eBook - ePub
On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art
James Elkins
This is a test
Share book
- 148 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub
On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art
James Elkins
Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations
About This Book
Can contemporary art say anything about spirituality? John Updike calls modern art "a religion assembled from the fragments of our daily life, " but does that mean that contemporary art is spiritual? What might it mean to say that the art you make expresses your spiritual belief?
On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art explores the curious disconnection between spirituality and current art. This book will enable you to walk into a museum and talk about the spirituality that is or is not visible in the art you see.
Frequently asked questions
How do I cancel my subscription?
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlegoâs features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan youâll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, weâve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art by James Elkins in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Arte & Storia dell'arte. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Information
Notes
Preface
1. Elkins, âFrom Bird-Goddesses to Jesus 2000: A Very, Very Brief History of Religion and Art,â Thresholds 25 (2002): 75â83, especially the section âCaroline Jones Responds,â ibid., 81â83.
The Words Religion and Art
1. It is hard to sound neutral in defining a part of life as large as religion; I do it reluctantly in order to get the argument going. I have tried, in this definition, to name just the features of religion that are at once universally agreedupon (my definition is adapted from several dictionary definitions) and pertinent to the themes in the book. I thank Frank Piatek and David Morgan for their responses to this issue.
2. Spirituality as I intend it here can also be linked to what the art historian David Morgan calls the âspiritualized response to art,â the search for innerlichkeit and innere Empfindung in art. Morgan traces this through Romanticism to Winckelmannâs reading of the Laocöon, which Morgan finds is infused with 18th-century âPietist spirituality.â If I do not follow this genealogy here simply because it has become so diluted and pervasive that it would be difficult to distinguish interpretive agendas that effectively oppose it. I thank Morgan for sharing his unpublished manuscript âToward a Modern Historiography of Art and Religion,â forthcoming in Reluctant Partners: Art and Religion in Dialogue, edited by Ena Giurescu Heller (New York: The Gallery at the American Bible Society, 2004).
3. Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, translated by Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).
A Very Brief History of Religion and Art
1. For a color photograph and brief discussion, see Vincenzo Nicola et al., The Christian Catacombs of Rome (Regensburg: Schnell und Steiner, 1999), 124â25; for background see Paul Finney, The Invisible God: The Earliest Christians on Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
2. Andre Malraux, La MusĂ©e imaginaire de la sculpture mondiale (Paris Gallimard, 1952â54).
3. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, translated by Robert Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983); Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, translated by Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Mark Lalonde, Critical Theology and the Challenge of JĂŒrgen Habermas: Toward a Critical Theory of Religious Insight (New York: P. Lang, 1990).
4. Marxâs phrases are from Critique of Hegelâs Philosophy of Right (1844), translated by Annette Jolin and Joseph OâMalley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972).
5. Slavoj ĆœiĆŸek, The Spectre Is Still Roaming Around! An Introduction to the 150th Anniversary Edition of the Communist Manifesto (Zagreb: Arkzin, 1998), 72.
6. The secularization of current studies of iconoclasm is acknowledged by Bruno Latour, in Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art, edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). See my review,âVisual Culture: First Draft,â Art Journal 62, no. 3 (2003): 104â7.
7. Personal letter from David Morgan,May 20, 2002.
8. Willaim Hood, Fra Angelico at San Marco (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993); Georges Didi-Huberman, Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration, translated by Jane Todd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
9. For other Renaissance examples see John Shearman, Only Connect . . . Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); and Paolo Berdini, The Religious Art of Jacopo Bassano: Painting as Visual Exegesis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
10. Eileen Reeves, Painting the Heavens: Art and Sciences in the Age of Galileo (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). My review, in Zeitschrift fĂŒr Kunstgeschichte 62 (1999): 580â85, takes up this point.
11. Leo Ewals, Ary Scheffer, 1795â1858 (Dordrecht:Waanders, 1995).
12. The painting is in the MusĂ©e dâOrsay. I thank Marc Gotlieb for bringing my attention to it. GĂ©rĂŽme is still awaiting contemporary treatments, see Scott Watson, âJean LĂ©on GĂ©rĂŽme (1824â1904): A Study of a Mid-Nineteenth Century French Academic Artist,â MA thesis, University of British Columbia, unpublished; available on microfiche (Ottawa: National Library of Canada, 1997).
13. Albert Boime, Thomas Couture and the Eclectic Vision (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980).
14. I thank David Morgan for bringing these religious affiliations to my attention. See Morgan, âThe Cosmology of Philip Otto Runge and Its Influence on His Interest in the Gesamtkunstwerk,â MA thesis, University of Arizona, 1984 (Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms, 1985).
15. I owe these two paragraphs, including the information on the artistsâ religious affiliations, to David Morgan, although the conclusion I draw is my own.
16. This is the subject of my âA Hagiography of Bugs and Leaves: On the Dishonesty of Pictured Religion,â Journal of Information Ethics 2, no. 2 (1993): 53â70, reprinted in Religion and the Arts 1, no. 3 (1997): 73â88.
17. Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of the South, edited by Douglas Druick and Peter Zegers (Chicago: The Art Institute, 2001). Compare Lauren Soth, âVan Goghâs Agony,â Art Bulletin 68 (1986): 301â13, especially 309 on the âessentially religious natureâ of the painting.
18. For Munch see Edvard Munch: Psyche, Symbol, and Expression, exh. cat., edited by Jeffrey Howe (Boston: McMullen Museum of Art, 2001). I thank Thomas Sloan for this reference.
19. Celia Rabinovitch, Surrealism and the Sacred: Power, Eros, and the Occult in Modern Art (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2002). I thank Celia Rabinovitch for correspondence on ...