Andres Serrano, “Blood on the Flag” (9/11), 2001-2004. © Andres Serrano and courtesy Galerie Nathalie Obadia Paris/ Bruxelles.
By Paul Ben-Itzak
Text copyright 2016 Paul Ben-Itzak
In a jaundiced media climate in which too many journalists seem more interested in confirming stereotypes than confronting them, what artists can provide is a perspective guided not by fixed political, racial, national, or societal constructs but by their own inherent acute aesthetic antennae and geographic sensibility. Such is the frank portrait etched of the United States — not incidentally providing a much-needed antidote to the tired stereotypes the American presidential election has enabled much of the French media to regurgitate (we’re just a bunch of Puritan sexists, 60 million of us are in prison, ad nauseum) — by the photographs of Andres Serrano in a major exhibition opening November 9 at the City of Paris’s Maison Européenne de la Photographie, where it continues through January 29.
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The Arts Voyager 