The principal form of visual art in our time and place is of course photography especially via motion pictures via TV and the cinema screen. Some of our best and also most controversial directors are considered to be cultural treasures.
The most popular Christian film in recent times was of course Mel Gibson's The Passion of Christ, a film which was widely praised and touted by both Catholics and Protestants as a great missionary tool for communicating the "good news" of the Gospel to the non-Christians. It was even mildly praised by the then Pope who supposedly commented that Gibsons gore-fest was an accurate depiction of how the last day(s) of Jesus actually happened.
Such a claim is of course complete nonsense, and it is certainly not even described thus in the work of religious FICTION called the Bible.
Furthermore it was essentially an auto-biographical description of Mel Gibson's personality as formed/created by his upbringing at the hands (via thrashings) of his psychotic father.

The photographs to be found on this site depict the nature of this presumed "good news".

http://spiritlessons.com/passionofchristpictures.htm

My advice would be to run as fast as you can away from a religion that uses such horrific imagery to promote itself.

Oh dear, Mr Selleck.

"...the European Enlightenment. This movement, its arrogance obvious from the implications of its name, claimed to discover reason"

And of course, there's not a skerrick of arrogance in your own approach, is there.

"The only way to restore the arts, the only way to see the artistic charlatans for what they are is to come to grips with truth and beauty. And the only way that I know is to recognise Christ as the figure of truth and beauty.".

Ah well. Reason cannot accept that religion has any factual basis (Adam, Eve, Noah, Jesus' miracles, bodily resurrection etc.). While Christianity has never forgiven the world for actually thinking for itself.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

"The next step on the path to nonsense is that because individuals are different and because they have different responses to art, all taste is relativised. At this point any warranted art criticism disappears. We can no longer say what is adept and inept, profound or naïve, art or fashion, easy and slick or the product of intense effort and focus. We can no longer talk about beauty or meaning. We cannot because all is relative; it is a matter of individual taste."

Are we to presume this recent example is exempt?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-19349921

"The only way to restore the arts, the only way to see the artistic charlatans for what they are is to come to grips with truth and beauty. And the only way that I know is to recognise Christ as the figure of truth and beauty."

But because Cecilia Gimenez already recognises Christ this way, I assume she is immume from relativised art criticism of what is adept or inept?

Unfortunately before this Christ is the figure of truth and beauty there is a need to restore the art...

Art is always coincident with the culture or the dominant zeitgeist of the time and place in which it is produced or created.

All visual art, regardless of the seeming topic or subject depicted is an auto-biographical description of the artist who creates it.

The dominant zeitgeist of our time is that of scientific materialism which was/is the inevitable result of the profound shift in human (mis)understanding about the nature of Reality that occurred at the time of the Renaissance. Protestantism also emerged at the same time as the ideology of scientism. They are the two sides of the same dismally reductionist coin.

Scientism now rules the entire world. It has produced a "culture" that has deprived humankind of all profundity of view, relative to the nature and significance of the conditional universe, and of the Living Divine Reality.
We are all quite literally trapped within the perceptual strait-jacket created by scientism. This includes ALL of the usual advocates of old-time traditional religion whether Protestant of "catholic".

The Renaissance was the collapse of the "God"-civilization that preceded it. The civilization based on naive MYTHOLOGIZED presumptions of what was traditionally conceived (but not perceived) to be spatially and temporally "behind" and "above" the world.
The Renaissance destroyed that earlier form of civilization. With the Renaissance, "God"-myth-based civilization was replaced with human-based civilization, or ego-civilization - or the civilization based on the myth of the separate (and always separative) human ego-"I".
Protestantism is course the religion based exclusively on the whats-in-it-for-me separate and always separative ego-"I". And contrary to all of the hype of the back to the past "catholics", such as that promoted by the previous two Popes, the "catholic" religion is now entirely a form of self-serving whats-in-it-for-me religiosity.

This reference describes the characteristics of our now everywhere dramatized "culture" of doubt, and how/why ALL of the usual advocates of back-to-the-past traditional religiosity are devoid of any kind of understanding of esoteric Spiritual religion. And how the "culture" of scientific materialism has its roots in (or is an inevitable extension of) the essentially reductionist Christian mis-understanding of Reality

http://www.beezone.com/AdiDa/nirvanasara/chapter1.html

Now let me get this straight:
Art has been debased by the enlightenment which placed logic and reason at the centre of human endeavour and art is not subject to logic and reason, but is instead composed of universals, truth and beauty - each of which can only be reflected in the persona of jesus christ. Compounding this is the notion of relativism (300 years before postmodernism by the way) which places the self as the only meaningful authority in the judgement of art thereby rendering the notion of good/bad irrelevant because "i know what i like" is now the only determinant of good/bad.
Phew.
And all this happened in the eighteenth century.
Funny how the author is happy for Vopernican physics to supercede Ptolemaian physics but art is somehow universal, standing outside any kind of rational analysis.
The irony of this is that the author's belief in the universalism of art, free of the taint of the rational, mirrors the writings of the most famous of the Enlightenment's radicals: Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His notion of the noble savage, free of the taint of modern society, sits very comfortably with Peter Sellick's view.
Ah well don't let a few facts get in the way of an entrenched point of view eh?

This is very disappointing, Peter. Thanks to your previous article I've already explained to my friends how the alleged 'art' produced by the Ancient Greeks and Romans, Etruscan pottery, Egyptian statues and tomb carvings, Chinese scrolls, Japanese calligraphy, Islamic tiles and Pre-Columbian buildings and ornamentation are all complete rubbish because the artists were unaware of or unimpressed by Jesus Christ, but somehow they don't seem to be getting the message.

You'll need to come up something a bit more convincing to change their minds, I'm afraid.