The London newspaper, the Independent, reports that Monsignor Gianfranco Ravasi, the president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, claims that the Church “is searching for rich patrons to sponsor works in new houses of worship designed by cutting-edge architects.” The problem, he claims, is that the Church no longer has sufficient sway in the world of cutting edge art, so it is setting up a committee “to find ‘world-famous’ contemporary artists it can commission to produce new religious and spiritual works.”
Apparently, Monsignor is quite happy with the “magnificent new churches” like “Renzo Piano’s Padre Pio Pilgrimage Church in central Italy and Richard Meier’s Jubilee Church in Rome” (both shown here ). What they need is modern art to go in the modern churches. “We are looking for world-famous people,” Monsignor Ravasi said.
One of the sculptors Monsignor says is the kind of artist he is looking for is Anish Kapoor, whose large red blob shown here was specially made for the Nantes (France) Museum of Art. The description of the project reads:
“the work is made up of a huge, moving red-wax block, slowly going through the museum, from the entry hall to the deep end of the patio, on rails placed at 1.50m high above the ground. This heavy wagon, moving very slowly between the too narrow arches of the patio, rubs off, leaving dramatic scraps of red wax on to the pillars. It is an allegory of memory and history, two themes in the very heart of the museum function.”
There is a major problem here. When a patron decides that getting a “famous” artist is more important than one who understands the sacramental nature of Catholic art, the ingredients are prepared for a debacle. It happened when Paul VI tried to do the same thing.
I’ll let Orthodox Christian theologian Leonid Ouspensky give the critique, from his book The Theology of the Icon. It comes from an outsider looking in, and could hardly be more true:
…The Roman Church therefore appeals to the most famous or contemporary painters to decorate its churches, without being in the least concerned if they are believers or atheists. How can there even be a question of intercourse between the image and the word of Scripture when the person who decorates a church or paints a sacred image is an atheist?… Even to preach a sermon–something much less important in the Church than an image–one would not invite someone of a different religion or an atheist simply on the grounds that he is a brilliant speaker. But this is being done in the field of art. This shows the extent to which the very meaning of the sacred image has been lost in the Roman Catholic Church.
To reach the Pontifical Council for Culture, e-mail: cultura@cultura.va.
June 9, 2008 at 7:25 pm
Let’s always try to remember. Church is all about US. Worship of God must be secondary.
June 9, 2008 at 8:50 pm
Pehaps this architecture would be appealing to Martians. Then again the wrecked spaceship motif may be insulting to space aliens.
JBP
June 9, 2008 at 9:14 pm
Is this a spoof? I can’t tell if CMR is joking on this one.
June 9, 2008 at 10:34 pm
This one, sadly, is real.
There’s something awful about the world when you can’t tell the difference between our ridiculous jokes and the real world.
June 9, 2008 at 11:52 pm
Just when I think the Church has turned the corner I read something like this and it just reminds me how much work there is that needs to be done.
June 10, 2008 at 2:07 pm
I wonder if it might occur to the monsignor that the big red ball of wax also works as an allegory grace and the soul. If so, you can look forward to seeing it in a cathedral near you.
June 10, 2008 at 11:53 pm
As a performer of “new music”, often I am faced with the uncomfortable task of saying to a composer that his work is not playable. It is a delicate matter. We live in times when the language of music (and art and architecture…) has become so narrowed by individualism that a common language of expression no longer exists. We can take heart that artists are searching history and revisiting earlier methods and and forms capable of transmitting Catholic theology. Some might see such endeavors as a retreat into the past. Lest we forget, the Renaissance came about as people revisited the ancient world. Inevitably, when contemporary man meets his earlier self, the old takes on a new shape. Many current trends depend on rejection or rebellion to justify the construction of contemporary art. Perhaps it will take a little longer for some people to grow up and appreciate the past.
June 11, 2008 at 3:11 pm
Modernism isn’t BAD by itself. If you could get famous-artists who happen to be CATHOLIC to do the design and get them to find some way to merge the old with the new in a way that appeals to the imagination yet embraces the tradition of the Catholic Church – then the result could be amazing.
Our art should evolve, but it needs to embrace the faith like art did back in the 1300-1600s.
June 11, 2008 at 11:10 pm
Modernism as an “ism” *is* indeed bad by itself. Saying that it is not is like saying heresy is not bad by itself, as long as it finds some way to merge with Catholicism. Being innovative while respecting the Tradition is indeed good. But Modernism is as much a philosophical system as it is a way of making things, and that system has its roots in things antithetical to the Faith. The roots of Modernism are found in secularism, protest, methodological skepticism, anti-traditionalism, agnosticism, and anthropocentrism that are difficult to impossible to unite to Catholicism. Again, being “modern”, as in doing something better than has been done before, is fine. Being a Modernist, however, is to commit yourself to ideas antithetical to Catholicism, and therefore unacceptable.