A New Age-y Pictorial Fantasia

In today’s second “On the Square” article, painter and art critic Maureen Mullarkey reviews an exhibit at a New York museum comparing icons in Orthodox Christianity and Tibetan Buddhism. Modernity’s Seductive Hedges begins:

Modernity offers uneasy secularists two seductive hedges: aestheticism and Buddhism. New York’s Rubin Museum yokes them together in a pictorial fantasia on the New Age-y theme of universal spirituality. No divisive truth claims mar the view from the $100 million monument to Multi-Plan founder Donald Rubin’s own purchasing power and those acquisitive cravings that Buddhist doctrine decries. But all contradictions and irreconcilable differences disperse in the solvent of art appreciation, that distinctly Western ideology at the heart of museum culture.

She goes on not only to review the exhibit but to offer insights into the profound differences between Christianity and Buddhism, which the exhibit, apparently somewhat unintentionally, highlights.