The Last Supper Imitation?

Recently, in the year 2008, a magazine company in Indonesia, Koran Tempo, apologized to the people and the Christian community as their magazine’s cover was offending to Christians. The people questioned the magazine asking how the former president Suharto and his children in a replica image of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Last Supper painting.

(Source: Google 2009)

This was the cover page for their February edition in 2008. Christian and others had found it offensive as the former president Suharto and his children was seated exactly the same way that Jesus and his disciples were sitting.

(Source: Google 2009)

After this issue was brought up, the magazine company immediately apologized to their audiences claiming that they did not mean to offend anyone especially the Christian group. In my opinion, it is very disrespectful towards the Christian society not only in Indonesia, but through out the world. According to ABC (2008), the chief editor of the magazine claimed that the company was merely inspired by the painting and not through the context mentioned in the Bible. Walsh (2006) also stated that meaning relates to the reader’s originally possess information, mostly cultural and general which enables them to process different information in a different way.

Putnis & Petelin (1996) strongly states that a document designer should identify three basic elements before producing a document which are audience, context and purpose. This has shown that the document designers in Koran Tempo magazine did not thought of the audience before publishing and designing that front cover of the magazine. According to Petitt (2008), the Christians in Indonesia were in anger when they saw this front cover due to how they replaced Jesus Christ and his disciple by former president Suharto and his family in the exact same margin of the original painting.

In conclusion, although the Koran Tempo is a famous magazine in Indonesia and they had apologized to the public, their decision for publishing that front cover is an example of unethical publishing as it offending a large group of people. This magazine would probably be boycotted by most of the people in Indonesia especially the Christian society for publishing unethical images.

References

ABC 2008, 'Indonesian weekly apologises over Last Supper Suharto cover', viewed 14 November 2009, http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/02/06/2156269.htm

Petitt, KA 2008, Educating Indonesia's Christians, Cook International, viewed 14 November 2009, http://www.cookinternational.org/pages/page.asp?page_id=32048

Putnis, P, & Petelin, R 1996, Professional communication: principles and applications, Prentice Hall, Sydney.

Walsh, M 2006, ‘The ‘textual shift’: Examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts’, Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, Vol. 29, No. 1, pp. 24-37