ISIS Militants Struggle To Identify Depictions of the Human Form in Iraqi Cubist Exhibition

Militants refuse to “disregard degrees of abstraction” before smashing shit with sledgehammer

Regional sources have this morning confirmed that ISIS militants ransacked several sites of cultural significance in Iraqi Kurdistan, but have been temporarily  brought to a halt by the abstract paintings on display in the Kurdish Museum of Modern Art which couldn’t definitively be said to depict the human form.

The assault follows a successful raid on Mosul Museum, where cultural artifacts were brutally destroyed. Unfortunately, the cubists’ subversion of the mimetic realism that underscores most of humanity’s artistic antiquities served only to confound the militants.

ISIS spokespeople complained of confusion, as typically blasphemous titles such as Two Men at Lunch were attached to predominantly geometric works that did not literally portray humans.

Speaking to The Garter, a fighter offered comment on Braque’s Portrait of a Woman, “It could be a human form to be idolised, but it could also just be a bunch of shapes on a canvas.  There are no provisions for squares and triangles in our faith.”

After their own attempts to identify idols proved fruitless, the militants proceeded to hold the exhibition’s curator at gunpoint. But even when threatened with execution she proved incapable of identifying the subjects of most of the works. The Garter understands that her last known words were “you clearly don’t understand art”.

Ultimately, only a solitary, little-known Metzinger was slashed. While all agreed that the painting was not an instance of idolatry, the ISIS militant who perpetrated the act was overheard justifying his decision: “I’ve always felt that Metzinger’s spatiotemporal complexities fail to properly counterbalance the flatness of the canvas. Also, his brushwork is lazy.”