Update to this story. And the Virgin Mary in elephant dung was just a ‘critique’…
For The New York Times, deciding which images are too offensive for publication is a tricky business.
On Monday, the paper published an image of Niki Johnson’s “Eggs Benedict,” a portrait of Pope Benedict XVI fashioned entirely out of condoms.
The artwork is “not hate-based,” the Milwaukee artist told the Times, but is meant only to “critique” Benedict’s views on sex and contraception “while raising awareness about public health.”
“What I want to do is really destigmatize the condom, normalize it,” she told the newspaper. “I’ve watched kids and parents talk about condoms. It opens a door to talking about what those things are and what they do.”
The Times’ decision to run an image of “Eggs Benedict” comes just five months after it opted not to show Charlie Hebdo’s infamously provocative artwork.
The newspaper’s executive editor, Dean Baquet, said in public statements at the time that the French satirical magazine’s cartoons were simply too offensive for publication.
“Was it hard to deny our readers these images? Absolutely. But we still have standards, and they involve not running offensive material,” Baquet told the Washington Examiner in January. “And they don’t meet our standards. They are provocative on purpose. They show religious figures in sexual positions. We do not show those.”