The Vatican’s decision to adopt cartoonish, trivialized symbols, such as the blue-haired ‘Luce’ mascot, is a symptom of a disturbing shift within the Church.  The current trend moving the Church away from Her treasury of glorious art to commercialized trinkets is a mere triviality to many, but the history of this move is darker than most realize.

Anyone Who Tells You V... Coleman, Dr Vernon Buy New $3.99 (as of 04:06 UTC - Details) The age-old question of whether life imitates art, or art imitates life essentially asks whether it is the art which impacts society and shapes the culture – and therefore the artist is an agent of change – or whether the artist is merely an agent of expression, reflecting what is already present within the culture.  The partial answer is that it’s a little of both, but what is missing from the equation is that the underlying philosophy of the artist is what drives it all.

The earliest traces of what is today referred to as modern art are firmly rooted in the French Revolution and the so-called Enlightenment, but it didn’t really take off until the late 1800s. Goya’s Romanticism led to Manet’s Impressionism. Van Gogh’s Post-Impressionism led to the avant-garde experimentation of Les Nabis, French painters who transformed the medium and laid the foundation for the abstract symbolism of modern art.

Most of art history is focused on the development of technique or style, but what is often ignored is the actual philosophy of the artists themselves.  One of the early progenitors of modern art, a Romantic artist named Eugene Delacroix, said: “Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.”  As a philosophy of art, it excuses imperfection and imprecision, but as a philosophy of life, it suggests something worse: that one need not seek to express truth and beauty with precision because the impression is good enough, and error is not to be avoided.  While this may seem like a stretch, this notion bears out with each succeeding generation of artists.

James Whistler, the American painter who is best known for painting his mother in a rocking chair, once said “Art happens – no hovel is safe from it, no prince may depend upon it, the vastest intelligence cannot bring it about.”  What he is saying is that art is some kind of spontaneous energy that supersedes intelligence which – in a manner of speaking – possesses the artist and simply creates.  This notion of art not only discourages the intelligibility of an artistic rendering but eliminates the objectivity of the art itself, which should be directed toward Truth. JFK and the Unspeakabl... Douglass, James W. Best Price: $6.42 Buy New $13.52 (as of 06:45 UTC - Details)

Paul Cezanne – an avant-garde, post-impressionist painter – was called, “the father of us all” by the Communist Cubist, Pablo Picasso.  Henri Matisse called him “a kind of dear god of painting.”  In speaking of the origin of an artistic piece, Cezanne said, “A work of art which did not begin in emotion, is not art.”  This was a revolutionary idea and a radical shift in the nature of art itself.  No longer an expression of the good, the true, and the beautiful, an artistic rendering must now be found in the expression of an emotion.

This radical shift in art from beauty and truth to emotive experience did not happen in a vacuum.  The heresy of Modernism rose to prominence at the same time.  Pope Pius IX warned about some of its errors, and Pope St. Pius X condemned them.  And after a close and careful examination of these two movements, one discovers that the medium of modern art is nothing more than a carefully crafted expression of the Modernist heresy.  The underlying ideology of Modernism is the notion that religion is something that wells up from within as an experience or a feeling, while the reformed nature of art – as defined by the modern artists – is that art is the expression of an emotion or an experience that wells up from within the artist.

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