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The anthropology of art and performance is an interdisciplinary research area that emerged from the convergence of social and visual anthropology, sociology of art and performance, visual and museum studies, and cultural studies. Despite its fragmented nature, anthropology of art as a field is marked by theoretical productivity, inherent interdisciplinarity, and empirical depth. Throughout the 20th century, anthropologists have invested significant theoretical effort in grappling with what can be termed the inherent dilemmas of art and anthropology. These dilemmas, stemming from the ambiguous nature of art as an object of inquiry, persistently resist resolution and remain subjects of debate. Essentially, they revolve around three fundamental questions: Is art a universal category? Should anthropology study what art means, or what it does? Can artists be anthropologists, and can anthropologists be artists? While trying to tackle these questions, ethnographers, interested in the materiality of objects defined as “art,” have extensively analyzed their trajectories, moving from the peripheries of the art world(s) toward its center(s) while producing all-encompassing systems of categorization of symbolically and aesthetically meaningful objects. At the same time, criticism of the universal validity of the category of art has been decentered by the ascendance of the global art market and the proliferation of its centers in post-colonial contexts, attracting artists and curators, including those of indigenous origin—adhering to its values. On the global art scene, the categorical boundaries between art, artifact, and commodity have been essentially dissolved, pushing anthropologists and artists to explore each other. These collaborative methodological discussions encompass the limits of multimodal and collaborative ethnographies, as well as curatorial experiments engaging anthropologists, artists, and curators in transversal conversations, moving beyond purely textual representations of anthropological debates. In contrast to these dilemmas that may at times appear scholastic, the early 21st century offers a potential renewal to the field through the intersection of art and political anthropology. This approach explores artistic and performative occurrences beyond the institutionally defined confines of galleries, museums, and art markets. Consideration of the contemporary phenomenon of global political iconoclasm supports this perspective, observable across diverse regions, including the United States, Western Europe, and postcolonial and postsocialist societies. Although this movement did not originate from officially designated art spaces, it revolved around works of art, such as statues, monuments, murals, and museum collections, involving artists and other actors. Here, art serves as a universally perceptible form of political expression, a tool for social mobilization, a witness to political violence, and a device in memory-making and decolonization. Despite its profound impact, there remains a lack of sufficient ethnographic tools to recognize, describe, and theorize the agency of artistic and performative practices occurring within the global political scene, not just within the realm of art.

The visual display of Filipinos in the United States temporally and ideologically coincides with the American military conquest of the Philippines at the end of the 19th century, a brutal and brutally forgotten war that some scholars have described as genocidal according to even the most conservative definitions of genocide. This intimacy between empire and vision in the Philippine case has shaped and sharpened the stakes of studying Filipino American visual culture and its history, aesthetics, and politics. As with other minoritized communities in the United States, Filipino American visual culture is a means and site of lively and often contentious debates about representation, which typically revolve around how to document absence and how to establish presence in America. However, because Filipino Americans historically have a doubled status as minoritized and colonized—Filipinos in the United States were legally categorized as “nationals” during the colonial period even as the Philippines was deemed “foreign in a domestic sense” by the US Supreme Court—the matter of legal and visual representation is particularly complex, distinct from that of other Asian Americans and comparable with that of Native Pacific Islanders and Native Americans. So, while the politics of Asian American representation generally can get mired in debates about the absence or presence of “voice” in literature and the stereotypical or authentic depiction of the “body” in visual culture, Filipino American studies scholars of visual culture have provided valuable, clarifying insights about the relationship between imperial spectacle and history. To wit, the hypervisible representation of the Filipino in American popular cultural forms in the early decades of the 20th century—from the newspaper cartoon to the photograph to the World’s Fair exhibition—ironically enabled the erasure of the extraordinarily violent historical circumstances surrounding the emergence of the Filipino’s visibility. This relationship between spectacle and history or, rather, between visual representation and historical erasure, continues to redound upon a wide range of Filipino American visual cultural forms in the 21st century, from the interior design of turo turo restaurants to multimedia art installations to community-based murals.

The world of art, across the globe and especially in the 20th and 21st centuries, has presented a range of challenges to those who attend to that world. These challenges span various spectra, but one set is ethical in character. How one responds to these ethical challenges will depend on one’s general ethical commitments and perspectives, but it will also depend, first, on one’s view of the relationship between the arts and ethics and, second, on understanding the context in which the challenge is made and the ethical challenge itself. Censoring a work of art, which can itself take many forms, is the result of meeting a particular challenge with the judgment that the work violates in important ways some ethical precept or set of precepts.

