Prince’s gesture, however, is leveled not only at “art-lovers,” but at an American spiritual tendency more broadly, at the American proclivity for privately reveling in what it loudly condemns. In fact, “Spiritual America” met with controversy and confusion for its spectacular sexualization of a minor, soliciting at once desiring gazes and outraged condemnation. And this was just the point. In Prince’s hands, the pedophiliac image provided a way of unlocking the paradoxical nature of this country’s collective spiritual disposition. If, as Newman suggests, there is a “religious power” to Prince’s photo, it has to do in part with its function as an icon of American spirituality and a corresponding contradictory moralism. Engaging the gaze of the viewer in a manner at once complicitous and critical, the piece thus exceeds what Walter Benjamin called the modern artwork’s “exhibition value” and partakes of the “cult value” of religious art. At once ironic and iconic, Prince’s work illuminates a spiritual America that takes pleasure in conjuring what it condemns, loathing what it longs for.
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