Disagreements are common occurrence in the art world. This is not unexpected. Creative minds are independent thinkers, after all. But the latest dispute can leave you open-mouthed.
The argument you don’t bargain for is over Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam” in the Sistine Chapel. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Michelangelo, the poet
This story began quietly enough when Artnet News cited a poem that Michelangelo’s wrote about his ordeal painting the Chapel ceiling.
To remind you of the postures he took to get to paint the 45-foot by 128-foot ceiling, he had to bend his neck backward and raise his arm high above his head.
So, he worked in pain.
He made these points in a poem to his friend known as Giovanni, beginning with: “I’ve already grown a goiter from this torture.” He went on about how his stomach was squashed under his chin, and his brush above him all the time, dribbling paint so his face “makes a fine floor for droppings.”
Moaning and groaning
Perhaps the biggest surprise in his gripes is the whine “every gesture I make is blind and aimless.” This is hard to take in when you behold what his “every gesture” wrought.
But what may the runner-up for most surprising moan: “Because I’m stuck like this, my thoughts are crazy, perfidious tripe.” Ending with: “My painting is dead... I am not a painter.”
The shock of such self-recrimination is that he purposely destroyed most of his drawings for the ceiling painting because, as historian Vasari noted in his 1550 tome, Michelangelo didn’t want anyone to know “the labors he endured.”
All that said, Michelangelo is surely entitled to belittle himself.
But belittling from The Christian Post is startling. What's the beef? The chapel ceiling is full of “white supremacy and patriarchy.”
Mind you, this naysaying is not from some social media malcontent spewing hate. It came from Robin DiAngelo, associate professor of education at the University of Washington, and authored several books and academic articles on race, privilege and education.
In 2011, she co-wrote with Ozlem Sensoy the award-winning book “Is Everyone Really Equal?” This work rated The American Educational Research Association's Critics' Choice Book Award in 2012.
According to DiAngelo, because the figures of God and Adam and the angels are all white, it’s “the perfect convergence of white supremacy, patriarchy.”
With those images, she thinks the message is that whiteness is the best race to be.
“It’s power.”
But if money is power, DiAngelo is full of it. Jon Brown, who reported this story about her for The Christian Post, noted that she has “raked in exorbitant speaking fees amid the success of her book.”
Counting up, there’s the $20,000 for a seminar she ran at the University of Connecticut. There’s her charge for lectures she gives that run at rates between $10,000 and $15,000. And to hear the Daily Caller News Foundation tell it, there are the phone call with her that costs $320 apiece.
As for DiAngelo’s complaints about the ceiling painting, is she saying that Michelangelo was a racist for coloring God, Adam and the angels white?
Wouldn't that make every painter in art history depicting religious figures a racist, too?
