“IT'S CALLED GOSSIP AND OF COURSE IT'S AN OBSESSION OF MINE -ANDY WARHOL

Art and religion have had a rocky marriage, but the divorce came only recently. Looking back at of the rise the 20th-century avant-garde — which, for the most part, aimed to subvert the complacent values of the bourgeoisie — one might wonder what role art ever had in American religious life.But of course it did, and for a long time.

Rock or hip-hop might not exist if Martin Luther, during the Reformation, hadn't insisted everyone sing together at church. If the 19th century had a soundtrack, it'd be the sound of noisy hymnals rising up from tent revitals and mass baptisms. The King James Bible informed the imaginations of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickenson. Whitman was considered a prophet in his time. Emerson's Transcendentalism yielded a powerful pantheistic view of nature and a belief in the divinity of all mankind.

Thanks to modernism, art and religion parted ways until the 1980s and '90s, when they clashed in ways familiar to us today. Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority launched a pernicious campaign to purge media of "indecency." "Piss Christ" nearly shut down the NEA. Mapplethorpe's bullwhip landed a Cincinnati curator in jail. Chris Ofili, a British-Nigerian artist, sent Rudy Giuliani into apoplexy after using elephant dung to ornament his Virgin Mary.
Camille Paglia has called these controversies, in a 2007 Arion article, "fading sparks" of the old mid-century politics of style. It's time to move on, she said. People need religion, and they need artists. To reunite them, modern day artists need to look back and "recover their spiritual center."

-Charleston City Paper
August 13 2008