Pope Francis decried a kind of superficial, or “cosmetic beauty,” and said a way to recognize true beauty is through the presence of harmony.
“True beauty is always the reflection of harmony,” he said. “If I may say so, harmony is the operative virtue of beauty, its deepest spirit, where the Spirit of God, the great harmonizer of the world, is at work.”
He added: “As artists, you can help us to make room for the Spirit.”
Serrano’s works
Serrano has often received intense backlash for his works, which often incorporate bodily fluids, human feces, or photos of corpses.
His photo “Piss Christ” has been criticized as blasphemous and has been the subject of controversy since the late 1980s. U.S. Sens. Al D’Amato and Jesse Helms expressed outrage that the artist received $5,000 from the taxpayer-funded National Endowment for the Arts in 1986.
Cardinal George Pell, when archbishop of Melbourne, tried and failed to receive a legal injunction to prevent the National Gallery of Victoria from displaying the photo in 1997. The show was later canceled when someone tried to remove the work from a wall and two teenagers attacked it with a hammer.
A print of the image was also damaged in 2011 by Christian protesters when it was displayed in an exhibition in a contemporary art museum in Avignon, France.
Serrano has defended the photograph against accusations of blasphemy, calling it “an act of devotion” from someone born and raised Catholic who is now a practicing Christian.
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Other invited artists
Poet Patricia Lockwood, writers Enuma Okoro and Jhumpa Lahiri, Korean-born American playwright Young Jean Lee, photographer Bill Armstrong, artist Daniel Arsham, and sculptor Barry X Ball also represented the United States.
One of Ball’s more recent works is a portrait sculpture of St. John Paul II, a figure he said had fascinated him since his early 20s.
In a description of the work, Ball said despite being raised as a strict fundamentalist Protestant Christian, after he was introduced to art history in college, he “developed a particular affinity for the art of the Church, an almost exclusively Roman Catholic art.”
The sculptor said he was inspired to start taking classes to convert to Catholicism, though he never followed through with it.
“Although I ultimately did not convert, I have continued to spend time in Catholic churches, taking opportunities as they arise during my travels, to look at the art they contain and to bask in their palpable spirituality — so different from the severe white Protestant ‘boxes,’ devoid of art, where I worshiped during my Southern California childhood,” he said.
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Pope Francis addresses artists, including creator of blasphemous crucifix photo - Catholic News Agency
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