Posted: Mar 11, 2018 10:58 pm
Animavore wrote:What a horrid, tacky statue. Looks like it's made of chalk and wishful thinking. If there really was a God he would've destroyed such a bastardisation of the nature he created.
Several observers have commented on the manner, in which the devout are drawn to grotesquely self-parodying trash. Nothing is too tasteless, too tacky or too prone to hilarious mockery, that it will be avoided by at least some enthusiasts for the most infantile interpretations of mythology. Though sometimes, those posturing as being "sophisticated" religious adherents fall into the trap of being seduced by artefacts in this class as well, and Catholicism provides some cringe-making examples, readily available to anyone who heads off on a trip to Lourdes.
My first encounter with explicit presentation of this phenomenon came courtesy of a poster called Zeno over at Pharyngula, who penned the following:
It seems to me to be as sincere as it is crappy. No matter how feculent, any religiously inspired travesty will get fulsome praise from the devout. They take sincerity for quality and eagerly spoon up the most noisome dreck.
I've since discovered that the more idolatrous the manifestation of supernaturalism, the more likely its adherents are to exhibit a love of excremental tat, especially if, as Zeno above notes, the requisite adherents become convinced of the sincerity of the maker thereof. Anything emanating from the hand of a fellow True BelieverTM will be elevated far beyond its intrinsic worth, and result in yet another instance of the idolatry that motivated the fabrication of the suppuratingly bubotic artefact in question to begin with.
Catholicism falls into this trap precisely because it's pretty much shot through with idolatry, but one of the more hilarious recent developments, is the emergence of self-proclaimed "anti-idolatrous" strains of fundamentalist Protestantism that are, if anything, even more florid than Catholicism in this vein. Said branches of fundamentalist Protestantism are notable for exhibiting a frankly creepy fetish for specific lurid parts of the Old Testament, which are revered with a fervour that borders upon being an ideological radiation hazard. Usually, the requisite lurid Old Testament tracts chosen for such reverence, also happen to be the ones most easily pressed into service by pedlars of apologetics seeking divine 'legitimisation' for all manner of hideous bigotries.
It's not without reason that I've stated in the past, in various circles, that the last decent artist motivated by religion (decent here referring to quality of output) was William Holman Hunt, though some of his offerings were frankly surreal, and led to head-shaking even by devout Christians amongst the Victorians he was seeking to keep on the path of righteousness. He did, however, possess genuine talent, and when he let loose with said talent properly, he produced some sterling artworks. Even with my natural suspicion of supernaturalist propaganda, I can appreciate The Light Of The World as an instance where his output was both sincere and technically proficient, though some of his secular subjects are rendered with even more finesse. I'm also minded to note that he strove to be decent in the ethical sense as well, within his historical and intellectual limits, and modern observers would regard his fretful concerns about his personal life as woefully over-wrought, when compared to the venal excesses not only of some contemporaries, but of later figures with a vastly more troublesome influence upon history.
World War I killed off any hope of a successor to Holman Hunt here in England, the horrors of The Somme doing for Victorian and Edwardian piety what the Black Death did for much mediaeval religiosity. World War II might not have hammered the final nail in the coffin (though in Europe it's been a salutary experience for obvious reasons), but it's certainly not helped with regard to the emergence of a Holman Hunt for the present age. It's difficult to imagine a Holman Hunt figure, let alone a modern-day version of Bartolome Esteban Murillo, becoming prominent in the present, and the vacuum left by such non-emergence has been filled with the ninth-rate and the downright pathological.