Christianity Today, the Books & Culture section, has an interesting and enlightening panel discussion of James Elkins' On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art. Elkins is the E. C. Chadbourne Chair in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. Panelists who responded to his book are Bruce Herman of Gordon College, James Romaine of Bethel University, Bruce Ellis Benson of Wheaton College, and Theodore Prescott of Messiah College.

Elkins was prompted to write this book by

his experience as one of four jurors for the 1990 exhibition "Revelations: Artists Look at Religions." It was a big show with several famous artists in it, including Andres Serrano, the maker of Piss Christ. But the jurors also had to slog through hundreds of submissions, looking at slides, reading statements, and scanning résumés. It was a daunting, numbing job. One submission caught their attention, and they were ready to accept it until they learned the artist was a nun, and her work, which the jurors had found quirky, was her vision of heaven. "Oh God," moaned one of the jurors, and they voted it down. Elkins was the only one to vote for it: "I wanted to accept it because it was religious, and religion was supposedly our theme."

This experience started Elkins thinking about "the exclusion of religious meaning in contemporary art,"


This panel discussion provides a good starting point for reflection on the world of contemporary academic art discourse, and on the larger problem of modern aesthetics.