Picasso, Luna and the Reverend Moon on politics and poop

Next Saturday October 4 at 7:00 PM, the exhibition Picasso/Luna opens at the Museum of Art of Fort Lauderdale, FL. The Upcoming Exhibitions page of the Museum website says:

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) was one of the true giants in the history of art. His works broke down barriers, ignited controversy, and have influenced artists for generations. This exhibition presents Picasso ceramics from the Museum’s collection paired with ceramics and paintings by South Florida-based artist Carlos Luna (b. 1969), our 2008-2009 Artist in Residence. Picasso’s creative imagination and penchant for folklore and mythologies is explored through the powerful symbolism of Luna’s work, with its rustic Cuban imagery, graphic use of text, and dramatic narrative. Luna’s paintings are distinguished by their painstaking composition, brilliant coloration, and skillfully rendered surfaces, created by a process that alternates the building of layers of paint with scraping and abrading them away. The resulting work exudes a sense of worn wisdom and muscular vitality that is at once, like Picasso’s work, both timeless and fresh.

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In May, 1937, while creating his famous mural Guernica, Picasso made his political opinion clear to the world for the first time in his life -in response to General Millán Astray declaring, "Down with intelligence! Long live Death!":

"The war in Spain is a war of reaction -against the people, against liberty. My whole life as an artist has been a continual struggle against reaction and the death of art...In all my recent work, I am expressing my horror of the military caste, wich is now plunging Spain into an ocean of misery and death."

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In a recent interview at his Miami studio, Carlos Luna said:

"I'm not an artist from any regime, exile or national. I've always tried to make my art apart from all of that. I've tried to make my career as an independent artist. I'm obviously not in agreement with the political statements of some of the Cuban artists, but I respect the quality they've achieved in their work. I can separate the two, art and politics, even if my own position is completely opposite of theirs."

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Reverend Sun Myung Moon, founder and father of the Unification Church once said:

"When I was young I thought that bodily waste should be an object of love. I looked down the toilet and saw the different bits of waste and touched them, thinking, "This is my mother's, this is my brother's," and so on. I thought, "What if I died and had never touched this?"