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The Strange Persistence of Religion in Contemporary Art

By James Elkins & Jonathan A. Anderson Interview

We’re talking here about two projects: rereading art history to recover a wider context for religious meaning, and rereading it to recover a wider sense of the art historical project. You are aiming at the first, which is the larger and more important one, but our examples have been mainly the second, which would be a tonic to the discipline.

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What Makes Tradition Great?

By Harold Fickett Essay

Thomas Merton said that the “oldest thing is the newest thing,” by which he meant that anything alive—including the arts—finds its source in the eternal.  The critic George Steiner has made this argument with eloquence and depth in his recent Real Presences: he specifies the “greatness” of the Great Tradition as God’s immanence. We believe…

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Web Exclusive: A Conversation with Dan Siedell

By Mary Kenagy Mitchell Interview

In the current issue of Image, #59, in an excerpt from a new book titled God in the Gallery: A Christian Embrace of Modern Art, Dan Siedell wrote about the importance of an “educated appetite” to understanding contemporary art. We sat down to ask him about how we go about developing such an appetite.   Image: I…

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Juxtapositions

By Roger Feldman Essay

Neighbors, Strangers,  Family, Friends Four Artists Reflect on Charis The traveling art exhibition Charis—Boundary Crossings: Neighbors Strangers Family Friends features work by seven Asian and seven North American artists. The show grew out of a two-week seminar in Indonesia sponsored by Calvin College’s Nagel Institute for the Study of World Christianity and the Council for…

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A Conversation with Daniel Enrique García

By Jo-Ann Van Reeuwyk Interview

Neighbors, Strangers,  Family, Friends Four Artists Reflect on Charis The traveling art exhibition Charis—Boundary Crossings: Neighbors Strangers Family Friends features work by seven Asian and seven North American artists. The show grew out of a two-week seminar in Indonesia sponsored by Calvin College’s Nagel Institute for the Study of World Christianity and the Council for…

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Marc Quinn: The Matter of Life and Death

By James Romaine Essay

IN  2009, BRITAIN’S NATIONAL Portrait Gallery acquired Self by Marc Quinn. The museum’s press release described the work as “unconventional, innovative, and challenging.” That is an understatement. Self is made of eight pints of Quinn’s own blood, approximately the amount in an adult male body. It was extracted over a period of a year, then…

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The Heart of the Whole

By Santiago Ramos Book Review

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2010) The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011) The Pale King by David Foster Wallace (Back Bay Books, 2011)   Strangeness and oddity will sooner harm than justify any claim to attention, especially when everyone is striving to unite particulars and find at least some general…

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The Catholic Writer, Then and Now

By Gregory Wolfe Essay

WHEN DANA GIOIA’S ESSAY “Can Poetry Matter?” appeared in The Atlantic in 1991, it galvanized a national conversation about the state of American literature and how creative writing was being taught, produced, and consumed by the reading public. That piece justly propelled Gioia to the front ranks of American letters, not only as a critic but as…

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Into the Artworld

By Theodore L. Prescott Essay

Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton (Norton, 2009) Artworld Prestige by Timothy Van Laar and Leonard Diepeveen (Oxford, 2013)   HOW MANY CONTEMPORARY American artists have you never heard of? Apparently a lot, if surveys are to be believed. A 2005 study by the NEA found that the number of artists in…

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