ABSTRACT
This chapter revisits James Elkins’ book, On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art , and his assumption that “straight-forward, ordinary religious faith” is not compatible with the mainstream contemporary art world. Through a brief survey of the author’s professional and personal engagement with art and religious faith, this chapter argues that faith is much more complicated and complex than Elkins presumes. Moreover, this chapter suggests that the relationship between religious faith and commitment to (and thus faith in) the visual arts is impossible to disentangle. The response this chapter offers is twofold. First, it presents a theological discourse that is as ungrounded and as creative as the art with which it engages, a discourse untethered to orthodoxy. And second, it introduces the concept of the curatorial as a way to “exhibit” this complex, entangled, and ever-changing relationship between art and religion, between faith in God and faith in art, and between art theory and theology.
