If Glenn Beck had any marbles left, he's lost them now. Over at Vulture, Jerry Saltz asks, Is Glenn Beck's "Obama in Pee-Pee" Actually Art?
Ambling over to a tall pedestal, he lovingly cupped his hands around a jar filled with yellow liquid. He announced that he'd been drinking a lot of water all day, that this wasa jar of his own urine. He offered that this was his "yellow period," and told us it's "a warm piece of me," again seeming overinterested and excited, fondling the jar with both hands. Then he had an assistant bring him a little plastic figurine. It was a kind of dashboard Obama, maybe in a smock. Beck took the figure between his fingers, held it over the jar, and dropped it into the urine.
Beck, of course, has the First Amendment right to do this. But that doesn't change the fact that it's asinine, an attempt to spoof without understanding Andrès Serrano's famous "Piss Christ" (a real work of art that challenges our construction of the sacred and profane). It feels less artistic or even political, and more like something based on a homoerotic golden shower fantasy about Obama on Beck's part. There's no shame in that, Glenn; have the courage to come out.