JD and Ed respond to controversial comments by the head of the Vatican’s communications office about the removal of artwork by alleged serial sexual abuser Fr.
There are apostolates dedicated to the arts. The Annie Moses Foundation is one. Granted, that is musical and performing arts not visual arts. The Henri Matisse Rosary Chapel is, to me, a beautiful example of contemporary visual art in a sacred setting. I’d love to see it in person one day.
I would argue that Rupniks art is exactly not edgy, challenging or interesting, in the same way most postmodern art fails to be edgy, challenging or interesting.
There are excellent Christian Artists who take their commitment to their faith and the traditions of their craft seriously and are ‘innovating’ out of that solid formation in traditional technique and practice and a deep contemplation of the mystery they are depicting.
Art schools barely teach you how to draw anymore in favour of ‘critique’, which is simply parasitical on the previous masters and has nothing new or insightfully to say and the work produced is usually shallow, ironic or just discordantly ignorant and lacking in true mastery of a medium.
I agree it should be replaced and it’s partly because Rupnik’s work is absolutely postmodern. I would direct you to the Venetian iconographic tradition which is equal parts mosaic (such as San Marco) and traditional tempera/gauche on timber. I studied art history under a professor who was an expert in Venetian icons and my mother is a Byzantine iconographer (her teacher Michael Galovic is well worth looking up for an excellent contemporary artist). Postmodernism is not so much an innovation of media so much as it is taking what is a sophisticated and distinctive tradition of beauty, order, symmetry, colour harmony etc (which iconography is) and ‘subverting’ it because that tradition is oppressive and there’s not such thing as truth or transcendentals. It takes a bit of an eye to hone in on it and it’s difficult to even get past the eyes of Rupninks. Bridget links an article that does a really good job of explaining what I mean with reference to actual works and diagrams.
By many accounts, Charles Manson was a talented singer/songwriter. He recorded demos under the wings of The Beach Boys in search of a record contract. And yet, even while he enjoyed the presumption of innocence and the right to a fair trial, hardly anyone, not even in 1970, would have played his music on FM radio in L.A. There’s a very interesting contrast between the L.A. music scene’s treatment of Manson — where celebrities socialized with him, were scared by him, and then scurried to hide their association with him — and the current treatment of Rupnik.
I don't think the Riefenstahl comparison works. The surface meaning of Rupnik's artwork is not objectionable in itself (as is the surface meaning of The Triumph of the Will). Paradoxically, perhaps, what is objectionable about Rupnik's artwork is the grotesquely yawning gap between the ostensible referent of Rupnik's art (Jesus, biblical figures, etc.) and the awful character and truly horrifying actions of the artist, the circumstances of the work's creation, and the entire series of events that have surrounded it.
The subversion of order, symmetry, meaning, and mathematical elegance is also objectionable in that genre. https://hilarywhite.substack.com/p/what-marko-rupniks-art-tells-us-about has some diagrams towards the bottom. So, like, discordant electric guitar solos loosely based on Tantum Ergo (with Latin pronounced by children who have been instructed in a deliberately incorrect pronunciation, to make it appear whimsical), as a sort of communion song, are objectionable for the genre even though they cannot be condemned *at a surface level* on the grounds of their lyrics, because the lyrics are notionally appropriate and merely "childishly" (yet actually deliberately) mispronounced.
That thought experiment, weird as it is, actual works. You make a good point.
It still wouldn't be the Horst Wessel Lied, though.
Anyway, I don't want to get myself in the argumentative position where it seems I'm defending Rupnik's art. I don't like it either (although without all the associations with his crimes, I might just grimace at it as yet more mediocre sacred art, rather than burn with rage when I see it).
I just think the Riefenstahl comparison is overstated in a way that makes it rhetorically ineffective.
Great discussion, Ed and JD. There are a few points worth noting.
Germany still has loads of Nazi buildings and other paraphernalia. The 1937 art gallery for "German art" in Munich opened by Hitler, the enormous Ministry of Aviation building in Berlin, Hitler's mountaintop retreat, Dachau and Sachsenhausen concentration camps. Plus huge concrete fortifications it would cost a fortune to demolish. Much is stored in public view in museums and "Documentation Centres". Hitler's limo, the Nazi bargain radios for propaganda, enough military stuff to launch a small war.
