Concerning my search for a visual language to describe sacredness: 

From Reclaiming the Spiritual in Art

“the spiritualization of the sensuous, the ontological apotheosis of the body in Western art, is also a violence to the body. The connection of these facts is, of course, no accident. To see the body as something which ought to be spiritualized is always also to denigrate it as it is. In fact, this is a denigration of the body in its essence, a denigration of the body precisely insofar as it is body, insofar asit is particular and physical. The spiritualization of the body in Western art is an expression of fear and hatred of the body, and in particular the human body”. – Crispin Sartwell, “Venus/Intra-Venus; Art Against And As The Body”

“Definitions and beliefs stemming from Jewish and Christian ideology have silently informed the interpretation of the sacred in art and the practice of art criticism in general. Feminist approaches to art criticism have attempted to address these issues. Feminist redefinitions of the sacred provide on base from which to reexamine the possibility of the existence of contemporary manifestations of the sacred in art”. – Debra Koppman, “Feminist Revisions”

 

From James Elkins, On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art

“Religion is seldom mentioned in art schools and art departments, partly because it is understood to be something private (what I am going to call spiritual), and partly from a conviction that religious beliefs need not be brought into the teaching of art. When religion does come up in the art world, it is because there has been a scandal: someone has painted a Madonna using elephant dung, or put a statuette of Jesus into a jar of urine”.

(talking about SAIC) “A few students each year try to make openly religious work – very few, perhaps two or three out of two thousand. In my experience they find that it is better not to bring their religious work to class, especially in graduate school. Our teachers are nto prejudiced, but the religious content of religious art just does not get critiqued. The work’s religious meaning is ignored or written off as something so personal it cannot be addressed. So the few really religious students make some work expressly for their class and keep their religious work separate and secret”.

 

Words like “kitsch” or “sentimental” are often used to describe religious art.