That Andrew Serrano"s painting Piss Christ has caused an overwhelming amount of controversy and response is undeniable. A search on The Age"s Archives turned up no less than 72 articles related directly to Serrano"s Piss Christ, mainly from the time Serrano and the work visited Melbourne during 1997 and 1998. The exhibition of the work provoked some violent responses here. One Timur Grin caused almost $100,000 worth of damage to works at the National Gallery of Victoria, including damage to Piss Christ, although he then claimed not to be offended by the photograph and not even to be a Christian...
problem between representation and resemblance would collapse. Specifically, for Piss Christ, the blasphemous effects of the artwork would disappear if it did not in some way reproduce the claim to the sacredness of the Christ-figure. For Feher and Heller this means that, "Aesthetics is, consequently, irreformable, in the sense that its antinomic character is untranscendable" 22. Nonetheless the very artwork itself demands or desires that there should be a real correspondence with its value as art and aesthetic judgement about it. No artist, no matter how much they claim to be, can really be free of the critic"s impact.