The city museum in Cologne shows a photo of its magnificent cathedral, the biggest church in Germany, draped in swastika banners.
The point is that the remnants of one of the worst regimes in history should be publicly visible. It is a clear demonstration that the German people and authorities have been coming to terms with the past. Even the group of bored teenagers I saw heading on a school trip to Dachau in 2011. We are deeply concerned about the suffering of Nazi victims, but they can view or ignore the artifacts as they feel able.
So I would be happy for most of Rupnik's art to remain on public display, with suitably prominent explanations about its provenance and requests to pray for his victims. And regular public prayer services at these places, especially places like Fatima and Lourdes with loads of visitors, for victims of abuse. It might be mortifying for many clerics, but we inherit the horrors as well as the glories of our past. Just as the Germans have to live with Dachau as well as Beethoven.
Rupnik's ephemeral digital art can be dumped and the Vatican might consider using its peerless art collection as an alternative resource.
I am delighted that Ruffini has been given maximum publicity. It is another reminder of how everything remains to be done inside the Vatican.
"The Christian faith is saying other things. Jesus said other things.”
Er....yes, Jesus said all sorts of embarrassing things. Like attaching stones to paedos and throwing them in the sea.
JD's microphone is too low, or he's not speaking into it. The contrast with Ed's makes it hard too listen to them both: if you turn up the volume to hear JD, Ed's voice is too loud.
JD will be at a fairly normal volume for a while, and then drop much lower…and this unfortunately has a way of happening at the same time that he starts to mutter/read something quite fast. (Maybe he tends to turn away from the mic when he does that? Dunno.) There was more of it than usual this episode and last, I felt…with the last 5-10 minutes of this one providing a solid example to re-listen to if one might need one.
I'm REALLY sorry, guys, for serious. There will probably be no podcast this week, because I'm too sick to do much talking, but I've figured this out and got it fixed for the next show.
This whole fiasco has caused me to start praying the imprecatory psalms more and contemplating why they are in scripture and therefore important. Ed’s comments about 70’s theology and the sex abuse crisis made me realize that the guys whose theology made them shuffle abusive priests around because “compassion” are the same guys that took the imprecatory psalms out of the LOTH. It makes more sense now seeing how they had such a defective understanding of the connection between justice and mercy.
I would love a call to action for a regular layperson who is horrified by this dicastery (and yes, autocorrect, you are correct that it is a disaster) of communications. How best can we express our own pain and outrage by these comments and the dicastery's continued use of Rupnik "art"? To whom can I write or call? Shall I start locally with my pastor, bishop, and cardinal? Go directly to the Holy Father? Find someone in that dicastery who might be able to receive and communicate our horrified response? Expressing outrage online isn't going to do anything, I don't think, so what would be an effective way to let the leaders know that we all suffer by the continued use of these images, even if we weren't directly harmed by a cleric? I visited the JPII shrine in DC for the first time this winter and was so excited to venerate his relics and see his museum (especially for my 7-year-old who loves him and wants to be a priest.) The entire experience was tremendously marred by those mosaics. The church tells us she doesn't care. It's so maddening and downright tragic. Yes, of course we will pray. And also need to write and call to help them see how wrong this is.
Ed's comment about the DNA of the dicastery, and larger swaths of Vatican personnel, is spot on. "Culture eats strategy for breakfast" as they say, and culture comes out loud and clear in comments like the prefect's, regardless of whatever strategy the Vatican wants to espouse toward finally repairing the harm she has done to abuse victims.
Finally listening to this episode, and at the enumeration of his three points, the third of which is that art is art and it is a bad sign for a culture to suppress art, I would so much like to hear him debate Disney on whether it is right to have locked Song of the South (which I think that I and most of us have never seen) eternally in the vault; it seems to me that they would eat him for lunch.
