by Jon Lackman | 20 September 2007 | Modern
Signandsight.com summarizes an article from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung:
For art historian Werner Spies, Cardinal Meisner’s comment on “degenerated culture” in his service Friday in the Cologne’s Cathedral (more here) merely gives voice to latent tendencies: the ignorance of the Catholic Church in face of modern art: “This attack on Gerhard Richter’s life’s work (the Cathedral now houses a new stained glass window by Richter – ed) only reveals the hypocrisy of the Church, which in the last fifty years was forced to greet practically everything with liberality because behind any criticism of modern art lay the disgrace of that baneful word ‘degenerate’. Neither Picasso’s variations on the crucifixion scene in Grünewald’s Isenheim Altar, nor Dali’s ‘Corpus Hypercubus’ could cause such a stir because they never made it into the sanctuary of the church. What a relief that a work like this has appeared in a place that belongs to and concerns us all, and has finally forced the Church to take a stance.”
