The Issue at a Glance

Make Art—and Academia—Medieval Again (https://doi.org/10.1007/s12129-020-09908-4)

Rachel Fulton Brown, University of Chicago

Much like the devotional paintings hanging in our finest museums, the Gothic architecture that adorns American college campuses fails to elicit from visitors even the slightest religious feeling. The reason, says critic Rachel Fulton Brown, is academia’s myopic focus on the material experience, the “worship of things (artifacts) rather than God,” and a “hostility to the possibility of seeing religious experience as something which academic study might facilitate, not to mention enrich—or vice versa.”

Art History Gone Amuck (https://doi.org/10.1007/s12129-020-09902-w)

Michelle Marder Kamhi, independent scholar and critic, co-editor of Aristos

An evaluation of the most widely used textbook in art history maps the slow but steady erosion of imagery in art—and the loss of meaning, purpose, and understanding that representative art in the West provided.

Autistic