Revenge of the Philistines
So the Pope is now an Art Critic as well as the Last Word on morality. I’m not clear on how baby Jesus and Joseph and Mary got approved as cosmonaut religious icons and I’m really not sure why anyone would think the Pontiff would endorse a nativity scene that looked like a scene on the cutting room floor of Aliens, but geez, couldn’t he lighten up a bit? He’s accepted homosexuals, why not avante-garde artists? Maybe even offer up an encyclical giving contemporary sculptors a pathway into Heaven? Modern art, it seems safe to say, isn’t the Holy See’s cup of tea.
I hate to say it, but the guy sounds like a Philistine. Don’t get me wrong, I got plenty of friends who are philistines, who think maybe I should tone my own stuff down and maybe do some nice sailboats and Victorian windows and even colorful flowers. Not because they worry that I’m going straight to Hell, just that this modern stuff leaves them cold. I mean, what IS that you got here, Skeeter? Is it my damn job to figure it out? It’s like those paintings by that guy Piccollo or whoever with two eyes on one side of a backwards face? C’mon, I never met anybody looked like that? D’jou??
Give me that old time religion, apparently. Renaissance art and forget the Campbell’s soup crap. Back here in Crazy Land, Trump just mandated that any new government buildings in Washington D.C. have to be ‘classic’ architecture. That new fangled stuff, forget about it, nobody likes it, nobody wants it, nobody is willing to pay for it. Right. Hitler hated modern art too. Degenerate art, I think was his term. Trump’s? Who knows what goes on in that gerbil caged brain of his? You ever seen his baroque apartment, the one with the gold toilet, probably all you need to know. The man thinks he’s in Versailles. Without the waiting guillotines….
Hitler sure had some nice buildings. Sturdy stuff. Brutal to some, but hey, brutal’s in the eye or the gunsight of the beholder. Trump maybe thinks his Reich will last a thousand years too. The Pope’s has. Why not lock in for another couple millenia? Personally, and I sure don’t want to offend any philistines, stagnation doesn’t seem like much of an aesthetic. Innovation, experimentation, evolution, change … well, it may not be the gold toilet standard, but last time I looked, the world was hurtling into the future whether we decided to rebuild Rome again or not. These folks don’t want to learn from the past, they want to live in it.
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Tags: Degenerate Art, No Modern Architecture in D.C.!, The Pope as Art Critic