Beasts of Revelation

Beasts of Revelation was a recent exhibition at the DC Moore Gallery in New York. The press release for the exhibition seems in line with the premise of my 'Airbrushed from Art History' series when it states:

"What aggravates us now? Religion, a taboo subject in the art world, is a strong candidate. As
our elders might say, "Let's not talk about it.” But this exhibition, Beasts of Revelation,
does just that ...

Even for secular audiences, religious images are everywhere, filling museums and saturating
popular culture. Centuries of representations are embedded in our psyches. So it is no
surprise that virtually every major artist has been tempted, at some point, to engage with
this giant visual inheritance ...

The focus of this exhibition is twenty-first century American (ir)religiosity with expressions
that are alternately ambiguous, questioning, transgressive, and open-ended ...  In dozens of different voices, images like these testify to Christianity's insidious aquifer of metaphorical power."

The New York Times concurred saying: "Religious imagination animates a lot of art being made these days but is rarely a topic of serious critical discussion." Similarly for the MoBIA blogger, the show "emphasized just how ingrained the word [Christ] is in our cultural psyche" - the "Western world is brimming with it [the Bible]" - even alterations to it, as with Dana Frankfort's “TSIRHC” placed on a stark white wall, cannot disguise it.

For the New York Press and Art Review, however, the issue with the exhibition was simply that the art included didn't do what the press release promised i.e. it didn't aggravate or provoke:

"Here, promotional blather about religion diverts attention from the crucial question: Is the art any good?
Some of it is, much is not. Even so, Rosary Society matrons will have a hard time finding offence. This is an unexceptional summertime porridge of appropriations and approximations of traditional iconography. Several pieces achieve a seriousness that is no less real for being unintended. The only insidious item on show is the press release."

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Bill Fay - Time Of The Last Persecution.