The interaction between the Roman Catholic Church and the arts in the period after L’Art Sacré and Vatican II has been eventful. The role of the visual and liturgical arts within the framework of the Catholic context has evolved, sometimes in radical ways. Works of art have been commissioned, curated, and displayed in different types of spaces with varying purposes. These range from modest chapels to huge cathedrals and from small galleries to world-renowned museums and international contemporary art exhibition venues. The period begins in the 1960s with the end of both the Vatican II Council held in Rome from 1962 to 1965 and of L’Art Sacré, a journal of avant-garde theory and action regarding sacred art published in France from the 1930s to the 1960s. Vatican II made official many of the changes already undertaken by what could be called the Art Sacré movement. However, the 1960s had brought so much societal upheaval globally that the arts were no longer the center of focus in the immediate post–Vatican II moment; most importantly in the Western church were the rise of secularization and the decline of traditional religious practice. Yet, Vatican II delivered guidelines that addressed the visual and liturgical arts specifically, and it set into motion organizational work within the Catholic Church that has allowed for several different types of artistic action to develop over the years. This quiet moment for the arts in the church afforded the emergence of a new generation of actors who, because of the years of theoretical and logistical groundwork, would be able to deploy the new policies of the Vatican. These could be poetically encapsulated in the via pulchritudinis, “the way of beauty,” referring to 13th-century theologian and philosopher Thomas Aquinas’s terminology. In this spirit, the popes since Vatican II have all engaged with the question of sacred art by calling out to artists to work for the church, collecting their work, and sponsoring exhibitions of contemporary art both at the Vatican and in international venues. At the same time, in countries like France and Germany where patrimony and heritage are high-stakes issues, cultural politics could be read as becoming an ally of the church—each with its own agenda at play. Both modest and major commissions for art in churches and cathedrals can be observed in this context, whether they be single artworks, series of stained-glass, or multifaceted ensembles. In countries like the United States and Australia, shifting demographics and concerns with cultural inclusiveness have played major roles in the application of liturgical reform and the types of art commissioned for churches. This activity highlights and demonstrates the theoretical premises of Vatican II put into action, sometimes with difficulty and resistance from within the church itself. This period depends mainly on primary sources for its information and must be seen as a narrow topic within the much broader conversation between contemporary art and religion. Studying it in depth means navigating between isolationist methodology and using comparative strategies associating neighboring topics and fields.

Since the late 20th century, performance has played a vital role in environmental activism, and the practice is often related to concepts of eco-art, eco-feminist art, land art, theatricality, and “performing landscapes.” With the advent of the Capitalocene discourse in the 21st century, performance has been useful for acknowledging indigenous forms of cultural knowledge and for focusing on the need to reintegrate nature and culture in addressing ecological crisis. The Capitalocene was distinguished from the Anthropocene by Donna Haraway who questions the figuration of the Anthropos as reflexive of a fossil-fuel-burning ethos that does not represent the whole of industrial humanity in the circuit of global capital. Jason W. Moore’s analysis for the Capitalocene illustrates the division between nature and society that is affirmed by the tenets of the Anthropocene. Scientists Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer had dated the Anthropocene age to the industrial acceleration of the late-18th/mid-19th century but Moore points to the rise of capitalism in the 15th century when European colonization reduced indigenous peoples to naturales in their modernist definition of nature that became distinct from the new society. As material property, women were also precluded from this segment of industrial humanity. By the 20th century, the Euro-American system for progressive modernism in the arts was supported by the inscription of cultures that represented un-modern “primitivist” nature. The tribal and the modern became a postcolonial debate in art historical discourse. In the context of the Capitalocene, a different historiography of eco-art, eco-feminist art, and environmental performances can be conceived by acknowledging the work of artists such as Ana Mendieta and Kara Walker who have illustrated the segregation of people according to the nature/society divide. Informed by Judith Butler’s phenomenological analyses of performative acts, the aesthetic use of bodily-oriented expression (with its effects on the viewer’s body) provides a vocabulary for artists engaging in the subjects of the Capitalocene. In the development of performances in the global context, artists such as Wu Mali, Yin Xiuzhen, and Ursula Biemann have emphasized the relationship between bodies of humans and bodies of water through interactive works for the public, sited at the rivers and the shores of streams. They show how humans are not separate from nature, a concept that has long been conveyed by indigenous rituals that run deep in many cultures. While artists have been effective in acknowledging the continuing exploitations of the environment, their performances have also reflected the “self” of nature that humans are in the act of destroying.

