What's Wrong with This Picture?

Submitted the infamous "Mr. Bun" to a critique forum and raised a ruckus, getting myself (temporarily) kicked off the site. Comments were, to say the least, intemperate. I'll paraphrase them and copy my replies.

A lady complained: "Really sick." Told me I should grow up, had obviously removed the photo to hide my name, etc. (It was removed when I was kicked off.) "PP" is the name of the website.

Some folks lead such happy lives that the sight of a dead animal shocks them. I doubt this photo would get highly ionized comments from viewers in Africa or Afghanistan. Which is a good thing, of course. When you're well fed you can argue matters of taste.

If PP's rules listed dead bunnies as a no-no I wouldn't have posted "Mr. Bun," just as I wouldn't post a photo of a ham on an Islamic website. In my book one of the worst sins is impoliteness – for example, telling an old man to grow up.

I thought of removing the photo, but of course after reading your comment I can't do so. Cheer up: maybe I'll be ostracized again.

Nothing daunted, she replied that she had seen her share of "death and decease" and that she was a cancer survivor who didn't need to be told she was impolite.

Speaking of "death and decease," I'm not quite sure how your having cancer amounts to a critique of my photo. The rabbit shown here succumbed to trauma.

You don't consider it impolite to tell a grown man he's childish, "really sick," tasteless, and a coward who hides his identity? Your politeness threshold must be high, so you won't mind being told that too many of my friends didn't survive cancer for me to be much impressed that you did.

When argument fails, show your scars.

The next is too tasty to paraphrase. "I'm an ALL ANIMAL LOVER and this really pissed me off. I know the facts of life and death but this is too much ..."

Not quite sure what an "all animal lover" is, and would rather not speculate, but I take your point. I loved my mother and father so much I refused to look at them when they lay dying.

If you know the facts of life and death, I wish you'd tell me what they are. I've lived a long time and expect to die pretty soon, but I still don't know the facts.

Nearly everybody said that I and my photo were "tasteless."

Most of the comments here say the photo lacks taste, but can that be right? A glass of water is tasteless; a glass of whiskey isn't.

D.H. said the photo was not only tasteless but "uncalled for."

"Uncalled for"? Surely this site invites people to post their photos. Or if you mean "unnecessary," the comments I see here suggest a crying need for my kind of irony.

D.H. replied, "Irony? Try Stupidity!"

Tut tut, Donnie. If I'm stupid, what are you?

"Blocked!" was D.H.'s response, which left me puzzled. Anyway, a Canadian commenter said the photo was "at the very limit of good taste."

As I suggested in an earlier reply, taste is very important to me. GOOD taste is a personal matter. I like caviar, but many of my friends say it tastes awful.

Another didn't like the purple background.

Glad to see a critical comment, the first so far. I once read an article by a famous critic – can't remember whether it was Susan Sontag or Clement Greenberg – attacking one of Picasso's most famous paintings. They didn't like the purple background. Finally, M.G. wrote a rather sympathetic and sensible note: "'Tasteless'? Well, good taste was obviously not part of your program."

No, good taste isn't in my program. Public taste varies from place to place and time to time, like fashions in makeup. I've seldom been in sync with it. I don't worry about my lack of good taste any more than I worry about not wearing lipstick.

I deny that this photo, or any other photo I've made, has a message or even a meaning. I simply want people to see things differently, as if for the first time, and perhaps to think about something they never thought about, notice something they've looked at a few million times but never saw. Gertrude Stein (I invoke famous names not because I'm famous or want to be famous but because there's not much point in parables about Harold "Peanut" Krezenski, who runs the newspaper stand at the town bus stop), asked about the meaning of her line "A rose is a rose is a rose..." (originally printed in a circle so it had no beginning and no end), said she believed she'd made people see a cliché as something more, that she'd made the rose fresh for the first time since Shakespeare. (Modesty wasn't her weakness.)

What's wrong with this picture? Is it really disgusting? I wish every viewer would stare at it until it becomes banal. As a friend of mine said when I showed it to him and told him lots of viewers said it spoiled their appetite, "In Afghanistan or Vietnam they'd probably ask you for the recipe." He got the point.

Others will find other points in it. Most won't find anything. Most people are asleep, so soundly asleep no shock can wake them. They'll die in their sleep, won't even notice that they're dead. I envy them. Some artists honor the sleepers and compose only lullabyes. Others, the unkind ones to whose company I aspire, use irony to trick the audience awake. Such artists should probably be strangled at birth. Plato thought so.