What is it about contemporary art—every international art fair’s signature product—that qualifies it as an engine of evangelization? If the Church’s magnificent patrimony of high religious art has not stayed the attrition of Christianity in its homelands, can we expect today’s fashionable brands to speak more eloquently to the heathen art crowd who turn up at these spectaculars?
The Vatican has abandoned its earlier attitude toward contemporary art as “the breakdown of art in modern times.” Previously misunderstood as a “debacle,” it is now recognized as a “language.” It follows, then, that the Vatican should learn to speak it, yes? Mischief, however, resides in that word language.
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Slug (2009); Anish Kapoor, on the short list of artists under consideration for Vatican City’s pavilion at the Venice Biennale
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Contemporary art, properly understood, is simply the art of our contemporaries. There is a wealth of gracious and impressive work to be found among them; yet what they create is, in the main, excluded from the term. Contemporary art denotes a marketing category. Its products are recognized by the degree to which they conform to a look, much of it—not all—rooted in Dada and drenched in the ritual theorizing of the academy. What the Vatican refers to is not a language at all. It is a style, a visual disposition that has expanded to include installation art and its flickering cousin, video.
Art collector and advertising mogul Charles Saatchi entrenched the sensibility—its bearing and reigning posture—by trademarking it as “The Art of Our Time” in the mid-1980s. He pioneered the positioning of contemporary art as a brand, or a cluster of brands. Like cosmetics or designer labels, it could be built on promotion. Contemporary art, stripped of rhetorical packaging, is as much a consumer confection as a vacuum-sealed packet of Starbucks Reserve Sun-Dried Sumatra Rasuna coffee.
In a consumer culture, it is image, not substance, that separates the sheep from the goats. By seeking “a dialogue” with contemporary art, the Vatican will be conversing with an image crafted for the global marketplace by admen fabricating the yardstick of what contemporaneity requires.
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“The moment I saw this my heart cried out that it could triple in value.” William Hamilton for The New Yorker
In comments to the New Statesman this past November, Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, President of the Pontifical Council for Culture, revealed his receptivity to the lure of the brand:
We are trying to get a dialogue up and running between the church and contemporary art—particularly artists at the highest level. We are looking for world famous people. Venice is a showcase for all the big countries in the world and the Holy See would like to be there too. We’re trying to get the best of international artists on our side who can create new works with a religious or spiritual subject./
Artists take commissions as they come. That is hardly the same thing as being “on our side,” in sympathy with Christian commitments, or in any way aligned with the ethos of the gospels. It is off kilter, this Vatican ardor to set up shop at the Venice Biennale. The Arsenale is not the Court of the Gentiles. It is the glossy core of an international circuit of vulpine dealers, speculative collectors, tight-lipped inside traders, money launderers, and courtiers (gallerists, artwriters, consultants, and entrepreneurial curators) who constitute the global art world—a phenomenon not identical to the world of art.
Saatchi himself has soured on the merchants in Venice. He stayed home last year from the “comprehensively and indisputably vulgar,” yacht-infested Biennale. He should know. Writing in The Guardian on “The Hideousness of the Art World,” he complained:
It is the sport of the Eurotrashy, Hedge-fundy, Hamptonites; of trendy oligarchs and oiligarchs; and of art dealers with masturbatory levels of self-regard. . . . Artistic credentials are au courant in the important business of being seen as cultured, elegant and, of course, stupendously rich. . . . even a self-serving narcissistic showoff like me finds this new art world too toe-curling for comfort. In the fervour of peacock excess, it’s not even considered necessary to waste one’s time looking at the works on display.
A rant from the best pitchmen in the business! Discounting for professional jealousy, it is all the more delicious since it comes from the very one who did so much to cultivate the ground under the cardinal’s crush on international brands.
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Detail of The Nativity by Giotto in the Scrovegni Chapel
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If art carried the power of conversion granted to it, tourists would exit the Scrovegni Chapel on their knees. Bernard Berenson, the old serpent and opportunist, would have been as great a soul as he was a connoisseur. Joseph Duveen and his client Henry Ford II would have knelt for the Angelus together.
