Simply put, the work of art that has the least potential for transgressing the self-conceived autonomy of the viewer is one most able to gain approval. The work that functions more as a sign than as a symbol is far closer to approval, since the sign tends to present itself to the autonomous self for review, whereas the symbol announces itself as avatar of a broader, even universal, conception which bears with it a kind of jurisdiction over the self.

[...]

Why is religio-spiritual content subject to the evaluation of theory and not the other way around? The problem with this arrangement is that theory denigrates practice by the expression of its critique. That is, the form of its existence is a questioning of praxis, hence the eternal strain inherent in the attempt to bridge the theory of a phenomena and the actuality of it. Any analysis of a particular practice, rather than reifying it, particularizes it in a hierarchical structure where the analysis plays the dominant roll of overseeing other. Thus by virtue of its own critical action, the theory of a discrete application becomes the arbiter of the value of that system. This is where the fundamental power of critique comes into existence. A theory of religious or faith-motivated art, then, must be a kind of violence exacted upon that art, for in its attempt to quantify, qualify, name, and place the systems and functions of that art, the theorizing acts as a systolic element that compresses the potentiality of anything it has defined. This is perhaps the fatal flaw of the Re-Enchantment panel: that their words could not seem to traverse the gulf between the disqualifying otherness of critique and the gut-wrenching, heart-felt arena of making artworks. They could not connect with the practice of making contemporary religio-spiritual art in any full measure; most of their time was spent describing it.