Believe it or Not: Art Was, And is a Faith-Based Business
FRIEZE MAGAZINE
By Dan Fox
Art is a faith-based system that, to paraphrase philosopher Simon Critchley, combines ‘an uneasy godlessness with a religious memory’. Religious conviction is taken to be a sign of intellectual weakness, and yet meaning in art is itself often a question of belief. Sol LeWitt wasn’t joking when he wrote, in his ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art’ (1967): ‘Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists.’ Art involves a conceptual investment in objects and images just as any religion invests significance in its icons and the ritual use of objects. People go to galleries on Sundays rather than churches. Is the idea that art has nothing to do with faith or religion just a lie we tell ourselves to hide the fact we crave something to believe in? Is it because the subjectivity of art provides the perfect ideological supplement to capitalism? Does God prefer Modernist abstraction or Italian Renaissance painting? Is there an afterlife with a gift shop that sells Mark Rothko postcards? [link]
By Dan Fox
Art is a faith-based system that, to paraphrase philosopher Simon Critchley, combines ‘an uneasy godlessness with a religious memory’. Religious conviction is taken to be a sign of intellectual weakness, and yet meaning in art is itself often a question of belief. Sol LeWitt wasn’t joking when he wrote, in his ‘Sentences on Conceptual Art’ (1967): ‘Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists.’ Art involves a conceptual investment in objects and images just as any religion invests significance in its icons and the ritual use of objects. People go to galleries on Sundays rather than churches. Is the idea that art has nothing to do with faith or religion just a lie we tell ourselves to hide the fact we crave something to believe in? Is it because the subjectivity of art provides the perfect ideological supplement to capitalism? Does God prefer Modernist abstraction or Italian Renaissance painting? Is there an afterlife with a gift shop that sells Mark Rothko postcards? [link]
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