Relics can be found in every era of Islamic history, throughout the Islamic world. In line with other religious traditions of the Near East, the Qur’an mentions several objects endowed with special power (e.g., Joseph’s coat, the Ark of the Covenant). The earliest Islamic literature, preserving the life and mission of Muḥammad, presents details of several revered objects. These include objects handed down from pre-Islamic prophets as well as the discards of Muḥammad’s person, including clothing, weapons, and hair. Saintly figures, descendants of the Prophet, and his companions have also been sources for relics. Relics are displayed and venerated in devotional contexts such as shrines, tombs, mosques, madrasas, and museums. Relics have been paraded on special occasions such as the festival days of the Muslim calendar, in medieval protest marches, as part of the rituals for relief from drought, and as talismans in battle. Despite the occasional objection from austere doctors of law, devotion to relics has remained commonplace. While a full inventory is impossible, five categories may be proposed for the Islamic relic: (a) Bodily relics include the blood of martyrs, hair, and fingernail parings. Shrines have been built over severed heads—the most famous being that of Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī (d. 680). (b) Contact relics, having collected the baraka (blessing) of their one-time owners, pass those blessings on to any pilgrim who touches them. Several staffs, lances, bows, shields, turbans, cloaks, and sandals attributed to the Prophet have been preserved, some of which were presented as symbols of authority in the early caliphate. (c) Impressions in stone made by feet, hands, fingers, posteriors, and even hooves are preserved. Muḥammad’s footprints saw a brisk trade in the medieval period, and his sandal inspired a minor tradition of devotional iconography first in manuscript copies and later in modern mass production. (d) Inanimate objects, miraculously endowed with speech or locomotion, constitute a fourth category. These animated relics could be speaking stones or moving trees, particularly in the sacred topographies of Medina and Mecca. (e) Many revered places which were the site of important events have been marked off and preserved. More than commemorations, these “stage relics” anchored sacred history and holy bodies in the landscape. The location of Muḥammad’s birthplace in Mecca was until recently a revered stage relic.

Contemporary Asian American art includes artworks created by artists of Asian heritage in the Americas as well as contemporary works that engage with Asian American or Asian diasporic communities, history, aesthetics, politics, theory, and popular culture. This includes Modern and Postmodern works created in the post-World War II era to the present. Asian American art is closely tied to the birth of the Asian American movement of the 1960s and 70s as well as a wide range of art movements of the same time period from minimalism, to community murals, to the birth of video art, to international conceptual movements such as Fluxus. “Asian American art” is associated with identity based works and began to be institutionalized during the multicultural era of the 1980–1990s. From the early 2000s onwards, Asian American art has shifted to more transnational framework but remains centered on issues of representation, recovery, reclaiming, recuperation, and decolonization of marginalized bodies, histories, and memories. Common themes in Asian American art include narratives of immigration, migration, war, trauma, labor, race and ethnicity, assimilation, dislocation, countering stereotypes, and interrogating histories of colonization and U.S. imperialism.

The story of Protestant visual art begins well before Luther posted the 95 Theses. It is a story bound up with iconoclastic revision and destruction as well as with new ways of telling the Christian story in a distinctly Protestant visual mode. In the centuries since the Reformation, artists have emphasized prophetic themes such as the peaceable kingdom, the abolition of slavery, the suffering of women, and the plight of the homeless.

The first Bienal de São Paulo occurred in 1951 as an event organized by the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo. At that moment, the principal objectives of the exhibition were to win a place for São Paulo city in the international artistic circuit and present Brazilian modern art to the world. Due to the artistic direction of intellectuals such as Lourival Gomes Machado, Sérgio Milliet, and Mário Pedrosa, the São Paulo Biennales played a central role in the process of the institutionalization of modern art in Brazil, whether through the organization of special exhibitions dedicated to historical vanguards or expanding the museum’s collection through acquisition prizes. Since 1957, the exhibition has occupied the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion, one of the iconic modernist buildings designed by Oscar Niemeyer for Ibirapuera Park. In 1962, the exhibition was separated from the museum, following the creation that year of the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, a private nonprofit institution, which since then has been responsible for the organization of the Biennales. During the following decades the history of the Biennales has been a constant effort to survive numerous crises, maintaining a contemporary identity for the exhibition through experimentation with different organizational structures. The exhibition followed the model of the Venice Biennale, based on the geopolitical logic of national representation until 2006, when the Fundação Bienal decided to implement the current organizational system in which an appointed general curator is entirely responsible for the choice of artists for the exhibition. The capacity to reinvent itself from time to time, to adapt to changes in artistic practices and the global artistic scene, is what still makes the São Paulo Biennale the oldest and most important contemporary international art exhibition in Latin America.

