It would be difficult to miss the point more completely

So: this hotshot Manhattan artist gets written up in the New Yorker for painting Michaelangelo-style paintings--except with the subject matter taken from, well, internet porn. Synopsis of the article is here; the whole article's not up yet. (There's also a slideshow on the New Yorker's site with one NSFW slide-- I'm not gonna link it, not that you're missing much, artistically or otherwise. The guy is technically pretty good; about like Larry Salk.)

But "transgressive" art is not the story here, and I doubt this is anything new on the Manhattan gallery scene anyway. Story is why he's doing it. For that we turn to First Things:

...the why behind Currin’s unabashed pornography: Currin is fighting against the rise of violent Islamic fundamentalism. In short, Currin is fighting a culture war. He cites the riots over the Danish cartoons of Muhammad and the murder of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, and says, “That’s when it occurred to me that we might lose this thing–not the Iraq war but the larger struggle.” Tomkins continues:

When I asked how this tied into his making pornographic paintings, Currin talked about low birth rates in Europe, and people having sex without having babies, and pornography as a kind of elegy to liberal culture, at which point I lost the thread. “I know how right wing this sounds,” I recall him saying, “but I was thinking how pornography could be a superstitious offering to the gods of a dying race.”

"Gods of a dying race"? Which race is that? If he means the God of those Renaissance painters whose style he's aping, I'm pretty sure He's not interested...buddy, the idea is that He invented sex, He doesn't need your pretentious half-assed skeev-o-gram.

As for the culture war, wouldn't that be cool if the West could just fight Islamofascism by sitting around making pornography? "Oh, you blew up San Diego, Zawahiri, well...here's a picture of three ladies gettin' after it! What does that do, does that blow your mind?" Bring the troops home, make Ron Jeremy Secretary of Defense. It wouldn't make a damn lick of sense, but it would sure be fun. (Thing is, if there were anything to this theory, I think we would have already won by now.)

But enough of my bourgeois tut-tutting. I'll just point out that the whole thing is not transgressive at all; it's quite derivative. E. Buzz Miller did this schtick years ago.