But, even more, it is because modern art put a lot of time, effort and rhetoric into becoming a religion of its own. To read, for instance, the heady, spiritual writings of modern abstract artists such as Barnett Newman or Mark Rothko is to be reminded that modern art had some deadly serious ambitions - and they were unabashedly about converting souls. It's one of the great unresolved questions of modernism. After all, a similar case has been confronted by literature. In the case of most religions, eternal life is at stake, which means you are welcome to believe or not to believe, but you can't not consider the question.
Pictures pale beside it.
So the category of religious art, it seems, must be art that knowingly subordinates itself to the religious impulse if it is to be meaningful. William Blake, the 18th-century artist and poet after whom the Blake Prize for Religious Art was named in 1949, was a visionary and an eccentric, but he was certainly a believer. Don't look at us, the judges seem to be saying. This is perhaps appropriate for a culture as proudly multicultural as our own. There are conflicting motives at work here.