Comments on: Ecclesiastical Art, So-Called

By: JDD

JDD — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 18:53:33 +0000

I guess that, before I had seen the pictures, I assumed the description “fat cartoon missile with three chairs” was an exageration.

Nope.

By: andrew

andrew — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 16:42:51 +0000

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.

By: Gail Finke

Gail Finke — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 15:10:56 +0000

Saw it in 2009 during the contest. No. 45 is my favorite. It is hard to believe anyone actually made any of it.

By: Mike Melendez

Mike Melendez — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 13:19:23 +0000

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.

By: J.W. Cox

J.W. Cox — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 22:52:19 +0000

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.

By: Beth

Beth — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 22:33:01 +0000

That is some of the worst stuff I’ve ever seen. It gives Christianity a bad name.