I can tell you one way to sure as heck get noticed. Make a great skeptical podcast, and then let it drop that you've got a hot nerdcore tattoo on an, um, exquisite surface. That'll do it every time.

Sorry I couldn't call in live last night. I was just getting ready to visit my last customer of the evening, so I had to pop off a quick email instead.

Thank you for briefly touching on my Blasphemy Day art exhibit during this edition of Skeptically Speaking. My name is Dana Ellyn and I created all of the paintings in the exhibit.

Several of my paintings in this exhibit are among my most controversial. And, I have to agree that those few paintings (for example, "Jesus Gets His Nails Done") have had the affect you mentioned... they either enrage or empower the viewer.

But, to give a little more background on the exhibit & me:
I am a full time painter and I happen to be an agnostic/atheist. Therefore, over the course of the past many years, some of my paintings are on this specific subject. For me, having an exhibit on Blasphemy Day was my way of 'celebrating' my freedom to express myself in these paintings.

If anyone is interested in seeing more of my work, I invite you to visit my website at
http://www.danaellyn.com

And here's a link directly to all the press around my Blasphemy Day exhibit and all the paintings that are in the show:
http://danaellyn.com/press/blasphemy/blasphemy.html
Me and my art have been featured in articles about Blasphemy Day on CNN, USA Today, NPR and on such blogs as Pharyngula and many many more.

It's been a fascinating few weeks since all of this went 'prime time' for me. Thanks for being a part of this ongoing conversation!
My best,
Dana

Thanks very much for your comment, Dana.

It must be an interesting experience, being surrounded by this kind of controversy.

Your work is wonderful... even the non-blaspheming pieces. ;)

d

Your comment about the skeptic movement learning from the atheist movement struck me, because on the most recent episode of <a href="http://www.chariotsofiron.com/2009/10/491">Chariots of Iron</a>, a review of the recent AAI convention, the Charioteers were observing that the AAI seemed to be almost entirely made up of old white men talking about what they didn't believe in (a problem the Skeptic movement was having not that long ago). They were asking what the atheist movement can do to reach out to people and bring in new blood, and I ended up sending them an email about how well the Skeptical movement had been doing this over the past few years, with blogs, podcasts, Skeptics in the Pub, Daniel Loxton's "Where Do We Go From Here?" and "What Do I Do Next?" PDFs, etc.

At the Charioteers request, I ended up posting the email to the <a href="http://www.atheiskeptihumanist.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=62">Atheiskeptihumanist forum</a>. It seems to be, these days, that skeptics actually have the edge, at least in technique, in getting noticed. The atheists are still getting more press overall, of course -- probably because they had a head start, and (as you observed on the show) they're naturally more controversial, and therefore more "newsworthy".

One thing the atheists are doing pretty well these days is getting noticed with the billboards & bus ads. Someone at TAM (I can't remember who offhand) defined organized skepticism as the intersection of science education and consumer advocacy -- and getting some consumer advocacy advertising out before the public would be great.