Word: vaticans
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...current display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art each piece is enhanced by its isolation. Hence, for most viewers, the show becomes a unique opportunity to enjoy and absorb the beauty of each object and painting. Many of these people will one day come to the Vatican. Then will they understand the context they missed. More important, they will want to see more art. There is no doubt that for them the risk is amply justified...
...exhibition its feeble coda. Owing in part to the zeal of an association called the Friends of American Art in Religion, run by an art dealer named Lawrence Fleischman under the benign presidency of Terence Cardinal Cooke, masses of otherwise unsalable modern religious art have been decanted into the Vatican since the late '60s. The result, the Collezione d'Arte Religiosa Moderna, amounts to something between a pork barrel and a junk pile...
...taste. And although the exhibition claims to show us in detail just what the changing relations of the Popes to art were, it does not deliver the goods. It contains only routine information and no fresh ideas about the liturgical, propagandist, doctrinal and decorative purposes of Vatican collecting, or the effect of that collecting on taste...
...works," he says, "is not to make a contribution to scholarship. We have tried to make a distillation, to save the public exhaustion. How many late Roman family portrait busts do most people want to see?" Fair enough, but to lug (for instance) tons of Egyptian sculpture from the Vatican to the Met, whose own Egyptian collection is one of the wonders of museology, is not distillation but excess. The Met insists that the sole aim of the show is aesthetic pleasure for a wide public. "Is the ultimate purpose of a work of art to advance art history...
...loans risk damage; it is one of the donnees of museum practice, and the Met has been scrupulously vigilant in its precautions. But one must balance out the benefits against the risks. How necessary, really, is the Vatican show, apart from fund raising? It is a queer fantasy of American education that some good must come of flying works of art, some irreplaceable and others mediocre, 13,000 miles at some risk so that a million curious people can look at them for about two minutes each, under coercively promotional conditions. Such brief and zipless encounters are thought...