Christina Leary - Spiritual Impulse of Art

December 12th, 2017

Christina Leary - Spiritual Impulse of Art

In Kuspit’s article he talks about the spiritual impulse of art and how he is interested in maintaining it because he believes it is being lost. This reminded me of Van Der Leeuw and his idea of the “religious man” and his world view. I think it is very fitting that we sort of started the class talking about that and now we are ending the class sort of wrapping all of that up, even though we can never very easily wrap up anything.

The part of the article I found to be the most interesting and relatable is when he mentions how the word spiritual used to have hold strong and clear meaning because it was grounded in the religious but now we are moving away from the religious and it is less clearly defined. For me the spiritual and the religious are so intertwined, they are roots of the same tree. However, he asserts we are going through a paradigm change and the connectedness of the religious and the spiritual is being lost, and therefore so is a huge part of the aesthetic experience. Spiritual is become the secular religion, they are hijacking the word, making it their own with a different meaning. We can look to the whole “I’m not religious, I’m spiritual” video that surfaced about 8 years ago now, where a line is clearly draw between the two but what isn't so clear is what that means and where the line was actually drawn. I liked this article because it talks about how it is so hard to explain art without talking about the unique aesthetic experience, which has come to be understood collectively as the spiritual experience. Now art is becoming something else. I think it may be key to explain that something which was difficult and took talent might not actually be art. Art isn’t measured by difficulty of the art or talent of the person who created the work. That simply implies that they have a skill but I think art must be something more like Kuspit is arguing.

At one point he goes into conversation about Pop art and how it is very much so materialistic. He argues it is almost impossible to find “inner life” in this art and I think I would tend to agree, it is mostly commercial art. Posters are what people hang in there room, comedy movies have been serving more and more as a mere distraction from reality littered heavily with useless curse words that really serve no purpose. This is all fun and games until it becomes dangerous by making its way into other aspects of our lives as Kuspit asserts it does when he says “for contemporary materialistic society and its media have discovered the advantage of being ironical about themselves, namely, it spares them the serious trouble of having to change.” To me this quote describes something similar to critiquing something and saying how much stronger it would be if this critique was applied then laughing at it and sinking back into complacency. I think this all goes back to the same thing I’ve been thinking about all semester, art should call us to action, it should move us in some way. Furthermore it is connected to this idea of the spiritual and religious because why would we be called to action if the world was simply chaos (as Van Der Leeuw implies the non religious world is)? What purpose would that serve? If I’ve learned something this semester it is that art and the aesthetic is necessarily a spiritual experience and spiritual experiences, I think, always move us or call us to action.