Masks of Mind
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What does theological humanism have to say about the condition of art as a reflective good? In today’s world, as we have said, anything whatsoever can Theological Humanism and the World of Art
be art, and art can be anything. Under these chaotic and unstable condi-tions, two strcommercial art.Didactic artong impulses compete for the soul of visual art: didactic art and refers to any art that minimizes its own embodied status and 36
exaggerates its ability to deliver a message. Didactic art diminishes the embodiment-side of the work of art, so that the freely created art object, with its potential for opening a superabundance of meaning for interpreta-tion, is nullified in favor of conveying an easily catchable “meaning,” like a
message in a bottle. Very often in current “postart,” the conveyed meaning is banal to the extreme. Consider, for example, Documental II (2002) by Multiplicity, an Italian group of postartists. “It deals with the death of some 200 Asians who drowned when their overcrowded Solid Sea, an installation at
boat sank between Malta and Sicily.” The installation includes a collage of video images and interviews “spliced together in a chorus of lament and anger.” The problem with the work is that it provides no insight into the event. We are simply given “managed imagery with no aesthetic relevance,
that is, with no transcendental import that would turn it into tragic art.”The public art of Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger is another example of didactic art. This “art” projects word-messages into public spaces, with mes-sages such as “I am because I shop.” (^38) The slogan ended up on New York^37
City shopping bags.ganda, then the artwork fails as art. The expressive level of meaning is reduced to a banal message, and the vocation of art is trivialized. The richness If the main purpose of the artwork is to proclaim political or social propa-
of human freedom, in its reflexive interpretation of the meaning of being human in a globalized and contentious world, is flattened. Rhetorical pan-dering replaces creative imagination. In general, didactic art suppresses rather than liberates the inner life of consciousness. It flattens human experience
through an ideological cause.Commercial art exaggerates the power of the image to stimulate desire or to provide entertainment without having an adequate meaning embodied Commercial art stands on the opposite extreme from conceptual art.
in it. Much Hollywood film, pulp fiction, and advertising fall under this category, but the shocking thing is that commerciality has overtaken much fine art as well. Commercial art finds its purpose in profit and its means in