There are apostolates dedicated to the arts. The Annie Moses Foundation is one. Granted, that is musical and performing arts not visual arts. The Henri Matisse Rosary Chapel is, to me, a beautiful example of contemporary visual art in a sacred setting. I’d love to see it in person one day.
I would argue that Rupniks art is exactly not edgy, challenging or interesting, in the same way most postmodern art fails to be edgy, challenging or interesting.
There are excellent Christian Artists who take their commitment to their faith and the traditions of their craft seriously and are ‘innovating’ out of that solid formation in traditional technique and practice and a deep contemplation of the mystery they are depicting.
Art schools barely teach you how to draw anymore in favour of ‘critique’, which is simply parasitical on the previous masters and has nothing new or insightfully to say and the work produced is usually shallow, ironic or just discordantly ignorant and lacking in true mastery of a medium.
I agree it should be replaced and it’s partly because Rupnik’s work is absolutely postmodern. I would direct you to the Venetian iconographic tradition which is equal parts mosaic (such as San Marco) and traditional tempera/gauche on timber. I studied art history under a professor who was an expert in Venetian icons and my mother is a Byzantine iconographer (her teacher Michael Galovic is well worth looking up for an excellent contemporary artist). Postmodernism is not so much an innovation of media so much as it is taking what is a sophisticated and distinctive tradition of beauty, order, symmetry, colour harmony etc (which iconography is) and ‘subverting’ it because that tradition is oppressive and there’s not such thing as truth or transcendentals. It takes a bit of an eye to hone in on it and it’s difficult to even get past the eyes of Rupninks. Bridget links an article that does a really good job of explaining what I mean with reference to actual works and diagrams.
By many accounts, Charles Manson was a talented singer/songwriter. He recorded demos under the wings of The Beach Boys in search of a record contract. And yet, even while he enjoyed the presumption of innocence and the right to a fair trial, hardly anyone, not even in 1970, would have played his music on FM radio in L.A. There’s a very interesting contrast between the L.A. music scene’s treatment of Manson — where celebrities socialized with him, were scared by him, and then scurried to hide their association with him — and the current treatment of Rupnik.
I’ll be praying/fasting for victims/survivors of clerical sexual abuse this week. 😔
Same
I don't think the Riefenstahl comparison works. The surface meaning of Rupnik's artwork is not objectionable in itself (as is the surface meaning of The Triumph of the Will). Paradoxically, perhaps, what is objectionable about Rupnik's artwork is the grotesquely yawning gap between the ostensible referent of Rupnik's art (Jesus, biblical figures, etc.) and the awful character and truly horrifying actions of the artist, the circumstances of the work's creation, and the entire series of events that have surrounded it.
No. The pictures themselves are disgusting.
The subversion of order, symmetry, meaning, and mathematical elegance is also objectionable in that genre. https://hilarywhite.substack.com/p/what-marko-rupniks-art-tells-us-about has some diagrams towards the bottom. So, like, discordant electric guitar solos loosely based on Tantum Ergo (with Latin pronounced by children who have been instructed in a deliberately incorrect pronunciation, to make it appear whimsical), as a sort of communion song, are objectionable for the genre even though they cannot be condemned *at a surface level* on the grounds of their lyrics, because the lyrics are notionally appropriate and merely "childishly" (yet actually deliberately) mispronounced.
That thought experiment, weird as it is, actual works. You make a good point.
It still wouldn't be the Horst Wessel Lied, though.
Anyway, I don't want to get myself in the argumentative position where it seems I'm defending Rupnik's art. I don't like it either (although without all the associations with his crimes, I might just grimace at it as yet more mediocre sacred art, rather than burn with rage when I see it).
I just think the Riefenstahl comparison is overstated in a way that makes it rhetorically ineffective.
Great discussion, Ed and JD. There are a few points worth noting.
Germany still has loads of Nazi buildings and other paraphernalia. The 1937 art gallery for "German art" in Munich opened by Hitler, the enormous Ministry of Aviation building in Berlin, Hitler's mountaintop retreat, Dachau and Sachsenhausen concentration camps. Plus huge concrete fortifications it would cost a fortune to demolish. Much is stored in public view in museums and "Documentation Centres". Hitler's limo, the Nazi bargain radios for propaganda, enough military stuff to launch a small war.
