A Wall Pitted by a Single Air Rifle Shot

Monday, September 21, 2026

Happy Monday, my friends! During college I spent a summer in Washington, DC, interning for a large urban congregation. Having grown up in a small town in Southeastern Ohio and being in the middle of attending college on the top of a mountain in rural Tennessee, DC was my first exposure to a city as an adult. I could explore at my leisure and, other than maintaining general safety, go anywhere the metro would take me. Having been directed to the significant cultural resources that the city has to offer, I ventured to the art museums where I soon realized that my hosts had omitted the Hirshhorn Museum from their guide to DC. The Smithsonian’s home to contemporary art, the Hirshhorn, I would come to learn, was a controversial institution to support or even visit. Even a friend my age looked at me with disgust and said, “Nothing in that ‘museum’ is art!”

I encountered Mel Chin’s Spirit (1994) at the Columbus Museum of Art when I was grade school. My first experience of the broad category of what might be called conceptual art, I began to recognize that art needed to challenge the world and evoke deep emotions to hold my attention. Yes, much of the art I prefer and return to breaches the categories of what many people are inclined to call “art,” but that’s the point. We should question our assumptions and question what we’ve been taught.

During its most recent exhibition in 2015, I stumbled upon Lawrence Weiner’s A WALL PITTED BY A SINGLE AIR RIFLE SHOT (1969) at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York (you can view a photo of the piece on the cover art for this essay). The piece begs the question: is the wall really pitted? Did MoMA allow one of their walls to be defaced in the name of art? Whether we can answer those questions is less important than that we ask them. We need not consider something “art” or “good art” or “acceptable art” for it to invoke strong emotions within us. When an Italian museum decided to display Martin Kippenberger’s Fred the Frog Rings the Bell (1990), a three-foot-tall green frog hanging on a cross with his tongue sticking out, even the pope got involved in the outrage. Few, if any, museums exhibiting Robert Maplethorpe’s photographs have done so without courting controversy given his sexualized images and take-no-prisoners attitude, though the latter identity was more about the images than the artist.

Even the most annoying and frustrating questions, challenges to our assumptions, and analyses of what compromises we choose to make when we’re questioned and challenged are all good processes.

What do you question? What do you find it hard to be questioned or challenged about?

Let us pray: God, the great artist of the world, grant us the will to see beauty and find our emotions evoked by both what we call “art” and what others call “art.” May we also recognize the grace found in questions and challenging our assumptions. Amen.

Blessings on your weeks, my friends! Please let me know if there’s anything I can do for you.

Faithfully,

Ben +

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