Blessed art thou Angelina, for thou art famous....



 

First off, I enjoy being able to say that this faux-sacred/satirical art is not blasphemous.  Nor is the thrust of its jab at our celebrity obsessed culture not without merit. 
 

Our society is devoid of depth, spiritual or otherwise.  The flashy yet still temporal idols of our land captivate us and keep us in a materialistic darkness where the holy and eternal, unseen to the blind of spirit, are missed as we dare not turn our sad fixed gaze from the soiled work of our culture's hands. 

We worship those who are not worthy of much.  We are currently spending way too much time looking at the life of a celebrity who recently died, who is "famous for being famous" as they say.  Perhaps we enjoy watching the smoke ascend from her train wreck of a life as she descended for the last time.  Perhaps there is just nothing better on television.

I do not care to analyze this work of art at any real length nor depth.  The artist, Kate Kretz, did a more than adequate job of this herself:

    This painting addresses the celebrity worship cycle. The title, "Blessed Art         Thou", is taken from a line in the Catholic prayer "Hail Mary": " ... blessed art thou among women". Our culture is deifying celebrities, but in the bible, it is the meek who are blessed, so the title presents a question for the viewer to ponder. I chose a setting where the cycle begins: psychologically oppressive environments like this one are one of the feeding sources for the consumer, hungry for "information" about the celebrity's private life.p

It is definitely and sadly not hard to see how our secular nation has raised such "faithful" worshippers.  In the place where God should be in our country's collective heart, there is a void.  We still from the depths of our souls yearn to worship that which is other, beyond, greater, and worthy to fill this void within.  Instead of looking to the God who gave us life in the Bible, we look rather to those who entertain us in varying degrees of baseness in the tabloids. 

Perhaps when enough of these idols crash and shatter we will look to God, whose "invisible qualities—His eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse" and turn from the Angelina Jolie's of our world.