ART THAT SHOCKED THE WORLD
absolutely no place for
SACRILEGE
i A violation of what is sacred
i Profane, heretic, controversial
 Is art religious in origin?
o Art proceeds primarily from a love of
beauty, which man later harnessed to a
spiritual purpose.
 linked to shamanistic rites or
designed to secure divine
intervention
i shamanistic rites – gift of
prophecy and power of healing
 substantial beliefs
 Religion imposed detailed rules on artists.
 The various religions have generated a vast
array of magnificent works of art of all kinds.
 Western art
o initially geared to depicting a Catholic
universe
 Pope Gregory I: stipulated that
art had two functions
 to spread knowledge of
the faith by creating
and disseminating
images of religious
figures and scenes
 to move the faithful to
devotion through such
images and so elevate
their souls
i Gregory the Great
 Last of the doctors of the church
 Eminent Christian teachers
 St. Augustine, St. Ambross, St. Jerome, &
St. Gregory
o St. Thomas Aquinas – not official
 16th century: reformers’ establishment of the
Protestant Church
o rivalry between Catholicism and
Protestantism
o a fight for the moral high ground, which
in turn led the papacy to monitor art
very closely
o Council of Trent: set out principles
designed to intensify the Counter
Reformation
 a decree that there was
profanity of any kind in a
sacred work
 Renaissance: Artists began to gain greater
freedom and confidence.
 As time has gone on, religion has come to play
an increasingly smaller role in society and art,
and profane, lay, event anticlerical subjects
have become permissible.
o Blasphemy continues to vex some
authorities.
 The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden
 fresco by Masaccio (Tommaso di
Giovanni)
o a pioneer of Renaissance
humanist thought that placed
Man at the center of
everything
o made religious painting human
i Father of Florentine Art
i Florence = center of art and
culture devlt
 size of the figures: governed by
perspective
o Adam and Eve are bigger than
the angel.
 Saint Sebastian
i Patron of homosexuals; plague
intercession
 painting by Fra Bartolomeo
o removed almost all traces of
violence and suffering and
focused instead on Saint
Sebastian’s unashamedly
sensuous body
i completed by Filippino Lippi
 was hung in all reverence in a church in
Florence but had to be swiftly removed
 shows Saint Sebastian’s graceful,
languid pose, prominent muscles,
genitals barely veiled by light gauze
 Reformation: the epitome of the
perversion of religion by painters
 The Last Judgment
 fresco by Michelangelo Buonarroti
 o commissioned by Pope Julius II
to paint the ceiling of the
Sistine Chapel
o commissioned by Pope Clement
VII to paint the altar wall of the
Sistine Chapel
 found at the altar wall of the Sistine
Chapel, Vatican City
 criticized for nudity and the depictions
of Christ and the torments of Hell
 “Make the world a more respectable
place and painting will quickly follow
suit.” (Michelangelo)
i artisans = artists
 no freedom
 mandated by church
 arts were rarely signed
 The Feast in the House of Levi
 painting by Veronese
 portrayed Christ’s Last Supper as a
bustling, lavish, profane banquet
o The Inquisition was displeased
 shows The Last Supper: Christ and the
Twelve Apostles and more…
 “We painters take the same liberties as
poets and fools.” (Veronese) Paolo
Caliari
rd
i Levi – 3 son of Jacob and Leah
i The Holy Office = judicial institution established
by the papacy and was in charge of seeking out,
trying, and sentencing people who were guilty
of HERESY
 The Death of the Virgin
 painting by Michelangelo Merisi da
Caravaggio
i very immoral; images of women
he had relationships with
 poor beggars and
prostitutes
 the Virgin as a drowned prostitute or
peasant woman fished out of the Tiber
with her swollen body and shamefully
exposed legs
 shows a common, everyday scene of
death
 The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa
 sculpture by Gian Lorenzo Bernini
 embodies the spirit of baroque
sculpture with its dramatic tension,
intricacy, and sense of movement
 controversial for the ambiguous nature
of Saint Teresa’s reaction
 divine ecstasy as an orgasmic mixture
of pleasure and pain coursing through
the body
 Divina Tragedia
 painting by Paul Chenavard
 Théophile Gautier: about the death of
pagan gods rendered obsolete by the
advent Christianity
 shows death lunging at the Christian
Trinity
 presents complicated religious
symbolism that turned out to be not
very Catholic
i death of holy trinity
 Immersion (Piss Christ)
 photograph by Andres Serrano
 Pat Robertson: “government-funded
blasphemy”
 shows a crucifix immersed in urine, and
the artist’s own at that
 Poleteismo
 mixed-media collage by Mideo Cruz
 displayed during the “Kulo” Art Exhibit
sponsored by the Cultural Center of the
Philippines (CCP)
 Cruz: about the worship of relics and
how idolatry evolves through history
and modern culture
 criticized as blasphemous
POLITICAL INCORRECTNESS
 “No, painting is not made to decorate houses. It
is an instrument of offensive and defensive war
against the enemy.” (Pablo Picasso)
 For centuries, art depended almost entirely on
the munificence of those in power.
 Relations between politics and art are often
poisoned by mistrust or even contempt.