February 20th, 2013 | 12:40 pm
Although I am intrigued by what you outline as Contemporary Art’s development as a brand, and I do not argue about Saatchi’s influence or the unprecedented amounts of money in the global art market, I must take issue with your definition of Contemporary Art. Contemporary Art is not simply the art of our contemporaries. If this were true, the category would include many landscape painters, portraitists, and wanna-be Abstract Expressionists, which it doesn’t. Art that ‘makes the cut,’ if you will, as Contemporary Art raises questions about what art can be and draws viewer’s attention to their own assumptions about life and art.
February 20th, 2013 | 1:11 pm
The global art world is indeed a sad and despairing picture of commercialism, pretentiousness and vulgarity. Yet, we ought to avoid dismissing wholesale every work of art that hones certain “contemporary” attributes. The art of William Congdon is evidence that a genuine dialogue between sacred and contemporary secular art is possible. I trust, or at least hope, that this sort of dialogue, manifested in William Congdon’s later work, is what Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi had in mind.
Of course, William Congdon is no longer a contemporary in the art world and his art is considered irrelevant to “cultured” sensibilities. Indeed, the art world’s trivialization and ignorance of his work began while he was still their contemporary–his paintings remained stored away in the Met’s basement after his conversion.
During his consecration of the Antoni Gaudi designed Cathedral of the Sagrada Familia, Pope Benedict XVI called the split between Faith and life, the sacred and secular, Christ and culture, the great travail of our time. I trust that Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi is sincerely interested in bridging this split in a genuine dialogue. Yet, I hope that he is clear-sighted to recognize that the contemporary-art world is largely constituted by hollow deconstructionists rather than truly human builders as Gaudi and Congdon.
February 20th, 2013 | 1:17 pm
I think you just made my point for me, Jessica.
February 20th, 2013 | 3:24 pm
While on the one hand I try to keep in mind that Jesus ate and drank with sinners and tax collectors, on the other hand we are reminded to be not only as innocent as doves but as cunning as serpents, as well, so the idea of “dialogue” with the art world does appear to be something of a dubious plan. In particular, the search for “world famous people” rather than artistically skilled and religiously devout people, does not bode well, although perhaps that’s reading too much into the cardinal’s words.
I suppose it’s possible for something like this to be successful, yet I find it difficult to envision how artists who have heretofore produced vapid, Dadaistic garbage are going to be brought to “our side,” as the cardinal hopes.
February 20th, 2013 | 3:57 pm
Looking for world famous people indicates a susceptibility to brands, brand names, that
does, indeed, not bode well. It signals an institutional arrogance rather than an informed sensibility.
February 20th, 2013 | 8:08 pm
Jessica, raising questions about what art can be and challenging people’s conceptions of that is sometimes interesting, I suppose. However, it seems like it could distract from actually making and appreciating art. While we shouldn’t naively assume that we know what art is, on the other hand, professional artists should at some point figure it out, don’t you think? Does thinking about what art is or could be have intrinsic value, or should people who want to call themselves artists eventually just get on with it and make some art? Is it wrong just to enjoy an artwork, without being “challenged” by it?
More to the point of this post, is there an evangelical purpose to be served by discussing the ontology of art? It does not even rise to the level of aesthetics because of course we can no longer talk about “good” or “bad” art, since we can not even finally answer the question, “what is art?”
February 21st, 2013 | 5:49 am
“Looking for famous people” does sound bad. I wish it meant that the cardinal wants to evangelize the famous into repentance, but that doesn’t sound like what he has in mind. It sounds like “please, make the church more like you.”
February 21st, 2013 | 4:02 pm
I attended the last Biennale after a 2 month tour of Italy and Sicily. After viewing a Pieta made of crash-test dummies, and a chapel buried in dirt, I noted how far contemporary art was from the divinization of man so evident in Churches such as Santa Maria del Populo in Rome. That religion is a pervasive theme in the Biennale is a given—but such a bleak, despairing, post-modern view.
It did rinse out the eye from too much baroque— enough to make one long for it again.
So, yes, there is definitely a place for the Church in the Biennale, if only to present a vision of hope, of love, of transcendence, of beauty, of what is good, to counter the bleak religion-in-decadence POV there already. The contrast, in modern idiom, would be well worth the effort.
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