Matthew J. Milliner at Marginalia Review:
If, in 1979, Rosalind Krauss famously said, “we find it indescribably embarrassing to mention art and spirit in the same sentence,” today many of us find it indescribably embarrassing not to.
It is hard to identify a single turning point. Maybe it was when the Visual Commentary on Scripture was launched from London’s Tate Modern in 2018. Maybe it was when Thomas Crow published No Idols: The Missing Theology of Art (2017). Perhaps it was the Hilma af Klint show at the Guggenheim (2018-19). Or was it the way that the fresh embrace of African American art finally opened the drawbridge for religion like never before? Maybe it was just that major art historical treatments of modern and contemporary art that re-incorporate religion were finally penned, whether Jeffrey Kosky’s Arts of Wonder (2012), Charlene Spretnak’s The Spiritual Dynamic in Modern Art (2014), or Anderson and Dyrness’s Modern Art and the Life of a Culture (2016). Maybe it was S. Brent Plate’s 2017 Los Angeles Review of Books article, “Reports of the Death of Religious Art Have Been Greatly Exaggerated.” Or was it the 2019 launch of Bridge Projects in the heart of Los Angeles, a gallery created to facilitate such conversations?
more here.