Documents of 20th-Century Latin American and Latino Art: A Digital Archive and Publications Project is a multiyear initiative at the International Center for the Arts of the Americas (ICAA) of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston that seeks to consolidate Latin American and Latino art as a field of study and to place it on equal footing with other established aesthetic traditions. It encompasses the recovery, translation into English, and publication of primary texts by Latin American and Latino artists, critics, and curators who have played a fundamental role in the development of modern and contemporary art in countries or communities throughout the Americas. The ICAA makes these essential bibliographic materials available free of charge through a digital archive and a series of fully annotated book anthologies published in English. It is facilitating new historical scholarship on 20th-century Latin American and Latino art through a framework of thirteen open-ended editorial categories that center on thematic rather than more traditional chronological guidelines. This approach broadens the discourse on the modern and contemporary art produced along this cultural axis. A discussion and contextualization of a selection of recovered documents that relate to the editorial category of “Resisting Categories: Latin American and/or Latino?” supports this central argument. These and other little-known or previously inaccessible primary source and critical materials will ultimately encourage interdisciplinary and transnational (re)readings of how aesthetics, social issues, and artistic tendencies have been contested and developed in the region.

The art of devotion in colonial Mexico, Central America, and South America—called the “viceregal” period, from the division of the colonies into viceroyalties from 1521 to 1821—arose in the context of reformed Roman Catholicism, especially after the Council of Trent (1545–1563). Devotional images included stand-alone compositions, images from altar ensembles and serial contexts, and works of sculpture that could be the focus of a believer’s pious contemplation or an accompaniment to liturgy. These images document the establishment of the Christian faith and its iconography in the New World, including syncretic elements, principally in the initial decades of colonization and missionization. They embody doctrines and local devotions relating to the Blessed Virgin Mary; the importance of the religious orders to Latin American devotional art; orthodox and heterodox imagery; regional variations; and special iconographies particular to Latin America. The creation of viceregal images was conditioned by issues such as the relative importance of centers of viceregal power versus peripheries, differing ethnic and religious traditions of specific localities, relatively permissive church attitudes toward heterodoxy, and the use of European models.. In the almost exactly three centuries of the viceregal era, artists of the first rank such as Baltasar de Echave Orio, Luis and José Juárez, Alonso López de Herrera, Cristóbal de Villalpando, Juan Rodríguez Juárez, and Miguel Cabrera from Mexico; Bernardo Bitti, Mateo Pérez de Alesio, Angelino Medoro, Baltasar Gavilán, and Bernardo de Legarda from Peru and Ecuador; and O Aleijadinho from Brazil created religious works responding to European stylistic developments but expressing local artistic values even as they nourished an ongoing Roman Catholic devotional life.

The 1922 Modern Art Week is considered the initial landmark of artistic vanguards in Brazil. However, before it was held, Anita Malfatti’s 1917 exhibition, which presented expressionism to Brazilians, and the articles of Oswald de Andrade announcing in the local press the poetry of Mário de Andrade and futurism caused significant polemics and opened the way for renovation. In the middle of the 1920s, the contacts of various artists with European vanguards—especially cubism—and the reinterpretation of the national element and popular culture with the incorporation of this repertoire, with an emphasis on cosmopolitism, established and solidified modernism in various artistic areas. In the 1930s, social commitment, the revalorization of the regional, and adhesion to leftwing ideologies changed the focus of artistic production, leading to the reorganization of groups and the emergence of new protagonists: Patrícia Galvão and Flávio de Carvalho, among others. The return to classic forms and new experimentalisms marked the 1940s and 1950s, characterized by the reappearance of the sonnet, with Vinicius de Moraes, Cecília Meirelles, Murilo Mendes, and Jorge de Lima; renovations in language that reached a peak with Guimarães Rosa; photomontages by Jorge de Lima. Concrete art and poetry, notably the National Concrete Art Exhibition (1956) and neo-concretism, returning to the strategy of the manifestos and journals of the 1920s, revived the same polemical reception and bitter rivalries. In the following decade, the revisiting of Oswald de Andrade’s work, especially the idea of anthropophagy, gave a strong impulse to tropicalism, Cinema Novo, and a greater renewal in Brazilian theater, with the staging of O Rei da Vela by the Teatro Oficina group (1967), the culminating point of a fifty-year cycle of artistic vanguards in Brazil.

