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.”
Baquet’s remarks came shortly after two jihadists attacked Charlie Hebdo’s Paris offices, murdering 10 journalists and two police officers. The attack was in response to the magazine’s repeated mockery of Islam and Muhammad.
"[L]et’s not forget the Muslim family in Brooklyn who read us and is offended by any depiction of what he sees as his prophet,” Baquet explained in a statement to Politico. “I don’t give a damn about the head of [the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria] but I do care about that family and it is arrogant to ignore them.”
For the Times, there’s no comparison between “Eggs Benedict” and Charlie Hebdo’s controversial Muhammed artwork.
“There’s no simple, unwavering formula we can apply in situations like this. We really don’t want to gratuitously offend anyone’s deeply held beliefs. That said, it’s probably impossible to avoid ever offending anyone,” the Times’ associate managing editor for standards Phil Corbett told the Examiner Monday, defending the newspaper’s decision to publish Johnson’s handiwork.
“We have to make these judgments all the time. Reasonable people might disagree about any one of them,” he said.
An official with the Milwaukee Art Museum, which will soon display Johnson’s portrait, told the Times he hopes the condom-laden image will “bring not only controversy, but room for conversation about the underlying discussion the artist intended as well as regarding the role of art in public discussion.”
The Times’ Corbett told the Examiner, “I don’t think these situations – the Milwaukee artwork and the various Muhammad caricatures – are really equivalent. For one thing, many people might disagree, but museum officials clearly consider this Johnson piece to be a significant artwork.”
“Also, there’s no indication that the primary intent of the portrait is to offend or blaspheme (the artist and the museum both say that it is not intended to offend people but to raise a social question about the fight against AIDS). And finally, the very different reactions bears this out,” he added. “Hundreds of thousands of people protested worldwide, for instance, after the Danish cartoons were published some years ago. While some people might genuinely dislike this Milwaukee work, there doesn’t seem to be any comparable level of outrage.”
In May, the Times’ editorial board published a scathing op-ed criticizing activist Pamela Geller for hosting an intentionally controversial “Draw Muhammad” event in Garland, Texas.
"[T]he Muhammad Art Exhibit and Contest...was not really about free speech. It was an exercise in bigotry and hatred posing as a blow for freedom,” the editorial board wrote, pillorying the group that hosted the event, the American Freedom Defense Initiative, and Geller. “As for the Garland event, to pretend that it was motivated by anything other than hate is simply hogwash.”
The Times has been criticized in the past for having an apparently inconsistent policy when it comes to publishing controversial – and even offensive – images.
In 1999, for example, the Times published Chris Ofili’s “The Holy Virgin Mary,” a painting of Christ’s mother fashioned entirely out of feces and adorned with cutouts of genitalia from pornographic magazines.
In 2005, 2006 and 2010, the Times republished anti-Semitic cartoons in full.