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In October 2007, New York's School of Visual Arts hosted a conference on Art Education, Religion and the Spiritual, where Elkins was the keynote speaker. Several Christian scholars and artists gave papers critical of Elkins' work. I invited him to respond to four abbreviated criticisms. He accepted, saying he "was looking forward to the criticism." (Unless otherwise noted, all quotes are from On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art.)
James Elkins has a refreshingly irreverent take on the current art scene, and he's pulled back the veil a bit on the last taboo: religion in contemporary art. The answer he offers to the implicit question posed by the title of his book—what is the "strange place" of religion in avant-garde art?—is straightforward: there's no place for it. He sees this as the inevitable outcome of the progressive "purification" of art from all systems of meaning exterior to it, all metanarratives; a kind of art qua art emerging over the past century or so. Of course this view presupposes avant-gardism as the definitive artistic voice of our time (ironically its own meta-narrative). Traditional art forms are retrograde because they employ outmoded aesthetic strategies and theoretical assumptions. Essentially traditional art and traditional religion are passè. In a word, they're too conservative.
Yet to be traditional is not necessarily to be conservative.In The Relevance of the Beautiful, H. G. Gadamer says tradition is not so much a matter of conservation as transmission; that every act of transmission necessarily involves a corresponding act of translation. By its refusal to "translate" itself into meaningful terms for a current generation of participants, a tradition dies. (Perhaps that's why religious art is on the outs?) On the other hand, whether or not we realize or acknowledge our debt to a particular tradition does nothing to affect the reality of our participation in it or dependence upon it. (Sometimes unconscious dependence can take the form of parasitism— the postmodern phenomenon of historical appropriation.) Failure to realize our debt to tradition can result in imagined originality and susceptibility to a special kind of hubris—the arrogance of the ignorant. For all its confidence, avant-gardism may suffer a kind of cultural amnesia or myopia.
I think Elkins knows all this. Nevertheless, his assertion that religious art cannot, by definition, be contemporary art involves a sort of unconscious chauvinism, a kind of parochial affiliation with one fairly small "world of art." If Gadamer is right, the real and broader question is not whether religious art has relevance to the current New York or L.A. art scene, but whether or not these art worlds have any place in the bigger picture of tradition. As T. S. Eliot once pointed out, tradition is inclusive of the authentically new, and the genuinely new work of art re-contextualizes the whole previous canon, extending and elaborating the tradition. But art that is narrowly self-referential is doomed to the historical dustbin. Either connect to the larger world of meaning or else find your place at the margins of civilization. And in the estimate of many, the current art world is decidedly marginal and inbred.
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