“Cardinal Ravasi is really hot on the subject of contemporary art and thinks most religious art of the 20th and 21st century is not worthy of the name,” says Anna Somers Cocks, the founder editor and chief executive of The Art Newspaper. “I very much hope he will be one of our witnesses in the Vatican gig of our ‘What is art for?’ investigations, and the prosecutor just has to be a Dominican—after all they ran the Holy Inquisition for centuries”.
The paper is celebrating its 25th anniversary on Wednesday 28 October with the first of these investigations at the British Museum. The witnesses are the Booker Prize-winning novelist, Ben Okri, the mathematician and cosmologist, John Barrow, the writer on comparative religions, Karen Armstrong, and the Saudi colonel, artist and activist, Abdulnasser Gharem, while the prosecutor is the well known human rights barrister Helena Kennedy QC. Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum, is taking the role of judge (he is, after all, a qualified Scottish barrister) and will do the summing up.
On 18 February 2016, the investigation moves to the Museum of Modern Art, New York, this time with American speakers. “They mustn’t primarily be from inside the art world, which has become either very self-congratulatory or self-flagellating”, says Somers Cocks. “We need to be refreshed with ideas from the people for whom art is ultimately being made”.
The road show continues next year to the Hermitage in St Petersburg (date undecided) and the Vatican, in May. The London and New York stages are supported by Volkswagen.