By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist
The famous New York auction house, Sotheby’s, is hosting an art exhibition celebrating Dante’s “Divine Comedy” that contains a mockery of Christ and profane images of priests.
The Catholic League for Catholic and Civil Rights is reporting that the exhibit, which opens today and runs until Oct. 19, contains some 80 pieces of work dating from antiquity that revolve around Dante’s famous poem.
One item, entitled “The Priest”, by artist George Condo, is described as a “weird 2010 depiction” of a deformed animal’s face resting on the torso of a priest. Another image, by Salvador Dali, called “The Vision of Hell, shows pitchforks and a portrait of the Blessed Mother.
But the most offensive piece is by Martin Kippenberger, Zuerst die Fuesse (Feet First). This work, which first appeared in 1990, substitutes a frog for Jesus on the Cross with the crucified amphibian holding a mug of beer and an egg.
“The work of Condo is amateurish and Dali’s is representative of his usual edginess. But Kippenberger’s crosses the line,” says Catholic League president Bill Donohue.
“No wonder Pope Benedict XVI was angry when he learned of it two years ago. On August 7, 2008, he wrote a letter to Franz Pahl, the regional official in Italy where the sculpture was being displayed at a Bolzano museum, saying it ‘injured the religious feeling of many people who see in the Cross the symbol of the love of God and of our salvation, which deserves recognition and religious devotion.'”
Apparently, Pahl agreed with the Pope and went on a hunger strike to protest the mockery.
“Sotheby’s needs to explain why they are featuring Kippenberger’s assault on Christian sensibilities,” Donohue says. “Hopefully, they will spare us the tired refrain that art is in the eye of the beholder. In fact, art is always partly, but never always, in the eye of the beholder. That’s why Wagner’s compositions are never played in Israel.”
Contact Sotheby’s media official: Lauren.Gioia@Sothebys.com
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