Word: arts
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That lyrical and nostalgic strain was amplified by Johannes Itten, the unlikely man Gropius first picked to teach the entry course. A vegetarian, Zoroastrian and state-of-the-art bohemian, Itten knew more about yoga than he did about factory floors. In the years when he set the tone for much of what the school produced, the would-be school of industrial art could seem more like a hippie craft shop. A product of the Bauhaus could be a hand-thrown pot or a funky hand-carved chair...
...turning point came in 1923, when Gropius dismissed Itten and replaced him with the resolutely modern Hungarian Constructivist László Moholy-Nagy. In the same year, the school mounted an exhibition with the no-nonsense title "Art and Technology--A New Unity." The painter Oskar Schlemmer announced the back-on-track Bauhaus ethic in a polemic that was only partly tongue in cheek: "Death to the past, to moonlight, and to the soul...
...this is no joke. On Saturday, the Vatican invited 250 of the art world’s Very Important People to its digs in the Holy See for a little face-time with Benedict XVI. The aforementioned Bocelli and Kapoor, as well as Ennio Morricone, Arvo Pärt, and other literary and artistic luminaries, put in appearances. The general mood in the artist camp was one of awed reverence; the general dress code, black. Nobody wants to clash with the supreme leader of the Catholic church...
...presumable motive for the meeting—a discussion of how best to “communicate beauty”—masked an exercise in negative aesthetics. No tourist will ever mistake the Vatican for the MoMA; the church’s vision for a new art seems mostly to be an art that won’t offend said church...
Benedict certainly didn’t self-censor as he condemned contemporary artistic representations of beauty as “illusory and deceitful.” He went on to argue that such art “imprisons man within himself and further enslaves him, depriving him of hope and joy.” (Tough words for those of us who didn’t know we were enslaved in the first place: could the papal library stock Weber and Nietzsche?) The spleen was perhaps only to be expected from a bishop who, prior to donning the mitre, frequently provoked...