IN a recent balmy Tuesday evening, a man in black stood behind a lectern at the Church of the Holy Apostles in Chelsea and addressed a group of about 50 people who had gathered to listen to a sermon on art and spirituality. "Artists are the new clergy, the monks and nuns of our day," he said. "When you see a man dressed in black walking down the street in Los Angeles or Manhattan, is he more likely to be a priest or an artist?"
The man commanding the pulpit of this 160-year-old Episcopalian church was not a minister but an artist — the Russian-born conceptualist Alex Melamid — and the book he held in his hand was not a Bible but "The Art Book," a popular paperback guide to the history of art. His "sermon" was the first in a series of three slide lectures introducing his semi-satirical theory of art as a new form of religion. (The third lecture will be this Tuesday night.) Some in the audience were there because they knew him or his work. Others were there because they are members of the church's community.
An artist who has built his reputation on irony and irreverence, Mr. Melamid, 58, is wiry and kinetic, his mobile face framed by bushy eyebrows and an electrified mop of gray hair. He was born in Moscow, where he and his longtime collaborator, Vitaly Komar, were prominent dissident artists. In 1978 they moved to New York, where they charmed American audiences with barbed satires of the Socialist Realism they had left behind.
For their best-known project, "The People's Choice," the artists hired professional polling agencies to ask people in 18 countries what they liked and disliked in art. Taking the poll results as a literal mandate, they created a series of the "Most Wanted" and "Most Unwanted" paintings for each country, which comically illustrated their interest in the gulf between popular taste and the entrenched elitism of the art world.
More recently, Komar and Melamid traveled to Southeast Asia to teach former work elephants to paint on canvas (holding the brushes in their trunks), then sold the paintings to raise money for wildlife conservation. (I accompanied the artists on two trips to Thailand and later wrote a book about the project.)
In his current "Art Ministry" project, Mr. Melamid uses religion as a lens through which to examine the ingrained pieties and genius worship of museum culture. "The whole idea of art is based on belief," he said in an interview after the lecture. "You cannot explain it, you cannot understand it. Just try reading art criticism — all you can do is have faith."
While the project has its parodic aspects — the Art Ministry's motto is "Close your mind, open your eyes" — he insists that his message is sincere, asking, in his heavy Russian accent, "Why the truth cannot be funny?"
Of course, Mr. Melamid's critique is not entirely new. Taking shots at the sacred cows of high culture has been a favorite sport of modern artists from Marcel Duchamp to Maurizio Cattelan. What distinguishes his approach is his disarming blend of ardor and absurdity, and his emphasis on the essential irrationality of the belief that art is good. "All I'm trying to show," he said to me, "is that believing in art is no more or less absurd than believing in Christianity or Buddhism or Vitamin C. Art is just another faith that promises immortal life and access to the spiritual."
Earlier this year, when Mr. Melamid was looking for a church where he could give his sermons, he met Elizabeth Maxwell, associate rector at Holy Apostles, through a mutual friend, the writer Ian Frazier. (Mr. Frazier founded a creative writing workshop at the church's busy soup kitchen.) At their first meeting, Mr. Melamid laid out his ideas about art and religion, but it was his work with Asian elephants that particularly impressed Ms. Maxwell, an animal lover whose gentle black dog, Scout, can usually be found curled up on the floor of her office. "Knowing he did that made me trust him," she said. "I thought he seemed like someone who would be sensitive to what is holy, to the connections we share with other people, and perhaps even across species."
Furthermore, the timing was right. In 1990, the church had suffered a devastating fire that left the landmarked building severely damaged. The elegant, vaulted interior and jewel-toned stained glass windows have been restored, but the wall over the altar, where a large painting of the Ascension once hung, remains empty. "There's been a lot of discussion about what kind of art should go there," Ms. Maxwell said. "We share the space with a synagogue, so we also want to be sensitive to Jewish beliefs in the selection of images."
Meanwhile, the blank, white-washed wall provided a screen for Mr. Melamid's idiosyncratic selection of slides, which included images of Russian icons, paintings by old masters like Raphael, Titian and Velázquez, photographs of museum visitors gazing at Jackson Pollock paintings and stark close-ups of a human eye illustrating "visual yoga" exercises meant to facilitate the "art of seeing."
"In recent years, museums have replaced cathedrals as spiritual centers and anchors of the community," Mr. Melamid said, flashing a slide of Frank Gehry's spectacular Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. "Museum attendance is higher than ever. When you go to a new city, you might go first to the cathedral to see beauty, but you go to the museum to see God, to seek the spiritual."
The next slide was a photograph of Mr. Melamid at a museum, performing strange calisthenics in front of a Rembrandt self-portrait. It's not enough simply to gaze at the art on the walls, he explained. "When you are in a museum, don't stay passive. Your blood should circulate in front of a masterpiece. Exert your whole body in the process of seeing!"
After an impassioned explanation of the centrality of Vincent van Gogh to the new religion of art, Mr. Melamid offered a quick rundown of the topics he would address in his next two sermons: the healing power of art (which involves projecting slides onto the bodies of the afflicted) and his missionary work (taking van Gogh reproductions to remote hill tribes in northern Thailand).
As the overhead lights came up, the audience was buzzing with opinions. Gary Indiana, a writer and art critic, agreed with Mr. Melamid's analysis of the sanctification of art, pointing to the recent sale of a Picasso painting at auction for more than $100 million. "It's not just about a financial investment," he said, "because intrinsically these things are worthless. It's more like we've invested these inert objects with the same spiritual value that people used to invest in icons of Jesus or the Virgin Mary."
Jeffrey Penn, a parishioner who serves on the committee responsible for choosing a new image for the wall over the altar, found the lecture instructive. "I do think he's right about artists as mediators between heaven and the world, who are trying to visualize the invisible," he said.
Another parishioner, Muriel Moore, was more circumspect. "Some of it I had heard before, watching PBS, so I kind of understood where he was coming from," she said. "I love old art and definitely religious art, but I'm not a convert. I'll stick with the Episcopalians, I think."