I’ve recently been in correspondence with a purveyer of religious art with regard to the prospect of featuring the artists he represents in the pages of the Saint Austin Review. I’m omitting the agent’s and the artists’ names in the interests of decorum but I thought I’d share my response with the visitors to this site

We’ve already featured the work of [Artist X] in the St. Austin Review but I feel that the corpus of work by your other two artists would prove too “progressive” (an ugly word) for the tradition-oriented sensibilities of our subscribers. There seems to be a curious lack of suffering in the work of [Artist Y], though I love the Madonna and Child. As for [Artist Z], I have no objection to the depiction of Christ and the Saints in ethnically diverse guises but [Artist Z’s] ethno-masochism conflates Mammon with Mission in his historically revisionist approach to the evangelization of the Americas. His ethno-masochism is essentially racist in its blaming of the crimes of greedy men on the whole European race. It’s also curious that he should blame his own Italian ancestors for the conquest of America! And if the evangelization of the Americas is something for which he feels guilty, why is he continuing to practice the “crime” with his art? Why not become a neo-pagan, like the Incas and the Aztecs, and advocate the return of human sacrifice? It was, after all, [for Artist Z] apparently a “crime” to convert these pagans to Christ in the first place.

I vent. I apologise …