Word: vatican
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...became clear relatively quickly, however, that the 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...
...precise victim of his vitriol, though, remained exasperatingly ambiguous. The Vatican has engaged in fairly frequent shake-ups with thriller writer Dan Brown, including last year’s totally straight-faced denunciation of “The Da Vinci Code” as an “offense against God.” (The spats tend to come off as amusing largely because the church takes him far more seriously than the rest of the world does.) Yet it’s hard to imagine Brown—or previous bête noire J.K. Rowling—creating...
...question of whether such a work exists at all is a valid one. If it does, the church has remained mum. As insistent as it is on passing judgment, the Vatican remains troublingly resistant to singling out any genuinely serious modern art or literature to criticize. Hand-waving vaguely at “contemporary representations of beauty,” or straw-manning Ron and Harry, is far easier than starting a real debate about what role religion can play in the arts. So far, the church’s reaction to complex—if provocative—creative...
...Haven, sleepless night of party-hopping, and booze-fueled all-day tailgate at The Game, it’s safe to say that piety wasn’t at the forefront of the typical Harvard student’s mind this Saturday. Thousands of miles away in Vatican City, the Pope’s gesture may have superficially seemed like a gesture of aisle-crossing good will—but, in its own way, it was just as profane...