Friday, July 24, 2015

Best, better, Beastist

It being a very, very slow news day, consider how often, when you are just about to do something important, you find yourself thinking, “I wonder what happened to Beast Jesus?” Well, here’s an update.  It's close on three years since Cecilia Gimenez took to Elias Garcia Martinez’s painting Ecce Homo. After an outcry by the professional cultural industries, the public started to vote with their feet and BJ (that’s Beast Jesus not Baby Jesus) became a major tourist attraction with the local version of PWC figuring it was bringing in hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of income. From the get go everyone who visited in the first few months paid .80 Euro and that alone brought in just under $NZ 200,000. Other news? Not so much but the digital Beast is kind of cute and didn’t want you to miss out on the coffee BJ or the BJ doll.