Category: ideas

The actual observance of Christianity is plummeting in modern-day Britain, but in the arts, the religion’s narratives and iconography remain powerful sources of both inspiration and controversy – from the very successful music of classical composers James MacMillan and John Tavener to artist Chris Ofili’s notorious Holy Virgin Mary (the one with the elephant dung) and sculptor Terence Koh’s depiction of Jesus with an erection to Jerry Springer: The Opera and David Hare’s play Gethsemane to the BBC1 television series Apparitions, about a contemporary priest chasing Satan away from souls. How does the subject of Christianity continue to engage artists and audiences, even as belief wanes?

Last year a large crucifix made of chocolate, titled My Sweet Lord, caused a mini-storm when it appeared in a Manhattan art gallery. But now the idea has gone commercial: a German businessman has started manufacturing and selling “Sweetlord®” and the “Original Chocolate GoldJesus®” (available at www.goldjesus.com).

“But the underlying problem is one common to all the arts: fear. The arts are rank with it. Fear of being thought ignorant or being revealed as a fraud. Fear of not knowing how to pronounce chiaroscuro, trompe l’oeil or gesamtkunstwerk. Fear because the books we think we should have read bully us mercilessly and the music we think we ought to recognise tortures us on a rack of nagging self-doubt. Galleries and concert hall lobbies are filled with those darting eyes and premature nodding that masks the gentle, creeping terror of those seeking to signify recognition where none in fact exists.”

What are the big ideas that will carry the arts into the future? What impact has the internet had on live performance, and how will audiences used to interacting with every type of entertainment evolve with performers used to passive crowds? A UK newspaper asks a collection of prominent artists and performers the big questions…

“I have yet to find a curatorial colleague who regularly beats a path to the fragrance counter in search of, say, Joy Parfum, the 1930 masterpiece by Henri Alméras for Jean Patou, which, if it were a painting, could hang beside Matisse’s nearly contemporary Yellow Odalisque in Philadelphia. And yet, the parallels between what ought to be more properly regarded as sister arts are undeniable. Artists and colourmen combine natural and, these days, synthetic pigments with media such as oils and resins, much as the perfumer carefully formulates natural and synthetic chemical compounds.”

“Birds may be bilingual, trilingual or better, suggest new findings that birds in the wild can learn the vocalizations of other species. The discovery not only proves that birds eavesdrop on what other birds are saying, but it also provides some of the strongest evidence to date that birds can learn ‘foreign’ calls, as opposed to just confusing similar sounds with their own.”

“Telling stories is as old a game as language itself. So it’s odd – not to say alarming – to read reports that some people seem to think we’re on the verge of running out of narrative.” Exhibit A: MIT’s Center for Future Storytelling. “Changing technologies have affected the means by which stories are told,” Sam Leith argues, but they are stories nonetheless.

“Once, long ago, culture revolved around the spoken word. The oral skills of memorization, recitation and rhetoric instilled in societies a reverence for the past, the ambiguous, the ornate and the subjective. Now invention is again overthrowing the dominant media. A new distribution-and-display technology is nudging the book aside and catapulting images, and especially moving images, to the center of the culture. We are becoming people of the screen.”

“If we could remember everything equally well, the brain would be hopelessly overburdened and would operate more slowly.” So what about those few people who rememered literally everything?

How did a civilisation so great and powerful end? According to Herodotus, “in magnificence there is no other city that approaches” Babylon. In it, or at least in its region, writing appeared for the first time. It was the only city that boasted not one, but two Wonders of the World. Besides the illusive hanging gardens, there was the mammoth city wall that stood nearly ten storeys high.