Maybe you've heard of Pyotr Pavlensky.  He is a Russian street artist whose art has made quite a splash in Europe lately.  Why?  Pavlensky's art is rooted in him mutilating himself.
     Some of us may be asking whether this is art.  If art is expression, then it is.  Pavlensky does art with a purpose, to make a point.  We may not like it, we may find it repulsive, but we should at least examine its point.  In the same way that Pussy Riot used the interior of a Russian Orthodox cathedral to play music as a protest to what they considered to be Vladimir Putin's repressive policies, Pavlensky uses his own body to lodge his dissent of the same.  At times, his actions make us cringe:  wrapping himself in barbed wire or nailing his scrotum to the pavement of the Red Square.  But like most street theatre, it is art that attracts attention.  And that is the point:  expression as protest.
     More broadly speaking, however, all art is protest.  It is protest against accepting what is and an openness to what could be.  It takes what is there and makes something new, something that has never been seen before.  Art makes us think.  It makes us think about what else, in this broken world, is possible.  We need it desperately.
     Even from a person who mutilates himself.  Even Pavlensky, a person made in the image of God, has reason to be.