The Atis Rezistans (Resistance Artists) are a collective of sculptors based in downtown Port-au-Prince who have founded their own museum. The artists are best known for using found objects and wood to make politically charged works that draw on the imagery of Vodou. Since launching this artistic movement over a decade ago, co-founder André Eugène has referred to his home and atelier as Le Musée d’Art E Pluribus Unum. While art collectives are common in Haitian art, by designating themselves a “museum” the Atis Rezistans have incorporated aspects of conceptual art and installation art into their art movement. They describe the founding of this museum as a strategic appropriation of an institution that has historically belonged to the bourgeoisie. Conversations with Eugène, and other artists in the collective, reveal that they have carefully considered the power of museums: museums imbue certain objects with cultural capital and monetary value; present certain world views through the display of objects; and may offer visitors encounters with human remains. Becoming a museum has allowed Eugène and the other artists to access networks of art world mobility in ways that their artworks alone would not have. This essay offers context for understanding the Atis Rezistans as part of a tradition of art making among Haiti’s majority. It argues that due to their location, their class, and their overt use of Vodou imagery, scholars have overlooked conceptual elements of their movement, specifically how they play with the idea of the museum.

The Museum of Mexican Women Artists (MUMA) is a virtual museum dedicated to the promotion of Mexican women in visual arts from the 20th century onward. It was founded by Mexican feminist activist and artist Lucero González (b. 1947), who envisioned it as a feminist digital network for artists, curators, and critics to build connections with initiatives across the country and in other parts of the world. It is currently run by a council of nine women who collectively come together to plan its yearly activities and to invite others to participate. Since 2008, MUMA has hosted a new exhibition every three months by different female curators and artists working mostly on drawing, painting, performance, photography, video, and sculpture. To date, it has organized more than forty online exhibitions and a number of temporary events including exhibitions, reading groups, and public forums across the country. While it has an exclusive focus on women, one of its objectives is to promote intergenerational encounters to discuss the intersections of art and gender and question the binary construction of sexual difference. MUMA is an important addition to the growing resources on the gendered dimensions of art, feminist art, and art curation in Mexico from the 20th century onward. It offers online galleries showcasing artworks by female artists working in Mexico and contemporary theoretical essays on feminist art and curation, as well as reinterpretations of early 20th-century women’s art. Its bilingual (English and Spanish) website showcases the artistic portfolios of more than 350 artists working in Mexico. Each artist portfolio includes a gallery of artworks, an artist’s statement, and a link to a personal artist website. The exhibition section contains image links to each show. Each exhibition can be viewed in a single window and showcases the works in the exhibition along with a curatorial essay. The program section consists of an archive of all the group’s exhibitions, including theoretical texts and events organized chronologically by year since 2008. The website also has an international news section on relevant art and academic activities, a library section with curatorial texts, book excerpts and theoretical essays, and a list of partner organizations and alliances. MUMA offers an email newsletter to its subscribers with information on current exhibitions and direct links to new artists’ portfolios. It has a search engine that allows the user to explore the website via six different categories which can yield results that cross reference texts, news, links, exhibitions, and artist portfolios. Throughout its more than twenty years of existence, MUMA’s hybrid model as a virtual museum and digital archive with a temporary physical presence—and as a collective organization—has significantly amplified the visibility of women artists in Mexico.

The art-based action research (ABAR) method has its roots in action research, particularly in participatory action research (PAR) and action research in education and is clearly linked with international artistic research (AR) and art-based educational research (ABER). The ABAR methodology was developed collaboratively by a group of art educators and researchers at the University of Lapland (UoL) to support the artist-teacher-researcher with skills and professional methods to seek solutions to recognized problems and promote future actions and visions in the changing North and the Arctic. On the one hand, the need for decolonizing cultural sustainable art education research was identified in multidisciplinary collaboration with the UoL’s northern and circumpolar network. On the other hand, the participatory and dialogical approach was initiated by examining the pressures for change within art education stemming from the practices of relational and dialogical contemporary art. ABAR has been developed and completed over the years in doctoral dissertations and art-based research projects on art education at UoL that are often connected to place-specific issues of education for social and cultural sustainability. The multi-phased and long-term Winter Art Education project has played a central role in the development of the ABAR methodology. During the Winter Art Education project, ABAR has been successfully used in reforming formal and informal art education practices, school and adult education, and teacher education in Northern circumstances and settings. Winter art developed through the ABAR method has supported decolonization, revitalization, and cultural sustainability in schools and communities. In addition, the ABAR method and winter art have had a strong impact on regional development and creative industries in the North.

