Does the church have the right to interfere in secular art, as the CPSU once did?
I wear a cross, a Catholic one, bought in Spain, in a shop in Santiago de Compostela, and consecrated there. My grandmother was from the Vlachs, she baptized me in her faith, from childhood talking about what happened in heaven and what was on earth. I don’t go to church very often, but I know the Lord’s Prayer for sure and almost every day I pronounce these very words. After all, they are New Testament, and therefore common. There is no impudence in this recognition today, this is a common place. This is where the problem begins. Under Soviet rule, a credo would have been a frank attack against the opinions and foundations of the majority, a risk to one’s career, but today it is not, quite the opposite. Loyalty report.
- neurons of spirituality
Today, the biggest impudence is to say “I don’t believe”, it is almost indecent, reprehensible and can even “have consequences”. I’m serious. Although the existence of God has not yet been proven, to believe is the imperative of the time. Just like in the days of total atheism, the imperative was not to believe under any circumstances. That is, the fluctuations here reflect only the spirit of the times: it is easier and calmer to live with God today, and thank God, pardon the pun. A society where they believe is dearer to me than an atheistic one.
But there is a «but». I (a person who reads a prayer) is jarred by the church’s attempt on secular art, which I (a worldly person) need for life. Hands off art, I want to say to the churchmen with their own fervor and noble anger, as I once wanted to say the same to the notorious “Glory of the CPSU”. Either they will not like the performance, or the song, or the figure of speech. Everything is business, you can’t hide from a strict eye!
Secular art, with its idea of not being subject to either the church or the authorities’ court, but only to the human one, often understanding the freedom of creativity as complete chaos, and often, on the contrary, soaring to the very heavens, is necessary for us like blood. Which carries oxygen, information from one organ to another, codes of commonality, kinship or, on the contrary, incompatibility, sometimes diseases, a virus in the fight against which we became viable. We don’t need to filter our blood, we don’t need to grab our tongues, our hands with a hedgehog, to poke them into musical harmony. We want to experience everything, digest it without any sterility, in order to understand what makes the stomach hurt and what makes it sing. In art, the repulsive acquires the attraction of a forbidden fruit, as soon as someone swings at it; stings worse than a wasp if someone tries to slap him with a newspaper. Is it not for this that the ugly exists in order to reveal its evidence, to arouse disgust for itself? We need both a pimple and a wart on the face of contemporary art. To appreciate beauty.