were confined to Ordinary Time?

2. While most of the portraits alluded to in the article's title aren't very good, the "genitalia" are just normal nude portraits, often classical in composition and not pornographic. It's a portrait exhibit; some of the subjects are naked.

3. There's no question (...in my mind) that the images do represent "how questions of biography and identity went into the making of images that are canonical." The exhibit features both "canonical" portraitists (John Singer Sargent, Walker Evans, Lee Miller, Andy Warhol, Romaine Brooks, Georgia O'Keefe, Thomas Eakins, the guy who did "American Gothic" and whose name I can't recall, Carl Van Vechten, Marsden Hartley, Jasper Johns) and portraits of "canonical" authors/artists (Frank O'Hara, Arthur Rimbaud [in allusion], Djuna Barnes, Joseph Cornell, etc etc). A huge theme of the exhibit is how gay/same-sex-attracted/we-don't-know artists formed their own identities and aesthetics by finding historical precedents and/or friends with similar orientations and sensibilities, and then paid tribute to these predecessors/comrades. It really is about that.

4. Much of the artwork is elegiac, and many of the memorial portraits commemorate friends rather than lovers. Chaste (as far as we know) friendships: Even gay men do have them!

I found it an immensely moving exhibit even though the only artist whose work I really loved was Brooks.

Oh and 5. There's a sign noting that there's graphic imagery, or something like that, so if you took your children to see it you are told going in that it is not an exhibit of portraits of Koko the gorilla cuddling kittens.

Sorry to write at such length, but it's frustrating to see a genuinely thoughtful and poignant exhibit reduced to such crude descriptions.

She then follows herself by adding:

Argh, replying to myself: Now that I've read the entire CNS piece, I do agree with them that a "Family and Friends" day is completely inappropriate for this exhibit. I have no idea how they thought they could, or why they thought they should, make such a grim, death-haunted, and sexually-provocative exhibit "family-friendly." It's like taking your kids to an Italian horror movie.

I reply:

Perhaps because those in the Art Bubble are a tiny elite that is out of touch and contemptuous of the great mass of humanity outside the Bubble--particularly if they are Christian heterosexuals?

Which was more or less my point.

Eve answers:

Fair enough, definitely. I think my point was that returning the contempt--or, I think on both sides, the misunderstanding--doesn't do much good either. And doesn't, I think, help those of us trying to make Catholic art.

I respond:

Art is supposed to be a form of communication. Communication depends on not making your audience feel as though they are insects whom the artist utterly despises at the atomic level. Given that so much of the 'art community' (who are, after all, the *professionals* at communicating ideas, thoughts and feelings) communicates precisely this in one insult after another directed against the deepest beliefs of a huge percentage of the public, I humbly suggest that artists who are serious about getting out of the Bubble should consider creating art that does not look much of a muchness with all the other Christ-blaspheming rubbish we out in the Great Unwashed Public are constantly beaten over the head with. Lots of us have been punched in the nose by artistic works and then told, "You need to be more appreciative of my genius" by the artist. It's a communication strategy with limited returns. And it tends to engender "Oh no, not another one" responses in people like me, who lack the time, patience or inclination to discriminate the fine shades of nuance between an artist to who puts Jesus in piss and one who covers him in ants. It would be nice if artist suggested a small amount of love for our Lord and his followers instead of the normal contempt of the federal tit sucker for us slobs who are frog-marched to the IRS trough and made to cough up his commission while he craps in our Wheatie Bowl.

I'm acutely sensitive to the reality of Right Wing demagoguery about Christian sensitivities. We are just heading into the thick of the War on Christmas frenzy that the Bill O'Reillys and Sean Hannitys use each year to gin up ratings and sell beer and shampoo while living in contempt for Catholic teaching that inconveniences them. I'm aware of the way in which those guys exploit well-meaning Christian sensitivities.

But here's the thing: the Talk Radio heads who periodically whip disaffected Christians into a frenzy about things know that their audience is, in fact, regarded with complete and utter contempt by our Manufacturers of Culture. Casual blasphemy of Christ, Sister Boom Booms, juvenile mockery of Christians, and the quiet cocktail party atmosphere of disdain is endemic in the circles known as "polite company" in DC, NY and LA. Everybody knows it. Serious belief in Christ is a gaffe, a social faux pas, and a grave liability. So when an exhibit like this looks for all the world to be sounding the same old gong of contempt, I don't think the onus is on the *audience* to sit there and take it or be charged with philistinism. If an artist wants to *really* be courageous, he should break with the Herd of Independent Minds and create art that will not be immediately perceived as the umpteenth voiding of spittle on the Body of Christ. But waiting for an outburst or *real* courage from the "Arts Community" is steady work.