The period of postmodernism refers to a diverse set of ideas, practices, and disciplines that came to prominence in the later 20th century. It is the overarching philosophical project that responds to and critiques the principles of modernity and challenges the established ways of thinking. It opposes the ideas that it is possible to rationalize life through narrow, singular disciplinary thinking or through the establishment of a universal truth and grand narratives that strive for the value-neutral homogeneity that defined Enlightenment thinking. Postmodernism questions ontological, epistemological, and ethical conventions, and it opens up possibilities for multiple discourses and accepting marginalized and minority thoughts and practices. Openness to diversity is a key outcome of the multiplicities arising in postmodernity across a range of fields, including, among others, art, education, philosophy, architecture, and economics. Through its rejection of the totalizing effects of metanarratives and their intentions to achieve universal truths, goals, outcomes, and sameness, the postmodern condition opens an ethical responsibility toward otherness, to allow for diversity, and thus to elevate those who have been subjugated or marginalized in modernity. Postmodernism has been playing a significant role in what sometimes is termed the equity approach in education. While postmodernism may be eventually overtaken by other “posts”—post-qualitative, post-truth, post-digital—it still remains an important part of philosophy of education scholarship and broader understandings and conceptualizations of education.

The sublime as an aesthetic category has an extraordinarily discontinuous history in Western criticism and theory, though the phenomena it points to in art and nature are without historical limit, or virtually so. The sublime as a concept and phenomenon is harder to define than many aesthetic concepts, partly because of its content and partly because of the absence of a definition in the first great surviving text on the subject, Longinus’s On the Sublime. The sublime is inflected differently in the major theorists: in Longinus it produces ecstasy or transport in the reader or listener; in Burke its main ingredient is terror (but supplemented by infinity and obscurity); and in Kant’s bifurcated system of the mathematical and dynamic sublime, the former entails a cognitive overload, a breakdown of the imagination, and the ability to represent, whereas in the latter, the subject, after first being threatened, virtually, by powerful nature outside her or him, turns inward to discover a power of reason able to think beyond the realm of the senses. Many theorists testify to the effect of transcendence or exaltation of the self on the far side of a disturbing, disorienting experience that at least momentarily suspends or even annihilates the self. A great deal in the theoretical-critical texts turns on the force of singularly impressive examples, which may or may not exceed the designs of the theoretical axioms they are meant to exemplify. Examples of sublimity are by no means limited to nature and art but spill over into numerous domains of cultural and social life. The singular force of the individual examples, it is argued, nonetheless tends to work out similarly in certain genres conducive to the sublime (epic, tragedy) but somewhat differently from one genre to another. The heyday of the theory and critical engagement with the sublime lasts, in Western Europe and a little beyond, from the late 17th century to the early 19th century. But it does not simply go away, with sublime aesthetic production and critical reflection on the sublime present in the likes of Baudelaire, Nietzsche, and—to Adorno’s mind—in the art of modernism generally, in its critical swerve from the canons of what had counted as beauty. The sublime flourished as a topic in theory of criticism of the poststructuralist era, in figures such as Lyotard and Paul de Man but also in Fredric Jameson’s analysis of the cultural logic of late capitalism. The then current drive to critique the principle and some protocols of representation found an almost tailor-made topic in Enlightenment and Romantic theory of the sublime where, within philosophy, representation had been rendered problematic in robust fashion.

A challenging issue in the field of religious studies is the relationship between preaching and art, particularly the manner in which preachers used works of art in their preaching and described specific pictures in their sermons; the way theological discourse influenced religious architecture; and the form and function of the preaching platform, whether a pulpit in Christianity, the minbar in Islam, or the bima in Judaism. There is a growing interest in the interrelationships among art, performance, and preaching in the early modern world; there has also been recent engagement in the way visual culture enhanced the power that preachers had over their audiences, and the interactions between preaching and visual culture in the various European and Mediterranean communities. When approaching this topic, one should apply an interdisciplinary approach by focusing across the historical, literary, and art-history fields in the increasingly active area of global studies. One should also consider the interactions between the visual and the verbal; the exchange between sermons and images, preaching and the arts through the lens of performance theory and models of word and image; and the exchange between textual and visual cultures.