One must credit the Vatican with an intelligence rarely seen in an institution of its scale. It understood, before most states and certainly before almost any corporation, that the narrative an institution projects is not altered by press releases or campaigns, but by culture. That if one wishes to cease being perceived merely as a guardian of the past, one must produce the present. And that contemporary art, with its prestige, its international circuit, and its capacity to generate memorable scenes, is the most effective instrument in existence for that purpose.
The sequence is coherent and has a long history. In 1973, Paul VI inaugurated a collection of modern art in the Vatican Museums, openly acknowledging that the Church had distanced itself from the living art of its time and that it wished to restore that dialogue. Since 2013, the Holy See has held a pavilion at the Venice Biennale; since 2018, it has also participated in the architecture edition. The most recent iterations demonstrate an increasingly refined hand: in 2025, a restoration transformed into a work, care as architecture; in 2026, a pavilion concerning listening, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, one of the most influential curators in the world. This is not an institution that decorates with art. It is an institution that thinks through art, and which uses it to address the present in a language that the sermon can no longer reach.
I state this in earnest, without irony, because it is the point of departure and because it is a fact: culture transforms the narrative. It does not accompany or illustrate it; it reprograms it. A millennial institution that takes a seat at the table of contemporary art ceases to be read as a relic and begins to be read as an interlocutor. That power is real, and those who deny it have failed to understand how culture functions.
Yet it is precisely because that power is real that it cannot be viewed with innocence. If art truly transforms how its user is perceived, then one must always pose the same question: in whose service does that transformation work, and at whose expense is it produced? And there is a case, within this very Vatican sequence, where that question ceases to be abstract and becomes highly concrete.
In 2024, the Holy See's pavilion in Venice was installed inside an active women's prison, the Giudecca prison. It was titled Con i miei occhi, 'with my own eyes'. To visit it, one had to book in advance, pass an identity check, surrender one's telephone and passport, and be guided through it by the inmates themselves, twenty of the eighty prisoners who volunteered for the task. It brought together artists of the highest calibre, from Maurizio Cattelan to Claire Tabouret. And its stated theme was the gaze, humanity, care, and the marginalised.
On paper, it is brilliant, and a portion of the critics received it with emotion: some described the visit as sincere and significant, and the guides, according to some chroniclers, claimed to find something therapeutic in the work. I do not doubt this. But there is a contradiction at the heart of the apparatus that other critics noted immediately, and which cannot be dissolved: a pavilion that preaches visibility while operating in secrecy. One enters with one's mobile phone confiscated, unable to photograph, unable to ask the guides anything personal, unable to document or contradict what one sees. The experience of openness was entirely administered by the institution that offered it.
And therein lies what interests me most. Two Italian curators accused the project of converting the prison into a set and the inmates into material for an image-building operation, noting that some contributions—poems, appearances in a film, the guided tours themselves—were allegedly not remunerated. The organisers denied this: they stated that participation was voluntary, formative, and oriented towards reintegration. I have no means to settle that dispute, and I shall not pretend that I do: there are no public contracts, no payrolls, nor a single voice from the inmates that does not pass through the institution's filter. What I can ascertain is the structure, and the structure is one of radical asymmetry. On one side, one of the most powerful institutions in the world, established artists, a bank as the principal sponsor, the global art circuit. On the other, imprisoned women whose freedom to refuse is, by definition, conditioned by the place where they are held. When someone in confinement 'volunteers', the word volunteer carries the full weight of that situation.
I am not suggesting it was exploitation, because I cannot prove it and because there were, surely, inmates for whom the project signified something positive. I am stating something more difficult to contest: that the scene of humanity and openness the pavilion produced for the Biennale public was constructed upon bodies that could not choose with full freedom to be there, and that this is a price the operation does not name. The vulnerability of those women was not the subject of the pavilion. It was its material.
None of this is unique to the Vatican, and it would be dishonest to suggest otherwise. For a century, the Venice Biennale has functioned as an infrastructure for legitimation: the Spanish pavilion served the Franco regime as a means of burnishing its image before the world, and today Saudi Arabia and Qatar employ it for the same purpose. Placing the Vatican within this sequence is not to identify it as an anomaly, but to understand it as a particularly adept player in a game that predated its involvement. The term sometimes applied to this, 'artwashing', originated in a different context—that of real estate speculation—and to apply it here without qualification would be to force its meaning. Yet the underlying mechanism—utilising the prestige of art to reposition an image—is recognisable, and it remains so regardless of the fact that those employing it possess two millennia of history.
I return to the beginning. The Vatican has grasped something true and valuable: that culture possesses the power to alter how one is perceived. The issue is that this power is neither neutral nor without cost. It transforms the narrative of those who wield it, certainly, but that transformation is always paid for by someone, and it is not always the one wielding it. The question an artist should pose to any institution that wraps itself in contemporary art—be it the Vatican, a bank, or a State—is not whether it does so well, for it usually does so very well. It is this: when culture enhances your narrative, who has borne the burden to ensure that enhancement?
On open conversation
This text does not accuse the Vatican of anything that cannot be substantiated: I acknowledge the intelligence of its use of contemporary art, I attribute criticisms to those who authored them and responses to those who provided them, and I do not present as proven that which sources do not prove. I am interested in a more general question, which I have been exploring for some time: when a powerful institution uses art to transform its narrative—and it succeeds—it is prudent to ask at whose expense that transformation is produced. Should anyone wish to intervene from the perspectives of art criticism, the ethics of participatory practices, cultural management, or work with vulnerable populations, this notebook remains open.
Sources
Musei Vaticani and Vatican News: Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art (inaugurated by Paul VI in 1973); participation of the Holy See in the Venice Biennale since 2013.
La Biennale di Venezia, 'Holy See': Con i miei occhi (2024, Giudecca prison), Opera aperta (2025), The Ear is the Eye of the Soul (2026).
Independent critical reception of the 2024 pavilion: Julie Baumgardner (Hyperallergic, 29 April 2024); Emily Watlington (Art in America, 18 April 2024); Jo Lawson-Tancred (Artnet News, 17 June 2024, including the objections of Francesco Urbano Ragazzi and the response from the organisers); James Payne (Artlyst, 1 May 2024).
Claire Bishop, 'The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents' (Artforum, 2006), on the ethics of participatory art.
Stephen Pritchard, 'The Artwashing of Gentrification and Social Cleansing' (2020), on the origin and limitations of the term.
Comparables of cultural diplomacy at the Biennale: Agar Ledo Arias on the Spanish pavilion during the Franco regime (Quintana, 2022); Anastasia Shanaah on Saudi Arabia (2026); permanent pavilion of Qatar (ArtReview, 2025).
Associazione Antigone, report on Italian prisons (2024): data on overcrowding.