But how can these brave new postmodernists fail to see that Heiner is a kindred spirit, indeed by rights one of their leading lights? In flinging his paint on a museum-certified piece of art, Heiner transgresses against the elitist conventions of the museum world, daring to see private museum exhibits as a fit canvas for his own conceptual rebellion against what Munson would call the NEA-funded "official art" of our time. Heiner's work is living proof of Munson's theorem: "Postmodern academic art had become Government Art." First funded by taxpayers, protected now by government police squads.
Oh, the NEA defenders pretend their favorite-funded artists are brave transgressors of the status quo, but the truth is that postmodern art has become as tediously and predictably formulaic as earlier forms of academic art: Find a taboo, break it. Add taxpayer dollars and publicists. Denounce Jesse Helms. Shake and repeat ad nauseum. Collect at the box office.
It took Dennis Heiner, the ultimate outsider artist, to find a live taboo within the art world that poses as taboo-breakers, and by breaking it expose the academy's shallow, rigid, sad hypocrisy.
Of course, Heiner was not tried by a jury of his fellow performance artists. A jury of regular folk, philistines unschooled in the postmodern formulas, saw only an old guy, upset at slurs over the Virgin Mary, who took the law in his own hands and tried to destroy a work of art that did not belong to him.
How bourgeois can you get?