The Task of Theological Humanism
144
artist to express, in abstract forms of intense color and strong painterly gestures, the spiritual path of consciousness toward the divine.one sees a cubist Picasso portrait, a dreamscape of Miro, or an image of a devastated mythical landscape by Anselm Kiefer, one says: “I understand (^32) When
what the work says about the inner truth of art, and how the artist’s vision transforms body, soul, and the whole meaning of the world to which we relate.”These eras in the history of art on Danto’s account are held together by a 33
single grand narrative: art emerged out of primordial religious origins, devel-oped through realism under the idea of beauty, and culminated in self- expression of the inner life of artistic consciousness in the modernist period. These turns are analogous to the path of theology charted before. And like critical
in the case of theology, in the early 1960s with the advent of pop art this narrative seems to have come to an “end.” Pop art was the anomaly that broke down the modernist paradigm because it violated all the rules of modernism yet was stunningly successful within the art world. Pop art had
the affect of liberating artists from the modernist paradigm, so that art could hproducing works of art which are visually indistinguishable from real objects in the world.enceforth be anything that the artist fancies it to be. It did so by
sists of a set of painted and stenciled wooden cartons which closely resem-bled the cardboard cartons of brillo pads which could be bought in any grocery store. Until Warhol showed those boxes as artworks, who could have Consider Brillo Box, which Andy Warhol exhibited as art in 1964. It con-
imagined them as a possible subject of an artwork? Pop art’s appearance showed that anything can be art, and that there is no dominant style or approach in making art.and another thing not-art, when there is no significant visual difference (^34) The question now becomes: “Why is one thing art
between them?”art could be art, just as much as could more traditionally identifiable works of art such as paintings or sculptures. Pop art ends where theology in the twentieth century ended: God is not God; art is non-art.^35 Nothing is disallowed; everything is possible. Non-
in the 1960s – color-field painting, hard-edged abstraction, French neo- realism, minimalism, new sculpture, conceptual art, neo-expressionism, and the like. None of them could lay claim to defining the new stylistic direction As a result of this revolution in art, a profusion of different styles appeared
in art. At this level, aesthetic reflective goods appear precisely in the confu-sion about what counts as art. The art world is thrown into a creative state of chaos in which much is at stake. Will art survive as a distinctive medium of reflective goods?