And as was pointed out earlier, folks who think there’s anything “demonic” about it can take two minuts to read about it to learn about the artists influence. I am sure there are other pieces of art in Catholic culture that they similarly don’t understand. Should we just get rid of all of those, too?
It seems obnoxious and elitist to expect an entire globe of strangers and the general public (including the illiterate and overwhelmingly busy) to undo the direct psychological impression an eccentric individual’s artwork gives them, by having to study the artist’s private motives and random private meaning-making in making it.
If it were just some dumb random art thing, I’d mostly ignore it (or maybe even praise it as a well-made piece of film horror set). But it’s literally behind the pope’s chair. And
enormous, behind the pope’s chair. This visually represents our religion when non-Catholics tune in and look at it. And for some people, such subconscious impressions of evil can have an effect on whether they explore a religion further in future in the first place.
Protestants exist who think the Catholic Church is the whore of Babylon. We love these Protestants and want them to convert. Why would we
instead deviate from traditional art forms and symbolic language that even Protestants largely understand (even if they don’t like it and think it’s idols), and start instead using the visual language of evil cues to represent Christ?
I think it’s deliberately obtuse to claim there’s no difference between one kind of artwork that confuses Protestants, and another. There’s such an obvious difference here that it’s jaw dropping.
Like… to get at this another way.
Look back at that image of the sculpture. Now imagine the pope’s chair isn’t there, no hint of religious figures to give the context away. Just, that sculpture. (And maybe a couple random people in front of it for scale.)
Now imagine you’re a scientist showing that picture to 1 million random people. Totally random selection, you can even make it global if you like: People from India, China, Africa, North and South America.
Imagine asking these 1 million people one simple question, with two checkboxes in front of them: When shown this image for a split second, does it instinctively strike them as evil, or good?
Then see how many human creatures instinctively report that this sculpture gives them an ‘evil’ sense versus a ‘good’ sense.
Now granted we’d have to actually run this experiment to know for sure.
But I honestly think that anyone who doesn’t have a feeling in their stomach that tells them which way most humans will go on this, is being dishonest with themselves.
While some things vary by culture, some things are near pan-cultural universals (like the ‘Kiki’ / ‘Boobah’ linguistic phonetic phenomenon). It strikes me that the visual language of this dreary shadowy exploding enormous thorn bush, that gives an uncanny valley effect of contorted human figures among other jagged things, is likely to have a similar instinctive consensus from most human persons.
And that matters.
(I can tell you what the Pope talked about, on the other hand: saint Joan of Arc.)
It just looks more normal to have that curtain and tapestry close behind the pope.
