I just wanted to make people think and, like, that stuff
Mack Hall

A sad, paint-by-stereotype woman named Kate Kretz has dazzled the world of lemmings with a painting of Angelina Jolie as Jesus' Mother flying around a Wal-Mart.

You, gentle reader, can view the image for free on the 'net, and you should, in order to experience a wonderful example of hand-medown mediocrity made famous through puffery. You need not pay the asking price, $50,000, for the original, offered by Chelsea Galleria in Miami - and that a business styles itself "Chelsea" is the clearest evidence of hokiness, Chelsea being the ultimate Low Prole attempt to sound somehow vaguely English and classy. And "galleria" instead of "gallery" speaks only to the crowd, not to you.

In the painting artist Kretz has used the image of Jolie in a conventional representation of the Blessed Mother, somehow persuading herself that the same old tired mockery dating back to John Knox is cutting edge/avante garde/pushing the envelope/cliche' of choice. Yawn.

According to the Associated Press, artist Kretz says "My intention was to ask a question and to get people to think. I had no idea so many people would be asking a question and thinking."

Well, my fellow little people, don't we feel special! We weren't thinking until artist Kretz showed us the way. O' blessed artist Kretz, we thank you for teaching us to think!

Perhaps all of us, in adolescence, have done the I-want-to-change-the-world-andmake people-think thing, judging the world in our pimply omniscience and finding it wanting. But most of us grow out of it and develop at least a little bit of humility for ourselves, respect for suffering humanity, and reverence for God's creation. We try not to laugh at the 16-year-old who whines such fatuous drivel, but when a 43-year-old styling herself an artist groans out such wheezes, laughter - loud, hooting, raucous laughter - can be the only intelligent response.

"I want to make people think" is even lower than "It's my culture; you wouldn't understand" as a selfcrippling excuse for boorishness.

Since artist Kretz has done the Iwant to-make-people-think thing, I will in response do the sensitivity thing:

Christians know (one may insert "believe," if he wishes) that, for reasons best covered by real thinkers, not by me, God chose to incarnate Himself as a human and then to allow Himself to be tortured to death so that humanity would, in the end, be saved in spite of itself. As part of this plan, God chose a human girl, whose name in English is Mary, to suffer public embarrassment, a rough journey to register with the Romans, and childbirth in terrible conditions. Mary later watched her son, her child, not some abstract concept, humiliated, beaten, whipped through the streets, stripped naked, and nailed up to die horribly in front of a laughing crowd.

If artist Kretz wants to make fun of this woman, well, she can, though even to the unbeliever the idea of portraying as floating in a Wal-Mart a widow whose one child has been murdered by the State is insensitive.

Should Christians be outraged? Probably not; outrage in such matters is old indeed. Laughter at the layered-kitsch painting, yes, and pity for artist Kretz, but not outrage. After 500 years of such, it's merely boring, the equivalent of Allen Ginsberg's Howl, and pretentious words cannot make it otherwise.

Artist Kretz referred to thinking, even though she herself in following old, hollow examples of the shallowest sort of mockery has failed to think at all.

Mack Hall is a resident of Kirbyville.