Imprisoning Religious Art in the Museum

BUSTED HALO
By Kevin Kirby

GREAT WORKS of art are so often stuffed into museums not easily accessible and therefore lose a part of the humanity that was their inspiration. The saddest version of this is surely when devotional images of any religion are pilfered from houses of worship and placed in sterile mediocrity. I get this awful feeling whenever I walk by a work of art with a religious focus. From bountiful Buddhas to carved Crucifixes and small Shinto tokens, it is a sad fact that so many religious items are housed in our museums. In the next century we must make a concerted effort to move religious art out of museums and back into places of worship, where they were intended to be experienced in the first place.[link]