 Artists inevitably communicate a way of looking
at the world.
 works of art
o can become political tools for they
reflect the prejudices and hopes, the
hidden desires and fears of the time
i ENEMY OF ART = CLOSEMINDEDNESS,
INDIFFERENCE, & ANYTHING THAT LIMITS
MORES AND NORMS
 The Raft of the Medusa
 painting by Théodore Géricault
o harshly criticized for his hideous
pursuit of realism
 portrayed the terrible story of the raft
of The Medusa
 cause of controversy: the violence of
the painting
 distress of the victims: a veiled criticism
of the abuse of power, negligence, and
racism
 Liberty Leading the People
 painting by Eugène Delacroix
o sympathy for the values of the
Revolution
 considered a key work in French culture
 the choice of subject and its treatment
as tantamount to an incitement to riot
 a reminder of the Revolution: the
Phrygian cap on the woman’s head, the
stripped corpses, the smoke, the
violence
i King Louis XVI & Marie-Antoinette
o Weak king and extravagant spending
o Too much tax
 Gargantua
 lithograph by Honoré Daumier
o accused those in power of
squeezing the people dry
o taught and inspired by Charles
Philipon
o Act of 1831: prohibited the
publication of his prints
 published in La Caricature
 shows a bloated king greedily
swallowing up all the money of the
emaciated, poverty-stricken people
i Caricature – work of art and comic
exaggeration; drawing, description, or
performance that exaggerates some things for
humorous or satirical effects
i Image of King Louis Philippe
o Inspired by Charles Philip (teacher)
 Balzac
 sculpture by Auguste Rodin
o deliberately chose to portray
Honoré de Balzac in a rough
and slightly distorted style in
order to convey the emotional
state of the writer
 commissioned by Société des Gens de
Lettres
o considered Rodin’s work a
crude and ugly figure
i Emile Zola  French writer; suggested Rodin
i Deliberately made it ugly
 The Trench
 painting by Otto Dix
 led an artistic and literary movement
called the Neue Sachlichkeit
o new objectivity; have a very
clear portrayal of reality
 best-known works depict the horrors of
war
 shows mass graves, abandoned corpses,
dismembered bodies, eviscerated
torsos, eyeless faces
 shown at the exhibition of “degenerate
art” in 1937
i one of 260 confiscated works
i Nazism = art is corrupt
i “The War” = triptych
 One-Thousand-Yen Note Trial Impound Object:
Mask
 by Genpei Akasegawa
o avant-garde artist who made
imitations of banknotes and
turned them into artistic works
o It was only art!
 to make simulacra of banknotes is to
interfere with the function of a major
instrument of the state
  Him
 sculpture by Maurizio Cattelan
 depicts recognizable historical figures
and the great masters of modern art
 controversy: exhibited in the old
Warsaw Ghetto
 “an insane provocation that insulted
the memory of the Nazi’s Jewish
victims” (Simon Wiesenthal Centre)
TRANSGRESSIONS
 “Beauty is a way of death. The newness, the
intensity, the strangeness; in a word, all of the
values of shock supplant it.” (Paul Valéry)
 Breaking the basic rules of art amounts to
overstepping the conventions of representation
and creative production.
 19th century: Artistic controversies became
more frequent
o Romanticism: invested the artist with
the status of a leader of men, of a rebel
and prophet
o The influence of the Church and
European monarchies decreased.
o new adversaries: the critics and judges
of official exhibitions
 Fountain
 readymade by Marcel Duchamp
o selected an everyday object
that he transformed into art
and then duplicated
 an upside-down urinal signed “R. Mutt”
 presented to the Society of
Independent Artists in New York
 One: Number 31
 painting by Jackson Pollock
o known for his dripping and
pouring techniques
o professed a belief in radical
abstraction
 found in Museum of Modern Art
(MoMA), New York
 “On the floor I am more at ease. I feel
nearer, more part of the painting, since
this way I can walk around it, work from
the four sides and literally be in the
painting.” (Pollock)
 Merde d’artiste
 work by Piero Manzoni
 90 yellow cans, numbered
consecutively and signed
 guaranteed to contain Manzoni’s own
excrement
 “Artist’s S**t, CONTENTS: 30 gr net,
FRESHLY PRESERVED, PRODUCED AND
TINNED IN MAY 1961”
 a contract of confidence between the
artist and purchaser
i 1989: Bernard Bazile  opened can, didn’t tell
i Agostino Bonalumi  not really excrement;
plaster inside
 For the Love of God
 work by Damien Hirst
o known as a “shockaholic”
o the enfant terrible of
contemporary art
 shown at an exhibition in the White
Cube Gallery, London
 a platinum cast of a skull studded with
more than 1,100 carats of diamonds
 controversies: cost close to 15 million
euros; Hirst never even got his hands
dirty
 Hirst: accused of producing a “publicity”
stunt devoid of any artistic content
i Not the one who completed it  assistants
i Baby’s Skull  “For Heaven’s Sake” = 8,000
diamonds
 Helena
 work by Marco Evaristti
 an installation in which food mixers
take the place of goldfish bowls
 aimed at drawing in 3 categories of
spectators: the “idiot,” the “voyeur,”
and the “moralist”
o The work is open: what
happens when an ordinary
viewer finds himself alone with
his conscience?
i Peter S. Meyers  museum director; faced
animal cruelty charge
 Balloon Dog (Magenta)
  sculpture by Jeff Koons
o the king of kitsch and neo-pop
 shown at the Château de Versailles
(Hercules Salon), Paris, France
 Jeff Koons – Versailles exhibition: a
“risk” and an “ephemeral folly”
 a 3-meter high balloon dog in the midst
of all the marble, mirrors, gilding and
sumptuous fountains of the palace

 Body Worlds Exhibition

 works by Günther von Hagens
i Doctor Death
i TV show: Autopsy: Life and
Death
 fascinated by the human body and how
it functions
 invented “plastination” preserving
body after death
 shown in Berlin, Germany
 Muscles, veins, arteries, intestines, and
tendons are visible.
 Solidified bodies were staged in
particular scenes or positions