The Metropolitan Museum of Art's recent decision to withdraw depictions of Muhammad from public display to appease a conservative segment of its Muslim audience sets a problematic precedent. Though the facial representation in the work in question, an Islamic painting from present-day Uzbekistan, The Night Journey of Muhammad on his Steed, Buraq, is unique within a tradition that has often eschewed any figural representation, it does not seemingly beach the Qur'an's general idolatry taboo, a restriction which has in Wahabist and other radical Qur'anic interpretations, been reconfigured as severe, total aniconisim. More to the point: The Met is a comprehensive museum, the closest we have to a living encyclopedia, and it is inappropriate for the curators of this--a publicly-funded museum--to cater to the specific tastes, interests, or practices of individual groups.  The portrayal of Muhammad has a substantial history within the Islamic faith (pictured here: Muhammad at the Kaaba, from Siyer-i Nebi, c. 1388) and this tradition should be represented in the wing, regardless of whether such depictions are currently forbidden in certain strains of the religion. Would it make sense for the museum to withdraw images of Catholic saints from view because Protestants dispensed with them in their practice? Certainly not. The Met has not only a right but a responsibility to present as complete a record of the Qur'anic figures as possible. And frankly, the museum should, without fear of backlash, be able to accurately reflect the historical record by balancing these piety-oriented images of Muhammad with those by William Blake, Gustave Doré, and other European artists, which, following from Dante's Inferno (Canto 28, verses 30-31), portray the prophet disemboweled, walking with a weeping Ali.  Censorship of history need not be a necessary symptom of cultural relativism.

A decade after his death, Martin Wong's work is on view in a solo show at P.P.O.W., including Court Room Shocker: Jimmy the Weasil Sings Like a Canary (1981, acrylic on canvas), in which gang signs are configured as mudras (Sanskrit word for “signs”), the ancient symbolic hand gestures used in Hindu and Buddhist practice and art. Key figure in the Lower East Side of the 1980s, Wong's paintings are perhaps most closely associated with the grapheme of tenement New York, the brick, which, like a latter-day Jacob Riis, he repetitively committed to pictorial form.  Wong's interest in the reconciliation of the street and the gallery also took form in his amassment of possibly the largest collection of graffiti-styled art,  later donated to the Museum of the City of New York.  

Jon Rafman's  Kool-Aid Man in Second Life is a must watch. The video reconfigures the soft-drink mascot as the epic hero of an odyssey through virtual reality, including stops at an orgy, a Mesoamerican pyramid, and Tokyo.