\u201cIf you\u2019re here to confess your sins, press one \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s the message awaiting callers to a special hotline from Thursday. But it\u2019s not a digital Catholic church initiative for the Easter weekend: instead, it\u2019s the latest intervention of the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, who scandalised some with his 1999 sculpture La Nona Ora<\/a> (The Ninth Hour), which showed a lifesize Pope John Paul II being struck down by a meteorite.<\/p>\n La Nona Ora depicts Pope John Paul II holding up a meteorite, which Cattelan said showed \u2018fragility\u2019. Photograph: Alain Jocard\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n To mark the 21st anniversary of John Paul\u2019s death this month, Cattelan has made a limited edition of miniatures of his famous sculpture.<\/p>\n Alongside this, he is inviting callers from around the world to \u201cconfess their sins\u201d directly \u2013 via a freephone US number or WhatsApp voice note for those elsewhere. Cattelan will then choose some callers to take part in a livestreamed event on 23 April, in which he will play the part of the priest and \u201cabsolve\u201d callers from their sins.<\/p>\n So is this an attempt to scandalise? Absolutely not, he said. \u201cI don\u2019t see it as absolution. It\u2019s not religious authority, it\u2019s a shared gesture. Confession exists in different forms everywhere \u2013 even outside religion.\u201d<\/p>\n Far from intending to insult the papacy with his 1999 work, he said he had been \u201cinterested in showing fragility\u201d. Some people, including some Catholics, saw the sculpture as representing the pope\u2019s burdens; others believed it referenced the abuse and other scandals in the Catholic church\u2019s recent past, and when it appeared at a museum in Warsaw, it was denounced as an attack on the church.<\/p>\n Cattelan is known for creating blunt, almost cartoonish pieces \u2013 from a functional gold toilet installed at the Guggenheim in 2016 called America (later stolen<\/a> while on display in Blenheim palace) to a banana duct-taped to a wall<\/a> at Art Basel in Miami in 2019, titled Comedian.<\/p>\n Cattelan\u2019s solid gold toilet was stolen while on display at Blenheim palace. Photograph: Jacopo Zotti (Guggenheim Museum 2016)\/PA<\/p>\n Some of his work can seem sacrilegious, but he said his ambitions were much more ambiguous. He told the Guardian: \u201cCatholicism is something you grow up inside, even if you try to step out of it. It\u2019s belief, theatre, control, comfort \u2013 all at once. I\u2019m not trying to defend it or attack it. I\u2019m interested in the images it produces and the tension they carry. If someone feels offended, it probably means the image is still alive.\u201d<\/p>\n Certainly, the Vatican seems not to have regarded him as a threat: in 2024 he was commissioned by the Holy See to create an artwork for its Venice Biennale offering. Cattelan painted a giant mural of soles \u2013 the feet kind \u2013 on the exterior wall of the women\u2019s prison where the Vatican\u2019s art exhibition was housed. \u201cThe fact that Pope Francis came to see the work \u2026 is more than a comment,\u201d said Cattelan.<\/p>\n Mazdak Sanii is chief executive of Avant Arte<\/a>, the company marketing Cattelan\u2019s pope miniatures. He said the confession idea is all about trying to reach new audiences: \u201cWe\u2019re trying to make art more accessible both in terms of collecting art, and involving a wider public.\u201d The miniatures, 30cm long and 12.5cm high<\/a>, are made of hand-painted resin, and the papal staff is metal: each will retail for \u20ac2,200.<\/p>\n Comedian sold for $6.2m at a New York auction in 2024. There\u2019s another provocation in the number of copies of the sculpture being made: it\u2019s 666, which in the bible is associated with evil. \u201cI like working with symbols people think they understand, and then shifting them slightly,\u201d said Cattelan.<\/p>\n The release of the edition is carefully timed: the sculpture\u2019s title, The Ninth Hour, references the moment Christ died on the cross, which Christians across the world will mark this week on Good Friday. It is a time when Catholics traditionally go to confession: so what does Cattelan think callers will confess to on his hotline? He said he is expecting \u201ca mix \u2026 some will play, some will be serious. The interesting part is when the two overlap: you don\u2019t know if someone is performing or revealing something.\u201d<\/p>\n What, then, would his own confession be? \u201cThat I trust doubt more than certainty,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd that irony is sometimes just a way to get closer to things without pretending to own them.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cIf you\u2019re here to confess your sins, press one \u2026\u201d That\u2019s the message awaiting callers to a special…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":369381,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[146,85,46],"class_list":{"0":"post-369380","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-il","10":"tag-israel"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369380","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=369380"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369380\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/369381"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=369380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=369380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=369380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Photograph: Peter Parks\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n