ABSTRACT
People in my profession consider such things as “Jesus 2000”untouchable. Some scholars who study visual culture might be inter-ested in the “Jesus 2000” contest because it is part of a widespread phenomenon in popular culture. That sociological approach avoids the problem of the art’s quality and importance in order to consider it, dispassionately, as a fact of contemporary life. I can imagine some art critics becoming interested in McKenzie’s painting because it is “so bad it’s good”—that is, it conforms to Susan Sontag’s original definition of camp.1
For the most part “Jesus 2000” has no place in contemporary academic thinking on art.
