"The invitation extended to the artist to express himself should be withdrawn."

yes well despiteth the fact there have been and are a few women artists around...hitler stalin rudd and abott would no doubt agree with you

this article put up against kath keeles pathetic crowing today, to me sees australia moving even more and more to the neo christian moralistic right than its been (since half heartedly, and for a brief moment, in the 1980s and early 90s we actually took an interest in a diversity of cultural expression)

it will take a great deal of effort to claw any sense of sanity and rationalism back into the centre of australian life, and perhaps never actually, perhaps we are now and will ever be a society regulated by madmen (and women :)

Is is not true that there is no "Christian" art Peter because there is plenty of it around. The problem is, like "Christian" contemporary music, it is generally rubbish and few people are interested in it.
I will not insult Bob with my opinion of his work.
The question you should be addressing is why "Christian" art (in any form) has little appeal even to the Christians. I have pondered on this for a while now and have come to the conclusion that someone with a mind that unquestioningly accepts a set of meme induced Bronze Age superstitions has difficulty expressing themselves using art as a medium. It is hard to be creative when constrained by a rigid set of rules and interpretations.(See: Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards).
But as they say "Art is in the mind of......".

The images featured on Sells post are horrible. The image of a tortured body nailed to a cross is intrinsically about death and suffering, and NOTHING more. All so called religious interpretations of such an image are horse-pooh.

Would you have such death saturated images in your bed room, your living room, or your dining room table while you are eating, or in your childrens bedroom.

Of course not.

By contrast the purpose of Sacred Art is to enable the viewer/participant to transcend the usual dreadful mortal condition. And to thus have a taste or glimpse of Reality, Truth and The Beautiful, even if only briefly.

Hence these four references by and about a Divine Artist who knows exactly what he is communicating.

http://www.aboutadidam.org/readings/art_is_love/index.html

http://www.aboutadidam.org/readings/transcending_the_camera/index.html

http://global.adidam.org/books/transcendental-realism.html

http://global.adidam.org/books/world-as-light.html

Plus these tworelated references puts the above Sacred Art, plus the authors literary Masterpiece The Mummery (and the Orpheum Trilogy) into cultural and historical perspective. Especially the culture that has developed since the European Renaissance.

http://www.adidabiennale.org/curation/index.htm

http://www.adidaupclose.org/FAQs/postmodernism2.html

Theology is the art of making up as you go along. And Peter is an old master.

Perhaps the absence of (good) Christian art is due to the fact that artists prefer to think for themselves about issues rather than rehashing tired old dogmas from a dying two-thousand-year-old religion.

Here's Mark Twain on the subject from 'The Innocents Abroad':

"We have seen Titian's celebrated Cain and Abel, his David and Goliah, his Abraham's Sacrifice. We have seen Tintoretto's monster picture, which is seventy-four feet long and I do not know how many feet high, and thought it a very commodious picture. We have seen pictures of martyrs enough, and saints enough, to regenerate the world. I ought not to confess it, but still, since one has no opportunity in America to acquire a critical judgment in art, and since I could not hope to become educated in it in Europe in a few short weeks, I may therefore as well acknowledge with such apologies as may be due, that to me it seemed that when I had seen one of these martyrs I had seen them all. They all have a marked family resemblance to each other, they dress alike, in coarse monkish robes and sandals, they are all bald headed, they all stand in about the same attitude, and without exception they are gazing heavenward with countenances which the Ainsworths, the Mortons and the Williamses, et fils, inform me are full of "expression." To me there is nothing tangible about these imaginary portraits, nothing that I can grasp and take a living interest in. If great Titian had only been gifted with prophecy, and had skipped a martyr, and gone over to England and painted a portrait of Shakspeare, even as a youth, which we could all have confidence in now, the world down to the latest generations would have forgiven him the lost martyr in the rescued seer. I think posterity could have spared one more martyr for the sake of a great historical picture of Titian's time and painted by his brush--such as Columbus returning in chains from the discovery of a world, for instance."

Peter,

I suspect you are conflating your own aesthetic preferences too closely with your theology. Each generation interprets the gospel story through its own culture and means of artistic expression. You may not be moved by modern art, but others feel differently. My own church includes several much-loved but definitely non-figurative paintings by Elizabeth Ford. Take a trip to the art gallery at New Norcia and you’ll see, alongside fairly formulaic and (to me) boring conventional devotional art, many fresh and moving modern pieces.

It’s a bit hard to tell from the website, but your friend’s pictures seem to me reminiscent of the explicit and gruesome violence of some European medieval church art. I was also reminded of Christopher Hitchens’ description of Mel Gibson’s movie “Passion of the Christ” as “sadomasochistic homoeroticism”. We must indeed confront and acknowledge the tragedies of human existence, but we should not wallow in them

May I suggest that readers interested in the theme of "Art and Religion" have a look at some of the earlier issues of the Australian Ejournal of Theology:

http://dlibrary.acu.edu.au/research/theology/ejournal/

Many of the earlier issues have a section devoted to the theological and aesthetic exploration of Christian Art (including poetry and literature) particularly from an Australian perspective.

Sells continues to view the world, through his narrow
perspective.

Last time that I checked, less then 1 out of 10 Australians
bothered to go to church on Sundays, so religion is
a bit like golf, its a lifestyle choice for a small
minority, the rest simply arn't interested and otherwise
occupied.

Given that the fact that maybe half of those who take
religion seriously, are actually interested in art, its
just another small, niche market, clamouring for attention.

The reality is that its an insigificant part of our
lives, as is religion. Sells is in the minority, for
95% clearly simply don't care. His perspective might matter
to him, but not to society in general. Just like golf.

My Protestant church lacks grand inspirational art and I agree with Sells that that's a pity. Visual art, like music, can be very moving, working on the receiver's sense of mythos. In this way it can help lead the person who sees or hears it into reverent contemplation.

Sells probably knows how Dostoyevsky was mightily moved by Holbein's painting of the dead Christ. To be so moved, one has to know the story, and be prepared to look at the painting in a non-desensitized way. Crucifixion was a gruesome, agonizing and protracted death; Christian theology is about the supreme sacrifice of Christ for all who believe in him and accept his gift of "life to the full".

But to use a metaphor, the Christian message is about the baby, not the bathwater. There are elements of the church which are heavily into "Churchianity" - besottedness with the aesthetic cultural attributes of the church, to the extent that bells and smells, liturgy in a foreign language, statues, beautiful paintings and wonderful liturgical music become the main course rather than the plate on which it is served. Jesus said "the Kingdom of God is within you" - meaning about personal transformation. He also promised to be there when only two or three are gathered - minus a cathedral.

In mediaeval Orthodoxy, icon painting (or icon 'writing' as the Russians call it) was a spiritual feat in complete effacement of the iconographer himself: a reverent essay in the use of colours each one of which had a symbolic meaning.

When visiting the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul I was moved by an exquisite (restored) fresco of Christ the Pantocrator, painted nearly a thousand years ago. Churches at Sergiev Posad (Russia) have beautiful scenes from the Old Testament. The New Testament provides rich subject material for art as an aid to our reverent contemplation of the life, teachings, death and resurrection of Christ.

Mel Gibson's movie The Passion of the Christ oversteps the bounds; it is gratuitously, obscenely awful. Christian art (including films) shouldn't wallow in evil.