Maurizio Cattelan Opens a U.S. Confessional Hotline — and Revives “La Nona Ora”
If you have something to get off your chest, Maurizio Cattelan is inviting you to do it by phone. The Italian artist (b. 1960), long associated with art-world mischief and carefully staged provocation, has launched “The Confessional,” a performance work that turns a toll-style hotline into a temporary booth for American sinners.
Open from April 2 through April 22, the U.S.-only number (+1 601-666-7466) asks callers to leave their confessions for Cattelan himself. On April 23, the artist plans to select a portion of the submissions for a livestream, where he will appear in the role of priest and offer absolution.
The project arrives as Cattelan’s most notorious religious image returns to the foreground: “La Nona Ora” (1999), the wax sculpture of Pope John Paul II sprawled on a red carpet, his lower body seemingly pinned by a meteor. The title translates to “the ninth hour,” a reference to the moment of Christ’s death on the cross — a theological timestamp that sharpens the work’s blend of spectacle and vulnerability.
Cattelan has described his interest in Catholicism less as a position for or against the Church than as an attraction to its visual and psychological charge. In an interview with the Guardian, he framed Catholicism as a system that can feel like “belief, theater, control, comfort, all at once,” adding that he is drawn to the “tension” carried by its images. “If someone feels offended,” he said, “it probably means the image is still alive.”
That tension has followed “La Nona Ora” since its debut. When the sculpture was shown at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw in 2000, two Polish politicians reportedly intervened directly, removing the meteor from the figure — a real-world gesture that echoed the work’s own collision between reverence and rupture.
The controversy has also tracked into the market. “La Nona Ora” sold for $886,000 at Christie’s New York in 2001. Another version later achieved $3 million at Phillips, de Pury & Company, underscoring how Cattelan’s most polarizing images have often proven to be his most durable.
Now, “The Confessional” shifts the drama from the gallery floor to the private space of a phone call. It is a performance built on intimacy and risk: the caller’s voice, the artist’s selection, the public exposure of a chosen few. In that sense, the hotline reads as a contemporary extension of Cattelan’s long-running question about power and belief — not only who gets to speak, but who gets to forgive.
A parallel release further amplifies the work’s afterlife. London-based online platform Avant Arte has issued a miniature version of “La Nona Ora” in an edition of 666, a number that nods to religious symbolism while leaning into the artist’s taste for darkly comic precision.
Whether the confessions skew petty, profound, or performative, Cattelan’s setup makes one thing clear: in his hands, Catholic imagery is not a static reference point but a live wire — capable of sparking outrage, commerce, and, now, a broadcast ritual of remorse.
