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Showing posts from August, 2023

Christian Renewal & Visual Art: From Kitsch to Quality

Image
  James Davison Hunter, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World , Oxford UP, 2010. 87 – Noncommercialized art by Christians is, as I said, vital, and growing through organizations such as Image , Christians In the Visual Arts (or CIVA) [which ended operations in 2022], and the international arts movement (IAM), but such efforts are small and constantly underfunded and, like the commercial art (e.g., Thomas Kinkade), it is typically peripheral to the major galleries and reviews. What is more, this vast commercial empire [of Evangelical cultural production] does not operate in the major centers of culture formation (such as New York City, Washington, Chicago, San Francisco, or Los Angeles) but rather in medium-sized cities on the periphery (such as Wheaton, Illinois; Colorado Springs, Colorado; Orlando, Florida; and Virginia Beach, Virginia). Third, cultural production in the Evangelical world is overwhelmingly oriented ...