A urinal. Soup can paintings. A crucifix in a container of urine. A wine bottle rack. Paint-splattered canvases. Shrill and dissonant music. Much of modern art (painting, music, drama, poetry, sculpture) bears the burden of being made in the absence of belief in God, or even the possibility of there being a God. The result is art that is alien to the human spirit, and often grotesque to human sensibilities and aesthetics.
Without allowing art to be iconic, or at least tinged sometimes by the sacred, it becomes brooding narcissism and nihilism, sterile and without a sense of both the deeply human and the ascendent spiritual. It is why so many people cannot connect to modern art and see it more as distraction and a caricature of art than disclosing the profundities of suffering, love, isolation, death, hope, good v. evil, passion, beauty, emotional and spiritual truths, and much more. Instead of being the object of contemplation, truth, inspiration, modern art leaves the viewer or listener out of whack and with a soul-less vertigo.
With the rejection of God, art has lost not only its relevance, but its portrayal of meaning in human and divine love in the face of separation, suffering, time, and death. It has become an aesthetics of hollow absurdity gleaned from postmodern presumptions and dead-end deconstructionism. What is missing in modern art as a whole is a soul, an incarnational and transcendental identity. The numinous, holy, and mystical are either neglected or ridiculed as superstitious. The irony is that atheism is the home of superstition with all its thin-soup beliefs that assume a superior insight. As has been said, “I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist.”
When art loses its enchantment and sense of the sacred, it becomes profanely profane, unable to inspire wisdom and new ways to experience experience. Since God is The Artist, the amputation of God from consciousness leads to an art that is neither fully human, nor somehow baring traces of the divine. Art has the potential to be epiphanic, but modern art is more solipsistic and deadening.
The age needs art that does more than reflect spiritual sloth and abandonment of truth. It needs an up-rising of art that integrates and involves both the body and the soul, the mind and the presence of God. Art without hope is a prescription for depressed focus more on trivialities than upon aspects of common life that can be windows onto impermanence, eternity, and beyond.
Too often what is lacking in modern art is an experience of the sacred in human consciousness, experience, and culture. With a memory of the future, art can regenerate itself and once again be both relevant and transformative. In the Book of Proverbs it states that without a vision the people perish. In art without vision and some dimension of the sacred, beauty and truth perish, along with art itself. A resurrection is needed.