I don’t appreciate modern art. Seriously, have you seen one piece of public art that didn’t look like evidence of public drunkenness? I saw some metallic structure the other day in Philadelphia and I couldn’t decide if it was a bear signaling a rescue plane or a hobo with antlers.
I sometimes fear that our art will somehow be the most durable thing we create and 25th century archaeologists will conclude that we either lost a terrible battle with antlered hobos who left their statues all over the planet as a sign of planetary domination or we were so artistically puerile that an antlered hobo invasion would’ve been preferable. To ensure that doesn’t happen I’ve been considering running around affixing notes to works of modern art saying “We didn’t really know what was going on here either. Art in our time essentially became welfare for liberal arts majors. Sorry.”
But as tough as it is appreciating modern art, let’s face it, it’s probably a lot tougher actually being a modern day struggling artist. Unless you’re the really fortunate heir to some eccentric uncle, you’re probably living in Mom and Steve’s basement. And while you’re crafting your masterpiece out of macaroni you know that throughout history, success typically comes to artists 1) like never 2) after they’re dead.
But somewhere during the 20th century a few enterprising artists figured out a way to achieve some quick and cheapo notoriety without a whole lot of thought or skill. They just plopped a crucifix in urine or threw elephant dung at a picture of a saint. And voila, instant artist-celebrity. Hey don’t make fun. Many chose that path and they got federal grants and their faces in free newspapers and they were called “edgy” on self important dimly lit cable access shows.
But I’ve got some bad news for artists. Not just a little bad news. Big bad news. While artists were never awash with avenues to success, now even the whole anti-Christian avenue has closed down. Creating anti-Christian art just doesn’t get the job done anymore either like it used to.
That’s right. Anti-Christianity rhetoric and art is so common that it’s just not edgy anymore.
Seriously, a decade ago if some struggling artist created pictures of swastikas made of unblessed communion wafers there would’ve been protests and screaming and the artist would be changing his name to some one word moniker and fielding phone calls from art critics, agents, and producers wanting to make his life story a feature starring Crispin Glover or Michael Pare.
But recently, a photographer from Vogue Magazine did create a swastika made of communion wafers, sat back and waited for the phone to ring and…nothing. Well not exactly nothing. The Hackney Gazette (really) and the Jewish Chronicle called and wrote stories but that’s it.
For profit-provocateurism is a difficult business when so many are doing it. It’s tough to provoke outrage in a world where Hugh Hefner has a reality show that’s on at the same time as “Wife Swap” and the Bill Maher show.
Mind you, this communion wafer swastika was a particularly weak attempt in that the “artist” didn’t seem to have his story down as to what he was exactly protesting. He told one paper it was both protesting “the persecution of the Christian faith by the Nazis during the Second World War” but at the same time attacking Pope Pius’ alleged “silence” during the Holocaust.
What?! So it’s about the persecution of Catholics by Nazis and the complicit persecution of Jews by Catholics in league with Nazis? Come on. At least get your story straight.
But no matter what, it’s clear that anti-Christianity is sooooo mainstream that it’s not even cool. Let’s face it, faithful Catholicism is the new edgy. Anyone have a cable access show I can come on?
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“But recently, a photographer from Vogue Magazine did create a swastika made of communion wafers, sat back and waited for the phone to ring and…nothing.”
I think sooner or later it has begun to dawn on each of us: “the world out there has gone stark, raving . . . bonkers. It really has.” Think about it: Swastiskas out of Communion wafers is something only a whack-job would come up with, and in a sane world, his family or colleagues would arrange to get him the help he needs, and would destroy the tortured artifacts of his sick mind.
Instead, in the present mad world we’re in, the whack-job is contgratulated; the tortured artifact of his sick mind is published and celebrated. Those congratulating and celebrating his output are as mad as he is, and most of those parting with their money to see and read the quacking gibberish they publish must be quite mad, too, or they wouldn’t waste a single moment to read it.
When I say “the world has gone mad,” I don’t mean literally everybody - plenty of housewives, physicians, farmers, cops, bus-drivers, ordinary folk still have their heads on straight. But the makers of contemporary culture - the publishers, the artists, the opinion-makers, the filmmakers, the heads of academia, the gurus, those who decide who and what the rest of us see, read, and hear - it has gotten so that their output is what only someone who has lost all reason and decency would produce. And millions upon millions of our fellow citizens watch and read this material, and are slowly led over the abyss.
I work hard to limit my own exposure to contemporary culture in the hope of keeping what’s left of my own sanity intact.
Best response to offensive art is in the Sister Wendy interview with Bill Moyers. She doesn’t get upset. She actually presents a plausible message for the crucifix in urine, similar to what the artist Serrano claimed it was intended to convey; lack of reverence for Christ’s sacrifice as evidenced by the Christmas shopping madness.
She said he did it in a “magaziney way.” Elsewhere, commenting on what makes art great, she said (approximately): You can keep looking at it again and again and get something out out it. With the urine thing, you look at it and go on. “You don’t want to keep looking at it!... He tried his best.”
I spent a year at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln where there is a large, leafless, metal tree in the middle of one of the quads. The story, I’m told, is that they actually uprooted a live tree in order to place the fake. If there’s a better metaphor for exactly what modern art is, I don’t know it. Real art imitates reality; modern art attempts to replace it.
For me, these works are just one more way God shows that He is transcendent. He is so above all of this but remains here with us as we shake our heads and chuckle a bit. One could look at the picture of the wafers and immediately be brought to the real human sacrifice of not only Christ (memorialized in the Eucharist) but all those souls sacrificed during the Nazi regime. Again, unlike the artists intended hope of offense, I am brought to the other side. All those killed by the swatiska can take their place next to Christ hidden in the wafer (when blessed, of course). Now, if only I could see something of value in a Jackson Pollock.
If you ever are lucky enough to corner and talk to some corporate sponsors (I have done it twice) and ask them privately about the pile of arc welded scrap they bought an plopped down in the lawn in front of the parking garage, they’ll agree with you that it looks like, and probably is cr@p, particularly after that plain iron stock has been sitting and rusting in the rain for a few weeks. The thing is, they’re ‘expected’ to buy it and display it.
It’s a pity, as there are some really good sculpture artists out there…
Another thing you can say about anti-Christian art: it’s safe! When Solzhenitsyn locked horns with the Soviet regime, for example, he showed the highest courage. His life and the life of his family was at risk. But he remained true to his art and put his talent to work. Today, I can throw dung at the Virgin Mary and brag about it.
How do we know that these people are cowards? Well, there are no dung-encrusted Korans at the Met. Comedy Central dares not even portray Muhammad in a cartoon. Seen any industrial sculptures or one-act plays entitled “Jihad”? Militant Islam fights back with credible threats of violence, something even conceptual artists can understand.
Artists may be edgy but they sure ain’t heroic.
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