The Return of Religion and Other Myths A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art

Series and the final part of a three-fold project organized by BAK under same title, in which the popular assumption of the return of religion to the field of artistic practice and its discourses, the public sphere, contemporary politics, and media in the West is interrogated as a constitutive "myth" of our current condition. Through a wide-ranging selection of texts, a group of artists, art historians and theorists, scholars of religion, and sociologists unpack the historical underpinnings of religion's so-called "return", art's long-standing relationship with iconoclasm and connection to religious representation, the manipulation of certain religious imagery in the mass media, and contemporary art's potential to complicate and problematize commonly-held beliefs about the role and potential of the image in today's world.