God in the Gallery: A Christian Embrace of Modern Art

Praise for the Print Edition

We’ve been waiting for this book for nearly 40 years. Finally, a robust and unapologetically Christian engagement with contemporary art by an ‘insider’ to its world and conversation. Though Siedell invites us beyond the wooden ideal of ‘the Christian artist,’ at the same time he articulates a vision of artistic practice and criticism rooted in the church. He provides much-needed wisdom, modeling how Christians can charitably engage modern art. He also provides much-needed guidance for how Protestants can—and should—incorporate the arts in worship beyond the eclectic pastiche of the ‘hip.’ Required reading for emerging artists—and their teachers.

—James K. A. Smith, professor of philosophy, Calvin College

God in the Gallery is a seminal work of interpretation, a guide for skeptics and faithful alike, in which Siedell offers a most profound, encouraging survey of contemporary art. An Emmaus Road encounter for those traveling on the path of contemporary art, Siedell’s careful and loving attention paid to known and unknown artists will surely open our eyes. A must read for all of us laboring in the art world and in the arts academia.

—Makoto Fujimura, artist, founder/creative director, International Arts Movement

Dan Siedell is an exceptionally thoughtful and articulate observer of the very difficult intersection of religious belief and contemporary art. Writing from the perspective of a committed religious belief, Siedell makes his careful way toward modernism and postmodernism, paying attention to those moments when modernism’s utopian aims have appeared as the search for ‘a new world, a better world, a perfect world, redeemed, perhaps saved.’ Siedell argues, very gently, for a more capacious reading of secularist critics, such as Clement Greenberg, and he reads Janine Antoni, Wolfgang Laib, and even Jackson Pollock as instances of ‘artistic practices of belief.’ The aim is to develop a ‘rich vocabulary’ to help revive ‘the sacramental and liturgical identity of human practice.’ The book is full of unexpected and promising confluences. Here a reader will find the principal secular theorists of modernism, but this book is also ‘nourished by Nicene Christianity’ and informed by a wonderful range of authors, from Florensky, Levinas, and Wyschogrod to Seerveld, Wolterstorff, Walford, and Dyrness. This is a tremendous book, a genuine effort at dialogue in an arena marked by the near-complete absence of open exchange.

—James Elkins, E. C. Chadbourne Chair in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism, School of the Art Institute of Chicago