Now in Brackettville, Texas!

UTEP Religious Art Appreciation 1301 Bravo:

¡Ora, UTEP!

¡Ora, MEChA!

¡Adelante, DESTINO!

Nearly a half century before Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code we had fellow Catholic Richard Egenter !

But! "Nobody listened !"

Richard Egenter's Kitsch und Chistenleben (1958), in English translation!

The job done on a certain Renaissance Painter by Dan the Man, albeit by liberally copying a lot of other folks, our main man does on nearly everyone else, like Salvador Dali and most recently Dali's famous painting The Christ of St. John of the Cross, copies of which were distributed to all and sundry at the end of El Paso's St. Patrick Cathedral's 2007 three day Lenten Mission as preached in English by Father Rick Mattey.

On Thursday, March 1, 2007, to be exact.

Egenter, Richard. Author. Gray, Nicolete. Editor. Quinn, Edward. Translator. The Desecration of Christ. Chicago, Illinois: Franciscan Herald Press, 1967.

Publisher's note:

"The word kitsch is untranslatable, and does actually now appear in the Concise Oxford Dictionary.

"A considerable part of this book is concerned with the discussion of its precise meaning, but the reader who is not familiar with the word it may be taken as a starting point to mean repository art and its counterpart in music, verse and the other arts.

"It is not by any means applied only to pious art, but this is the aspect with which this book is concerned.

"Kitsch is a noun which can be used adjectivally."

Pages 40-41:

"Our Lord is represented as a young man with beautiful curly hair.

"His body is painted very realistically but without any signs of the suffering of the Passion.

"The Cross is dramatically lit by a strong cross light, but the striking thing about the picture is the angle of view, the beolder looking down upon Christ.

"It may be that devout people glancing at the picture can pass on to a meditation on our Lord's contemplation of succeeding generations of men from the Cross.

"Studying th epicture, however, one becomes aware that the viewpoint is a trick to catch attention, while in itself it is fundamentally blasphemous, as is the realism used to make our Lord physically attractive.

"There is no inkling either of the divinity, or of the redemptive suffering of Christ."

Now, Editor Nicolete Gray has something to add to this in her Epilogue, page 154:

"In a different category are the works of Dali (Plates 6 and 7). These are not cheap and shoddy, but very expensive and very accomplished, and for that reason more insidious; these to my mind are evil kitsch."