ART 352 : Faith & Art

Frank Burch Brown offers a constructive,"ecumenical" approach to artistic taste and aesthetic judgment--a non-elitist but discriminating theological aesthetics that has "teeth but no fangs."While grounded in history and theory, this book takes up such practical questions as: How can one religious community accommodate a variety of artistic tastes? What good or harm can be done by importing music that is worldly in origin into a house of worship? How can the exercise of taste in themaking of art be a viable (and sometimes advanced) spiritual discipline?

In this 'image journal' and textbook, the contemporary artist Betty Spackman takes us on a guided tour of her collection of the images and objects that represent the Christian faith in popular culture. Having set out to critique these poor relations of ecclesiastical art, she finds herself torn between being deeply moved and outraged by their sentimental appeal. Her gentle deconstructions and playful permutations elicit new life from them to illustrate her observations, and to surprise and at times unsettle the reader.

The contributors to this collection address the problem of how and what kitsch might signify, and approach the kitsch question as a complex, nuanced interrogative. They consider kitsch in relation to its historical association with pseudo-art, its theoretical underpinnings and connections to class, the deliberate mobilization of kitsch in the work of specific artists, kitsch as a form of practice, as well as kitsch's traffic with race, patriotism, and postmodernism.

Kitsch! examines how the idea of kitsch is mobilised - progressively, as bad taste, as camp and as cool - to inform notions of identity and sensibility. The figure of "kitsch man" - a degenerate with politically dubious taste - looms large in the extant biography of kitsch and is here shown to begendered, racialised and classed. Where most studies proceed from the kitsch object, this book takes the moment of aesthetic judgement as its starting point and attempts to identify the ideological work performed by the category itself