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Secularizing Religious Art Robs It of Its Meaning

March 11 2015

The Museum of Biblical Art (MoBIA), located in New York City, currently has on display an exhibit of Renaissance sculpture borrowed from the cathedral museum of Florence. Despite its name, the museum officially “takes a secular perspective on the Bible’s pivotal role in art history.” The results of this approach, writes Maureen Mullarkey, can be detected in the exhibit:

Isolated from their liturgical setting, the art on view bespeaks a church submissive to secular pretensions. Without intending to, the [museum perpetuates] late modernity’s view of Christianity as a spent tradition, one that requires injections of museum prestige. Museumization allows Christianity to linger as an historical phenomenon, no longer a creative cultural force but compliant with the conceits of a post-Christian culture.

MoBIA follows the reigning practice of translating enhancements for a sacral setting into museum stock on shelves in the cultural pantry.

Read more at First Things

More about: Art, Arts & Culture, Christianity, Museums, Religion, Renaissance

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic