Mass, bishop lashes out at Veneziano exhibition: outrage, not freedom of expression, city council should not have allowed

The exhibition Storytelling, a solo show by Giuseppe Veneziano (Mazzarino, 1971) that took place at the Palazzo Ducale in Massa from Feb. 2 to 24, continues to cause controversy even after it closed its doors.The exhibition stirred up a lot of controversy in the city, especially because of the Sicilian artist’s irreverent religiously motivated works. In particular, many protests were raised against the gay Christ, depicted in a D&G loincloth and with the words “LGBT” instead of the traditional “INRI.”

The bishop of Massa, Giovanni Santucci, had not spoken during the days when the exhibition was open, and had told the press that he would speak only when the exhibition was over. As the closing date passed, the prelate did not forget to make his views on the exhibition known: Santucci, in fact, had emphasized, on the sidelines of a collective prayer of the Catholic association “Via Verità Vita” (which last February 17 had gathered in front of the Ducal Palace for a prayer vigil “in reparation” for the “blasphemy” of Veneziano’s works), that his opinion would come after the exhibition was over because to speak about it beforehand would be like advertising the exhibition.

Thus, the bishop is now a river in flood: “an outrage to the church, this is not freedom of expression but offense,” Santucci told Vita Apuana, the diocese’s weekly newspaper. “The artist,” he stressed, wanting to have his say about the role of those who create images, “communicates what he has inside him, when he sees in the world of life. He has the gift of seeing the invisible. His work enriches the community, expresses the beautiful, invites us to look beyond, says there is a different way of looking at things, at people. The artist does not speak it is his work that speaks and refers to a truth that the work recalls.” A line that, in the bishop’s opinion, has evidently been disregarded by Veneziano: “when instead one wants to be something other than an artist, one uses one’s abilities for other purposes: search for possibilities, provocations, notoriety, earnings. And one uses every medium from cartooning, to people, to feelings ... to faith.” He also does not miss a polemical trench on the fact that artists, according to the bishop, would target only Christians and not believers of other religions, since the faith he rails against, in his opinion, is “always the Christian one, because offending other faiths is dangerous.”

The impetuous Santucci, after describing Veneziano as a capable artist but also one with a “cunning expression” and “provocative,” also has some for the city administration led by Leghist Mayor Francesco Persiani (who, despite having judged Veneziano’s images as “strong,” had not taken up the pleas of those in the city calling for the exhibition’s closure and therefore had let the show remain regularly open): organizing events such as the Storytelling exhibition, Santucci pointed out, “is not creating culture: it is allowing oneself to be used by crafty people who feel superior to others and use a supposed freedom of expression, which is due to all but in this case is not freedom but offense, outrage, and this should not be allowed or tolerated. City administration included.”

Pictured: room of the Storytelling exhibition with the “gay Christ” of controversy

Mass, bishop lashes out at Veneziano exhibition: outrage, not freedom of expression, city council should not have allowed

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