Who is one's audience, the spiritually hostile professional art world or one's visually insensitive Christian neighbour?

The cumulative effect of the Romantic theory of creativity, as played out in the context of belief in the virtue of the avant-garde, is that while the art world has effectively freed itself from the tyranny of artistic tradition and its historic patronage system, it has ended up inhabiting an autonomous but perceived irrelevance.

Postmodernism has not overcome the problems of modernism, but only compounded them with a dosis of cynicism, relativism and indifference.

Christ, as the ultimate Imago Dei is alluded to in scripture as being without external beauty in the Classical sense, and should better be thought of as one who passed through all the slime and mire of a fallen and sinful creation in order to redeem it. His own body is to be remembered for the marks it bears-even in resurrection-of the scars of his sacrificial death. For the Christian, a theory of beauty might better begin at this point.

Who is one's audience, the spiritually hostile professional art world or one's visually insensitive Christian neighbour?

Begbie offers an additional valuable contribution by rejecting the traditional emphasis on beauty, in its Platonic sense, and instead suggesting that beauty be reconceived in Christological terms-as disorder redeemed.

It would be a serious oversight to limit our understanding of the impact of theology to strictly religious art, and overlook its pervasive role in shaping human understanding and artistic expression thereof within any given culture-regardless of the subject matter at hand.