By Carrie Gress
The 1970s were hard years on churches. Altar rails, statuary, reredos, stained-glass windows, and elegant ambos were torn out with wild abandon, while churches-in-the-round, modernist statues, and felt banners replaced them. There’s been a recent surge to return older churches to their former glory, replacing wreckovation with true renovation.
Art historian Liz Lev explains a sad phenomenon in the art world, known in Italian as “chapucismo,” or “a sloppy cob job,” where works of art are destroyed irreparably. The Ecco Homo is perhaps the most well-known example, striking both sorrow and the funny-bone because the finished product is such a caricature.
The destruction of churches and art is strikingly similar to another area where beauty is under attack: women. Women have been made to be beautiful and have been the subjects of great art for millennia for good reason. It was International Women’s Day yesterday, but sadly, since the 1960s and 70s, true feminine beauty has been transformed into raw sex appeal. New trends in third-wave feminism and its fourth wave, the LGBTQ+ movement, have maintained high-pitched sexuality, but also splintered off into a different direction – the rejection of the feminine entirely and the embrace of genderlessness.
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