Is That a Pope or a Tent?

As a student of the  Tom Wolfe school of art criticism (yes, by repeated usage I will make that a real thing) I tend to be harshly critical of most forms of contemporary art. So to show that I can be objective and fair-minded, I’ll say something nice about  Oliviero Rainaldi’s new statue of John Paul II : It’s bad, but it’s not that bad.

At least I don’t find it as appalling as Federico Mollicone, president of Rome’s Cultural Commission, who says: ‘It’s a permanent and sacrilegious mud stain on [John Paul II’s] memory.’’

The Vatican newspaper  L’Osservatore Romano didn’t like it either. The same paper that praised The Blues Brothers , Pink Floyd, and David Crosby , says the statue “makes him look like a tent . . . it looks like a bomb has hit . . . ”

Poor Oliviero Rainaldi can’t understand why everyone is hating on his creation. “I’m disappointed that my statute has been misunderstood,” he says, “I had wanted to do something more 18th Century but in the end went for contemporary design.”

Take a look and see what you think:

Eh, I’ve seen worse. Do you find it as horrific as do our friends in Rome?

By the way, why do bronze statues always look like they were just pulled off the ocean floor? They just put this one up on Wednesday and it already looks like it is covered in algae. Isn’t there some kind of coating they could put on them to prevent them turning that ugly color?