THE CITY
I would argue that the route to a renaissance of the American fine arts lies through religion. Let me make my premises clear: I am a professed atheist and a pro-choice libertarian Democrat…. For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center. Profaning the iconography of other people’s faiths is boring and adolescent. The New Age movement, to which I belong, was a distillation of the 1960s’ multicultural attraction to world religions, but it has failed thus far to produce important work in the visual arts. I’m not sure I would put it that strongly, but like Elkins, I’m not taking sides—just reporting. Such new academic openness to religion has meant challenges to October are growing bolder. James Romaine’s article, “Gerhard Richter: The Capacity for Belief” and Wayne Adams’ “A Reflection in the Window: Gerhard Richter Longs for More,” in a recent issue of Image together constitute a concerted attempt to wrench “Europe’s greatest painter” from the constraints of October editor Benjamin Buchloh’s limited interpretive horizon, employing not religious projections, but the words of Gerhard Richter himself. They are not alone in doing so, and find Robert Storr, the former director of the Museum of Modern Art, an ally in their new interpretation. Even some October contributors have shown openness to traditional faith. In a book entitled The Monstrosity of Christ, the Radical Orthodox theologian John Milbank conversed at length with Slavoj Žižek. The interaction was made possible because of Žižek’s increasing engagements with theologians such as G.K. Chesterton. If it can happen to one October contributor, it can happen to others.
W
e could rally the Christian refugees with tales of October oppression, hoping to instigate a peasant revolt. But even Roger Kimball—the daring foot solder who once issued a “battle plan” to retake the academy—has admitted such an overt takeover strategy is doomed. Instead of a rag-tag peasant uprising to take over the October kingdom, Christians involved in the arts need to emerge from exile and become serious, independent landowners. The increasingly favorable place of religion in academia invites just such an emergence. Our inexhaustible acquifer of theological aesthetics means little without the up-to-date scholarly equipment that enables it to irrigate dry, barren art historical land. Fruitful landowning would mean that instead of seeking the validation of October, we 16