What’s next? A candy cane Muhammad?!?!

The Easter season unveiling of an anatomically correct chocolate sculpture of Jesus Christ, dubbed “My Sweet Lord” by its creator, has infuriated Catholics preparing to observe some of their holiest days of the year.



The 1.8-metre sculpture by artist Cosimo Cavallaro was to debut Monday evening, the day after Palm Sunday and just four days before Roman Catholics mark the crucifixion of Jesus Christ on Good Friday. The final day of the exhibit at the Lab Gallery inside midtown Manhattan’s Roger Smith Hotel was planned for Easter Sunday.

Last night’s news carried a story about the six-foot anatomically correct chocolate Jesus currently on display at the Roger Smith Hotel here in midtown. There are lots of things I have to wonder about with something like this. Lots of funny yet totally blasphemous things that will undoubtedly condemn me to an eternity of torment.

Aside from the fact I have the tune from the Depeche Mode song echoing through my head with one small lyric change... ‘Your own... Choc-O-Late Je-sus...’ The other things that ran through my mind was, if the chocolate Jesus statue is anatomically correct, then it must be circumcised?

No?

Jesus was Jewish after all.

Then, I was thinking if there was such an uproar over the a guy made a chocolate Jesus, I can only wonder if he had made it out of dark chocolate instead of milk chocolate and the uproar there might have been over that kind of implied political statement.

It’s not shocking to me after all, I have the Buddy Christ sitting atop my computer monitor.



Still, it does seem a bit offensive and nasty. You know, it is Easter Week and that does account for something to Christians.

We hear about freedom of expression and I’m actually a proponent of it but, I think some people in the art world take the easy way out. It’s too easy these days to take a Christian religious icon and do something like this. For all the talk of uproar and everything, the gallery owner and the artist’s lives aren’t in any danger. If he had done a chocolate figure of Muhammad can you begin to imagine what the response would have been? The guy would be in hiding and we’d have demonstrations across the planet.

I’m not pious by any stretch of the imagination but, it just seems tacky, there’s really no other way to state it. As much as the gallery owner talks about his surprise to the response, there is a part of me that doesn’t wonder if it isn’t all calculated to generate as much publicity and notoriety as possible. It is not so much about making a statement or getting a message across as much as making a name for one’s self and becoming a celebrity.

Seems to me there’s a big difference between the two.