Visual culture in the news, pt. I

Here are a few recent news stories I've come across this week relating to visual culture:

The Roman Catholic Archbishop of Cologne (Köln), Cardinal Joachim Meisner, recently sparked controversy when he said (in a sermon on the inauguration of a new museum housing the art collection of Cologne's Catholic archdiocese) that when art becomes estranged from worship, culture becomes 'degenerate.'
The scandal lies not so much in the surface sentiment expressed, but by the Archbishop's choice of words, 'degenerate,' German 'entartete' : the exact term used by the National Socialist (Nazi) regime to smear modern art (Expressionism and Dadaism, in particular) as anti-German, bolshevik, Jewish, and dangerous, as in the 1937 exhibition of modern art organized by the Nazis in Munich under the title Entartete Kunst (or degenerate art)... See the BBC article here.

Meanwhile, in a kind of repeat of last year's protests and calls for assassination over the publication of cartoons satirizing the Prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper, the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq publically called for the murder of a Swedish cartoonist who published a cartoon in a Swedish newspaper depicting Muhammad with a dog's body. A reward of $100,000 is offered to anyone who undertaking to kill the cartoonist. See the CBC article here.

And, closer to home, a controversy surrounding the announcement last week that Muslim women wearing the veil (niqab, burqa) would not be required to remove it to show their faces at federal polling stations, brought to light some interesting questions about identity and visibility.