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I think a Christian artist might get artworld support if their art was about their complex feelings toward Christianity or had some kind of critical lens, or maybe if it was by a Christian outsider or even mentally ill person and mixed in another culture or influences in novel ways. If it was primarily proselytising art, it wouldn't stand much of a chance though, especially if it was iconographic in the sense of emulating previous artists in already existing styles. Today's art world insists on newness above all. Not to say most 'tastemakers' of the 21st century aren't incredibly judgemental, they are, but they don't generally deny the incredible artistic output of christianity in centuries past, just today.
If you have got some good example of contemporary conservative Christian art that is uncelebrated, would you be willing to share? I'm genuinely interested.
They say they do, but whether they actually do is another question. And at any rate, constant newness is not a reasonable demand. Creative work always falls into regular patterns; in both the sciences and the arts, the majority of work consists in simply filling out the details of a given paradigm, rather than actually pushing at the boundaries of the paradigm itself. True innovation is hard, and at this point in human history, the possibility space of the traditional plastic arts has been explored pretty thoroughly.
A sculpture that consists of, say, a few loose pipes and concrete slabs strewn about the floor, which are alleged to represent the struggle for Palestinian liberation, is just as much of a genre piece as a representational painting of the deposition of Christ. It follows genre conventions, it shares a clear lineage with other works in the same group, etc. It's just that "abstract sculpture paired with a leftist artist statement" is a politically favored genre, whereas "representational Christian painting" is a politically disfavored genre.
I don't know if you're describing an actual or hypothetical sculpture, but yes, it does sound workmanlike from your description (although, if we're evaluating comparative newness alone, we can note that it is at least in a relatively new genre compared to a representational religious painting, and potentially expresses emotion about a breaking situation rather than depicting the motifs of an ancient faith).
I also think a lot of the artworld would agree that abstract political sculptures genuinely were a lot more exciting back when there was something innovative about them as a form. In other words I suspect artworld people often really are interested in newness and I am not convinced by your suggestion that it's a pretense. (Of course within that story, loads of art is totally boring and not innovative and exists only for reasons of business, personal ambition and to rally political causes.)
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Not off the top of my head, in regards to painting. I was just giving an example of conservative subject matter that would not fly far in contemporary art circles. You raise a good point that one of the issues is the constant drive for novelty, which I think comes at the cost of alienation from more universal experiences and values that could reach a larger audience.
I'm more familiar with Christian music. POD is an example of a Christian group that was very contemporary and found wider market success when I was younger. I like Alive and Youth of the Nation by them. Looking them up, I hadn't realized they were still going, I need to check out their recent stuff.
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