For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center. Profaning the iconography of other people's faiths is boring and adolescent.
Thus comments atheist Camille Paglia in her excellent essay. She makes the case, with which I agree, that art without a spiritual center quickly degenerates into narcissism, commercialism, propagandizing, or adolescent shock-art. Another quote:
A primary arena for the conservative-liberal wars has been the arts. While leading conservative voices defend the traditional Anglo-American literary canon, which has been under challenge and in flux for forty years, American conservatives on the whole, outside of the New Criterion magazine, have shown little interest in the arts, except to promulgate a didactic theory of art as moral improvement that was discarded with the Victorian era at the birth of modernism. Liberals, on the other hand, have been too content with the high visibility of the arts in metropolitan centers, which comprise only a fraction of America. Furthermore, liberals have been complacent about the viability of secular humanism as a sustaining creed for the young. And liberals have done little to reverse the scandalous decline in urban public education or to protest the crazed system of our grotesquely overpriced, cafeteria-style higher education, which for thirty years was infested by sterile and now fading poststructuralism and postmodernism. The state of the humanities in the US can be measured by present achievement: would anyone seriously argue that the fine arts or even popular culture is enjoying a period of high originality and creativity? American genius currently resides in technology and design. The younger generation, with its mastery of video games and its facility for ever-evolving gadgetry like video cell phones and iPods, has massively shifted to the Web for information and entertainment.
I would argue that the route to a renaissance of the American fine arts lies through religion.
Read the whole thing in Arion. h/t, reader.
Image: One of Andy Warhol's Tomato Soup images, to my mind just one example of "art" lacking in a center - unless his idea was to mock the very idea of artistry. He made himself fabulously wealthy with this sort of stuff, but his Hollywood-style celebrity was at the core of it all.
