From the world of art:

An Italian museum on Thursday defied Pope Benedict and refused to remove a modern art sculpture portraying a crucified green frog holding a beer mug and an egg that the Vatican had condemned as blasphemous.

The board of the Museion museum in the northern city of Bolzano decided by a majority vote that the frog was a work of art and would stay in place for the remainder of an exhibition.

Great news. Now can we please use these skills the next time there’s a work of art that offends Muslims?

The Vatican wrote a letter of support in the pope’s name to Franz Pahl, president of the regional government who opposed the sculpture. Pahl released parts of the letter, which said the work “wounds the religious sentiments of so many people who see in the cross the symbol of God’s love“.

In other words, he thinks his ideas are so important that everyone else should tiptoe around them to save his feelings.

Then he holds his breath and turns blue.

Pahl, whose province is heavily Catholic, was so outraged by the sculpture of the pop-eyed amphibian that he went on a hunger strike to demand its removal and had to be taken to hospital during the summer.

I hope he’s okay now. At least he only tried to harm himself rather than others, so props for that. But he (and everyone) needs to realise that it’s not okay for his ideas (or mine, or anyone’s) to be exempted from satire, scrutiny, or even criticism and mockery.

“Art must always be free and the artist should not have any restrictions on freedom of expression,” Claudio Strinati, a superintendent for Rome’s state museums, told an Italian newspaper on Thursday.

Most encouraging.