Arts Roundup: The New Artistic Evangelicals and the Sistine Chapel Rejected
July 30th, 2007 by Menachem Wecker
Makoto Fujimura’s works “speak to his evangelical Christian faith. But to find it takes some digging,” according to the AP’s Eric Gorski. Gorski says according to Dick Staub, “These artistic evangelicals, though still relatively small in number, are striving to be creators of culture rather than imitators.”
Though Ami Isseroff worries that “rightist extremists” will exploit his piece while “the anti-’Zionists’ will quote what I write here (out of context as usual) as proof of ‘Jewish Zionist Islamophobia,’” he still writes on Middle East Analysis of a piece in Al Ahram English weekly, “Behold, a work of Islamic art! A veritable souvenir of the desert! A tome worthy of the tomb of a Pharaoh and of the utterances of the Islamic sages!” The piece is on Jewish psychosis.
From Maclean’s (Canada):
While the Church appears to be exclusionary in regard to other religions, it’s not above getting grumpy when it feels slighted. Just before the new seven wonders of the world were announced, the Vatican’s Archbishop Mauro Piacenza, head of the pontifical commission for culture, said that it was “surprising, inexplicable, even suspicious” that Christian art such as Michelangelo’s masterpiece in the Sistine Chapel didn’t make the short list. Brazil’s Christ the Redeemer statue, selected as a wonder, was deemed too touristy.