ABSTRACT
Artist and art critic Jonathan Anderson argues that Elkins’ 2004 book On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art is less concerned with the absence of religious content in contemporary art than with the fact that this content “does not have a place in talk about contemporary art.” Since the publication of Elkins’ book, however, a surge of recent books, articles, conferences, and exhibition catalogs have been devoted to precisely this kind of talk, fueled by broader debates about postsecular and postcritical turns in academia at large. Religion, argues Anderson, has not only become more visible in contemporary art; it has also become more discussable. Concentrating on the years since the publication of Elkins’ book, Anderson surveys the primary ways in which religion is reappearing in the writing about contemporary art, mapping them within four general interpretive horizons – anthropological, political, spiritual, and theological – which are currently organizing and orienting the various discourses of “art and religion.”
