Baghdad Barbie

Yesterday BBC News reported on the Aussie Christian hoo-ha over two of the entries in the 56th Blake Prize for Religious Art, which most of us had never heard of until then. Satirical artist Priscilla Bracks has been savaged for her entry: Bearded Orientals, Making the Empire Cross, a picture which "morphs", as the BBC puts it, between images of Sword of Allah Osama Bin Laden and Jesus Christ. "Gratuitously offensive" moans the Aussie PM, a typical knee-jerk reaction. Your ace cub reporter has dug deeper into this morass and found that Making the Empire Cross is a series of paintings that satirize the clash of cultures in the Iraq war (CLICK). And if Aussie Christians don't like it they can blame the Queensland Government, which, through Arts Queensland, paid Priscilla Bracks $9,999 "to produce and present this series of artworks". Removed from the context of the Blake Prize, the series is an inoffensive, even mainstream, anti-war protest. Episode Two is Baghdad Barbie in the Cradle of Civilisation (CLICK), Battle for the High Ground (2007) shown.