The art itself and the conditions of production, circulation, and reception change so fundamentally that they sharply distinguish the work from earlier art. In her oeuvre, Neshat has expanded the significance of the veil in the variety of ways it shapes meaning. Delving into their personal struggles, the artists interviewed explored avenues for hope in their creative practices. What we learn is that there are potentially as many interpretations of spirituality as there are viewers. In the present day, artists are at liberty to combine genres, materials, and forms and to represent a range of global subjects, some of which refer directly to societal issues, whereas others are more universal and timeless. “The contemporary” can be used to refer to the current, the present, the here-and-now. The artworks under discussion here detail the scope and breadth of art that can be described as spiritual by virtue of its revelatory, revitalizing and contemplative capacities. It differs from art history’s preoccupation with iconography and style in favor of an engagement with images and objects as visual practice. The lack of religious meaning does not preclude a spiritual reading of Bacon’s work, though; his work is deeply spiritual as it is about themes that are central to human life, including embodiment, isolation, and mortality. The intention is to capture the changing lighting conditions as day passes into night. Works are not necessarily commissioned to reflect Christian theology or to support the liturgy; they might indeed offer a critique of or challenge to Christian values, but the intention is to respond sensitively to the space in which the work will be contained, and to encourage spiritual reflection, even if this is not always in connection to religion. An overriding theme in his paintings is the coming together of creativity and destruction, where creation is bound up with devastation and the trauma of history. The viewer sees each drop expand, and as it falls, it lands on an amplified drum. 35. Conversely, many religions tried to portray their dogma and biblical stories through the use of art. The audience, too, was rendered abject—morally abject—by their complicity in their objectifying and dehumanizing actions. This work tests boundaries: the boundaries between the individual and the group, the boundaries of the artist’s body, and the boundary that determines what is permissible and morally acceptable. Philip Sheldrake provides some useful initial definitions of spirituality: “‘[S]pirituality’ refers to the deepest values and meanings by which people seek to live.”2 It conveys an outlook, vision, or aspiration about life that involves thinking holistically about identity, about one’s own and that of others, and of being cognizant of death. 4–5. Virtually all contemporary artists make art about life, involving everyday subjects and materials. James Elkins, On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art (New York: Routledge, 2004), 15–20. In philosophical thinking, the idea that God was an a priori foundation for our belief system was also replaced by an increase in scientific knowledge that placed the onus on inquiry rather than revelation as the ground for thinking. You could not be signed in, please check and try again. This does not devalue the experience but demonstrates the often personal and subjective nature of viewing, as well as the different ways of engaging with the spiritual. Spirituality seeks to transcend worldly goods and ambitions. That is not to say that the contemporary art world is not without hierarchies; it is just that images and objects are not subject to the same categorization that they were in former centuries. In Refiguring the Spiritual (2011), Taylor argues how “the commodification, corporatization, and financialization of art represent a betrayal of principles and values that guided artists for more than two centuries,” and he singles out four artists for consideration who have defied this approach, and whose work can be seen as embodying spiritual values.21. Dan Fox, “Believe It or Not: Religion versus Spirituality in Contemporary Art,” in Frieze. Greenberg’s essay “Modernist Painting,” in Art in Theory 1900–1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. It was a reminder of the total vulnerability of humans in the face of an unpredictable nature.6 In “The Abstract Sublime” (1961),7 which was developed in Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition, Robert Rosenblum argues for a counter-French tradition in modern art that traces a history of the sublime in the “Northern Romantic Tradition,” from Friedrich in the 19th century to Mark Rothko.8. 2. For churchgoers, it may be seen to enhance lived worship, or viewed as a distraction or intrusion. Indeed, the display put me in mind of that bravura passage in Michael Baxandall’s Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-century Italy, in which the art historian sets out the gradations of the Virgin’s gestures in Renaissance Annunciations, directing us to the relevance of historical doctrinal nuance for our understanding of such works.