A thought-provoking evaluation of religious-themed art of the 1980s.
An analysis of popular culture’s incorporation of religious elements.
In 1979, when Bob Dylan released the album Slow Train Coming, fans felt betrayed that an “un-cooptable” rebel had become a born-again Christian, “marking his conversion with a set of songs dealing with spiritual warfare and holy submission.” He performed selections on Saturday Night Live, 13 years before Sinéad O’Connor sang Bob Marley’s “War” on SNL and infamously ripped up a picture of Pope John Paul II. Those two performances bracketed a moment in which “figures in what we call popular culture engaged questions of faith and art and the ways they fit together with an intensity seldom seen before or since.” In this all-encompassing book, Elie documents the achievements of a range of artists from popular music, cinema, literature, and more whose work during that period, primarily the 1980s, was “crypto-religious,” a term coined by Czeslaw Milosz that Elie uses to mean “work that incorporates religious words and images and motifs but expresses something other than conventional belief.” Among the artists he cites are Andy Warhol, whose work, Elie argues, “put him squarely in a line of twentieth-century writers and artists with Christian preoccupations”; U2, the Irish band whose “mix of devotion and desire came together in The Unforgettable Fire,” their 1984 album; Madonna, who “made old-school Catholicism suddenly, inexplicably sexy”; and filmmaker Martin Scorsese, who devoted 15 years to making 1988’s The Last Temptation of Christ, with its depiction of a fallible Jesus, which provoked a backlash from religious conservatives. The writing can be dry, but there’s enough entertaining material to keep readers interested, as when Elie notes that Universal Studios was so concerned about protestors when they showed Last Temptation to clergymen in New York that, before the screening, they “had the cinema inspected by men with walkie-talkies crawling down the aisles, looking for explosives under the seats.”
A thought-provoking evaluation of religious-themed art of the 1980s.Pub Date: May 27, 2025
ISBN: 9780374272920
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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