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Take a stroll through just about any gallery dealing with the work of living, western, artists, and you’ll be most unlikely to discover anything that would want to describe itself as ‘religious’. There’s a profound contemporary prejudice against such art, perhaps a mistrust of the motives of those making it. Some artists may use religious imagery and symbol, but generally they do it in subversive ways, as a critique of religious institutions, even of people’s claim to religious experience. I’m thinking here of Andreas Serrano’s notorious piece called ‘Piss Christ’, where a tacky plastic crucifix has been submerged in urine. Or there’s Francis Bacon’s ‘Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion’. Although painted nearly 60 years ago, so not strictly contemporary, it clearly shows Bacon’s belief that the crucifixion was just another meaningless human outrage, staring in the face of the recently exposed Holocaust. But for me it is also a profound existential reading of the human condition, and of our ability to crucify what is good. But even if the culture is against historical forms of religion, and in particular institutional forms, there is a hunger abroad for ways to engage with something beyond the concrete and conscious. At its broadest, there’s a desire for transcendence, for spiritual experience Just look at the attendance figures for ‘Seeing Salvation’, the National Gallery’s most successful show for decades. An incredible 84,000 of the 350,000 visitors came through their |