Associate Dean Robert Nelson's new book "The Spirit of Secular Art"

Associate Dean Robert Nelson has published a new book titled The Spirit of Secular Art: A History of the Sacramental Roots of Contemporary Artistic Values. Various theorists have discussed how art has an aura or indefinable magic. This book explains the spiritual prestige of art, revealing how, when and why art gained its spiritual properties.

Extract from the introduction:
“There is undeniably a cultish background to premodern art; but it is a popular misconception that the breakthrough of modernism involves the transcendence of religious institutions. First, secular art has a tradition long anterior to modernism. Second, there is a question of when and how the religious preconditions of art receded and the dependence on cultish ritual became inconspicuous. This book argues that those cultish contingencies were never abandoned: they were translated into secular enthusiasms, enthusiasms that paradoxically depend on the backdrop of arcane spirituality which they seem to transcend.”

Robert Nelson is Associate Dean in the Faculty of Art and Design at Monash University, Australia, where he lectures in art history and research methods. He is the author of many scholarly and polemical essays and reviews in journals such as Photofile and Artlink. He is also the art critic for The Age, a major Australian newspaper, and is the author of over 750 published newspaper articles.

Spirit of Secular Art, will be published by Monash University ePress on 17 September 2007. The book will be available both in paperback (rrp$40) and as an ebook at Monash University ePress Web Site.

For a copy of the book for review, or to arrange an interview with the author, contact Sarah Cannon on +61 3 9905 0526.