What It Means If OCP’s Angel Is Mormon

A scandalette erupted over the past few days with the release of Oregon Catholic Press’s 2021 hymnal.  The scandal is not, for once, of a lyrical or musical nature; the eyebrow-raising issue is the cover art.  It portrays a blond, white-robed figure standing on a glob, blowing a trumpet, and carrying a golden book—an angel?

The figure is currently labeled on the artist’s website as “Angel VIII (2017).”  But it’s more complicated than that, because another angel in the series is called “Angel Moroni (2018)”.  Complicating matters further, an Instagram account associated with the artist, Jorge Cocco, identifies the OCP image (and “Most of the angels in this collection”) as “different versions of the angel known as Moroni” (h/t Father Matthew Schneider and Deacon Greg Kandra).  OCP, however, initially stated on Facebook that while they understand Mormons seeing it as Moroni, they “saw a beautiful image of an angel, and nothing more.”  They took it as an image of the last day, and, “[t]o ensure this didn’t conflict with the original intent of the art,” they “consulted with the artist. He stated, ‘This angel does not have a name, it is left to the interpretation of the viewer.’”

It’s hard to know the artist’s intention in this particular case, since he seems to have two different stories about who the angel is.  Not surprisingly, OCP at first decided that the artist’s intention (or lack thereof) was irrelevant—a position which is, from an academic viewpoint, arguably correct.  What they offered concerned customers was, essentially, reader-response theory.

Reader-response theory—a reaction of the 1960s and ’70s to earlier modes of interpretation concerned with literary form—argues that what truly matters in understanding a work of art is the consumer’s interpretation.  By this reasoning, if it were to turn out that Edvard Munch’s agonized portrait The Scream was actually intended as a bemused albeit alopecic individual attempting to hail her dog at sunset—that wouldn’t matter.  What would matter is that hundreds of thousand of people think of the picture as the image of a soul in existential angst.  For those people, that would be the “meaning” of The Scream.

Read the rest at the Register: https://www.ncregister.com/blog/feingold/what-it-means-if-ocps-angel-is-mormon