Over at the First Things On the Square blog, Matthew J. Milliner reviews Daniel Siedell’s God in the Gallery, which provides a different approach to art from the Reformed, Rookmaaker-influenced tradition.
Here’s a teaser:
Simply put, God in the Gallery succeeds by dividing, that is, by clearly distinguishing the sanctuary from the salon. The author has no interest in churches aping galleries or galleries playing church. But what keeps Siedell from merely erecting a Jeffersonian wall of separation between church and gallery is his unflinching insistence that the church’s aesthetic framework, grounded in the ecumenical warrant for icons, is strong enough to inform, shape, and underwrite the practice of contemporary art. “The church’s aesthetics and poetics . . . is the ground of all aesthetics and poetics.” And the direction of influence “goes from the church outward toward culture, not from culture to a passive, inert, irrelevant church.”
The former Associate Director for the Emerging Scholars Network, Micheal lives in Cincinnati with his wife and three children and works as a web manager for a national storage and organization company. He writes about work, vocation, and finding meaning in what you do at No Small Actors.
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