“As an artist, you have to take a stand for things,” Vilks, who has a PhD in art history, said in 2010, according to USA Today. “If you do something, you have to take full responsibility for it. I’m actually not interested in offending the prophet. The point is actually to show that you can. There is nothing so holy you can’t offend it.”…
Vilks, who reportedly sleeps with an ax by his bedside and booby-traps his art with electrified barbed wire, has also constructed a safe room patterned after a design used that reportedly saved Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, according to the Christian Science Monitor.
When a reporter from Russia Today caught up with Vilks, he appeared on film matter-of-factly discussing his safety with the ax in his hand.
“It could be that someone tried to do something at nighttime,” he told RT.
