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Consider, for example, one of the most explicit references to the vanitas tradition: the 1997 work Black Kites, by Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco (b. 1962), an artist known for his subtle compositions, whether installations, photographs, or sculptures, and his use of ordinary materials, whether a garden hose or a partially deflated soccer ball filled with water. Lent to the exhibition from the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Black Kites is a human skull covered in graphite patterns of diamond-shaped kite forms.

The skull is the classic symbol in the Western tradition of the transience of life. Instead of representing a skull, Orozco draws directly onto an actual human skull, decorating it with patterns that allude both to the Harlequin costume and the chessboard, evoking the game of life and its rules. Orozco downplays the potential morbidity of an actual human skull serving as a drawing surface through his sensitive application of the diamond shapes, which suggests an intimate—even meditative—tactile experience of and relationship to this human skull, as an aesthetic manifestation of the artist's reflection on life and death.

The massive media coverage devoted to certain recent "sensational" exhibitions has reinforced in the public mind the already well-established image of a viciously anti-spiritual and anti-religious contemporary artworld. The reality is much more complex. Spiritual and religious issues re main important for a vast number of contemporary artists. This modest project demonstrates that contemporary artists, like their predecessors, "address some of the basic conflicts of human existence, between presence and absence, pleasure and fear, love and loss, power and instability, beauty and death." Vanitas also shows that, contrary to its dismissive critics, contemporary art is not devoid of beauty—with the understanding that beauty is ephemeral. "Vanity of vanities . …"

Daniel A. Siedell is curator of the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden at the University of Nebraska.

1. There have been notable exceptions to this consensus; see, for example, The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985, by Maurice Tuchman et al. (Los Angeles County Museum of Art/Abbeville Press, 1986).

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