Maurizio Cattelan Launches a “Confession” Hotline Ahead of Easter
What does confession look like when it’s routed through contemporary art rather than a confessional booth? This Thursday, Italian conceptual artist Maurizio Cattelan (b. 1960) will launch a free hotline inviting people to “confess their sins” via phone or WhatsApp — a participatory project timed to the days leading into Easter and framed around the 21st anniversary of Pope John Paul II’s death.
The initiative arrives alongside a new edition of small-scale replicas of Cattelan’s 1999 sculpture “The Ninth Hour,” the work that cemented his reputation for turning religious iconography into a pressure point. The original depicts Pope John Paul II felled by a meteorite, an image that has long oscillated between slapstick and sacrilege depending on the viewer’s threshold for discomfort.
Organizers say the project is designed to widen access to contemporary art in two ways: by offering a collectible object and by inviting the public to participate directly. The replicas of “The Ninth Hour” will be released in an edition of 666 — a number freighted with ominous associations — priced at €2,200 each.
The hotline, however, is the project’s more volatile element. Participants around the world are encouraged to submit confessions through the free number or WhatsApp. A selection of self-described “sinners” will be chosen to appear in a livestream on April 23, when Cattelan will assume a symbolic, priest-like role and offer a form of “absolution.”
Cattelan has been careful to resist the idea that he is staging a provocation for its own sake. “I don’t see it as absolution,” he said. “It’s not religious authority, it’s a shared gesture. Confession exists in different forms everywhere, even outside religion.”
That insistence on ambiguity has followed “The Ninth Hour” since its debut. When the sculpture was first unveiled, it sharply divided audiences, and later presentations intensified the debate. Its display in Poland — a predominantly Catholic country — drew particularly strong backlash, underscoring how quickly the work can shift from dark comedy to perceived insult depending on context.
Cattelan’s broader practice has repeatedly tested the boundary between the instantly legible and the ethically charged. Over the years, he has produced deliberately simple, headline-ready works — including a fully functional gold toilet and a banana duct-taped to a wall — that invite viewers to decide whether they are encountering a joke, a critique, or a dare. As he has put it, “If someone feels offended, it probably means the image is still alive.”
Yet the artist’s relationship to religious institutions has also evolved in ways that complicate any straightforward narrative of antagonism. In 2024, the Holy See invited Cattelan to contribute to its exhibition at the Venice Biennale, where he painted a large mural on a prison wall. Pope Francis visited the work, a moment widely read as a sign of the Vatican’s growing willingness to engage contemporary art on its own terms.
With the hotline and the April 23 livestream, Cattelan returns to a familiar set of questions — guilt, spectacle, authority — but shifts the stage from museum or gallery to the intimate, anonymous space of a phone call. Whether the result reads as communal catharsis, conceptual theater, or something more uneasy may depend, as it often does with Cattelan, on what the public chooses to bring to it.
