Some of you will have seen this, but I send it along since some of you haven’t (I hadn’t, as far as I remember, but then one’s mind blanks out such things). Your submissions make Baby Jesus cry offers fifty examples of failed attempts at ecclesiastical art. Many of them make me flinch back in my chair.
But I tried, I really tried, to see if I could find any of them expressions of the seriousness and reverence from which ecclesiastical art should spring. Number 29, for example, a painting of the Last Supper with Jesus and the Disciples in modern dress: there you can easily imagine an earnest young artist having experienced the love of the Lord in his own life wanting to make that Lord more accessible to others, because Jesus is always, so to speak, in modern dress. That “old picture in modern dress” is a cliche, but you can see that it might be one used in good faith. More or less the same could be said of number 28, a traditional statue of Jesus in front of a painting of clouds and a planet, and a few others.
I’m sure much of the rest of it reflects the creator’s attempts to express seriousness and reverence, but the reality is that the works just don’t. They don’t even look as if the creator was trying to do so. A secular person, told that box over there was made to contain the Lord of the Universe, wouldn’t believe it.
Much of it just looks like really bad art of the sort that you walk by, while trying to remember to stop and look at each thing and for heaven’s sake keep smiling and nodding, at a high school art show. A surprising amount of it is clunky and ungainly, and you don’t know if the artist was trying to pull off a very (very very very) amateur imitation of Picasso or of primitive art. It’s a kind of production you see nowhere else. No one else makes stuff that looks like this, which is a bad sign in itself.
I mean, look, just why would anyone think the fat cartoon missile with three chairs at the bottom (number 29) something people would want to look it, and look at for years? Who would design the Jesus encased in a brick wall (number 5) or the soap carving of Gumby standing behind a broken couch (number 45)? Etc.
I just don’t get it. And I’m not even that picky. But there is something essentially different between, say, the sometimes garish and sentimental folk art you find in some Italian-American parishes and this stuff. The first moves you to prayer, the second, well, maybe it can, but . . . no, I just can’t see it. This stuff is inexplicably bad. Tear-it-out-the-space-would-look-better-bare bad.
Why would anyone — and not just the creator (to whom some latitude can be given because they must mean well and few people are good judges of their own work) but the people who commissioned the work, paid for it, and installed it (and who ought to have more objectivity) — think it was good enough for buildings in which the Savior of the world is daily made present to his people? I just can’t see it.
October 31st, 2012 | 6:33 pm
That is some of the worst stuff I’ve ever seen. It gives Christianity a bad name.
October 31st, 2012 | 6:52 pm
Ecclesiastical art — painting, sculpture, etc — like ecclesiastical music has suffered a lot Vatican II or maybe one should say “since the 1960′s.” But there’s probably a connection between the two, and with the general trajectory of the Protestant mainline.
To me, it seems like what had functioned as a common visual vocabulary and grammar of art has fragmented. And what’s replaced that is this weird blend of sentimentality and self-consciously “edgy modernism” (or at least an edgy modernism acceptable to the middle class priests and parish committees who pay for this stuff and install it), which these examples seem to share.
The “loss of common vocabulary” is my (weak) attempt to get at what Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger wrote about with regard to art and music in Part 3 of “The Spirit of the Liturgy.”
oriented to the heavenly liturgy.” I can’t do justice to the argument in those two chapters here, but it Ratzinger relates sacred art to the nature of the Church in history, to liturgy, and to the Resurrected Christ.
But he does write “[Sacred art] presupposes that there is a subject who has been inwardly formed by the Church and opened up to the “we”. Only thus does art make the Chruch’s common faith visible and speak again to the believing heart.”
As you have intuited from these images, they do not speak to the believing heart.
November 1st, 2012 | 9:19 am
I think my eyes are permanently damaged. Current church music is also denigrated. There I think the cause is simple. Good and bad music is created all the time and at every time in history. Over time, the bad gets filtered out. I would not be surprised if the same was true of physical art, but I don’t know. Whereas music can fade just by not playing or singing it, physical art has an existence independent of the viewer.
November 1st, 2012 | 11:10 am
Saw it in 2009 during the contest. No. 45 is my favorite. It is hard to believe anyone actually made any of it.
November 1st, 2012 | 12:42 pm
of the intellect, will, and the imagination, often it is imagination that is most responsive to truth. sometimes beauty pierces through rationality to reach the inner man. bad art fails to engage — it obscures truth instead of illuminating it.
what lewis calls sensucht is being quashed by trash. i especially worry about today’s children because many are not being shown beauty in all its excellent and true glory. i see them playing their portable video games on the edge of the grand canyon or by the foot of a waterfall…. how do mozart and chopin and sebastian bach get a word in edgewise in a sonic universe full of justin biebers and “marty haugen?” children without chests grow up to be men without chests. that is terrifying imagery, worse than anything on this list.
November 1st, 2012 | 2:53 pm
I guess that, before I had seen the pictures, I assumed the description “fat cartoon missile with three chairs” was an exageration.
Nope.
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