The city museum in Cologne shows a photo of its magnificent cathedral, the biggest church in Germany, draped in swastika banners.
The point is that the remnants of one of the worst regimes in history should be publicly visible. It is a clear demonstration that the German people and authorities have been coming to terms with the past. Even the group of bored teenagers I saw heading on a school trip to Dachau in 2011. We are deeply concerned about the suffering of Nazi victims, but they can view or ignore the artifacts as they feel able.
So I would be happy for most of Rupnik's art to remain on public display, with suitably prominent explanations about its provenance and requests to pray for his victims. And regular public prayer services at these places, especially places like Fatima and Lourdes with loads of visitors, for victims of abuse. It might be mortifying for many clerics, but we inherit the horrors as well as the glories of our past. Just as the Germans have to live with Dachau as well as Beethoven.
Rupnik's ephemeral digital art can be dumped and the Vatican might consider using its peerless art collection as an alternative resource.
I am delighted that Ruffini has been given maximum publicity. It is another reminder of how everything remains to be done inside the Vatican.
"The Christian faith is saying other things. Jesus said other things.”
Er....yes, Jesus said all sorts of embarrassing things. Like attaching stones to paedos and throwing them in the sea.
JD's microphone is too low, or he's not speaking into it. The contrast with Ed's makes it hard too listen to them both: if you turn up the volume to hear JD, Ed's voice is too loud.
JD will be at a fairly normal volume for a while, and then drop much lower…and this unfortunately has a way of happening at the same time that he starts to mutter/read something quite fast. (Maybe he tends to turn away from the mic when he does that? Dunno.) There was more of it than usual this episode and last, I felt…with the last 5-10 minutes of this one providing a solid example to re-listen to if one might need one.
I'm REALLY sorry, guys, for serious. There will probably be no podcast this week, because I'm too sick to do much talking, but I've figured this out and got it fixed for the next show.
Oh dear…rest up, get better, will look forward to the next show whenever that can happen.
(P.S. I hope Ed’s doing okay…checking in on his well-being might have been called for after the calamitous end of Team USA’s T20 World Cup.)
This whole fiasco has caused me to start praying the imprecatory psalms more and contemplating why they are in scripture and therefore important. Ed’s comments about 70’s theology and the sex abuse crisis made me realize that the guys whose theology made them shuffle abusive priests around because “compassion” are the same guys that took the imprecatory psalms out of the LOTH. It makes more sense now seeing how they had such a defective understanding of the connection between justice and mercy.
I would love a call to action for a regular layperson who is horrified by this dicastery (and yes, autocorrect, you are correct that it is a disaster) of communications. How best can we express our own pain and outrage by these comments and the dicastery's continued use of Rupnik "art"? To whom can I write or call? Shall I start locally with my pastor, bishop, and cardinal? Go directly to the Holy Father? Find someone in that dicastery who might be able to receive and communicate our horrified response? Expressing outrage online isn't going to do anything, I don't think, so what would be an effective way to let the leaders know that we all suffer by the continued use of these images, even if we weren't directly harmed by a cleric? I visited the JPII shrine in DC for the first time this winter and was so excited to venerate his relics and see his museum (especially for my 7-year-old who loves him and wants to be a priest.) The entire experience was tremendously marred by those mosaics. The church tells us she doesn't care. It's so maddening and downright tragic. Yes, of course we will pray. And also need to write and call to help them see how wrong this is.
Ed's comment about the DNA of the dicastery, and larger swaths of Vatican personnel, is spot on. "Culture eats strategy for breakfast" as they say, and culture comes out loud and clear in comments like the prefect's, regardless of whatever strategy the Vatican wants to espouse toward finally repairing the harm she has done to abuse victims.
Finally listening to this episode, and at the enumeration of his three points, the third of which is that art is art and it is a bad sign for a culture to suppress art, I would so much like to hear him debate Disney on whether it is right to have locked Song of the South (which I think that I and most of us have never seen) eternally in the vault; it seems to me that they would eat him for lunch.