Monday, January 23, 2006

Religious art?

Religious art used to be inspiring, uplifting, challenging.

Now... hmm... (see left!?)

Well, "mainstream" religious art or statements aren't all that exciting. Sometimes they're downright scary. Or just deeply, deeply odd.

We get stuff like The Visitation, a Frank Piretti altar-call book made into one long-winded, poor quality altar-call movie. Loads of Hillsong albums which seem to have the collective level of engagement with issues of Christianity and the world as a one-legged cockroach does of mountaineering. The Left Behind series, which is disturbingly bad theology for a start...

It's like we've skipped over thinking and gone straight for "fluff" or "frighten the pants off of 'em and THAT will be sure to make 'em convert and fall on their knees and possibly give us money, too."

Surely there are some Christian artists out there who are going to present us things with some sort of intellectual and visual appeal! Things that are subtle, beautiful, honest, challenging, that allow people to explore their own faith, that doesn't Bible-bash or is the visual/intellectual equivalent of cotton candy...

Somewhere?

I hope so, at least!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

See van Eyck. He's one of my favorites... Oh you're talking about current artists. You're on your own. Large Louie

Brandon said...

Wow is this a hybrid of Jesus and Sampson?

I didn't notice him RIPPING THE CROSS APART at first :P Maaaan alive he's got muscles...

Della said...

Large Louie - Hubert or Jan van Eyck? They were both good. The Ghent altarpiece is beautiful. And yes, current art... ever the challenge! I guess they've thought that in past centuries, tho, too.

Brandon - yes! I was worried about that! Jesus on Steroids! It's got a look of, "I can see you're not appreciating my free gift of salvation so I'm coming down and giving you the thrashing of your life, young man!"