The Task of Theological Humanism
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marketingdecades, shrewd marketing experts have turned to art. Why not, if anything can be art? So-called artists calculate how to sway an audience in order to cash in on sales or popularity of some kind. Art turns into a commodity,. Observing the price of “artworks” go through the roof in recent
purely and simply. One strategy has been to market everyday objects as artworks, as in Jeff Koons’ exhibition of new vacuum cleaners (“New Hoover Convertibles, New Shelton Wet/Dry Displaced Double Decker,” 1981–7). (^39) Another is to market pornography or scatology as art, as in Jeff
Koons’ “Made in Heaven.” Damien Hirst is another example of a highly successful commercially driven artist. His celain ashtray filled with cigarette butts. The apparent meaning is the same as in other works by Hirsh: “that everyday life is more interesting than art, Home Sweet Home (1996) is a por-
and art is only interesting when it is mistaken for everyday life.”when this work is exhibited in an art museum, and thus is called art, it loses its identity as art. There is no productive relationship between representa-tional meaning and an expressive meaning in the embodied image.^40 Even
Commercial art engages the imagination, but only to distract it in order to convert the value of art into economic value. Here too human experience is flattened, concealed within the mask of art.Didactic art and commercial art both fail to realize art as an embodied
mask of consciousness for a viewer. The work of art is reduced either to a trivial message or to a marketable commodity. Theological humanism seeks and promotes art that respects and enhances the integrity of life. From this standpoint, good art integrates embodiment with meaning so that meaning
and medium fuse together into a living, free unity. In that way art is a mask of mind displaying consciousness so that it can thus contribute to the integrity of life. This is possible because genuine art integrates three dimensions that bear the traces of goods and formal norms partially be understood and
noted above: (1) the aesthetic dimension, which opens up for the imagina-tion a world, a locality, that reaches beyond immediate interest; (2) the moral dimension, which presents the viewer with a living subjectivity and finality of the other over against my own; and (3) the spiritual or sacred dimension,
which challenges and transfigures one’s autonomy and one’s world. Of course, this account entails a reflective not others. That simply means that theological humanism is a way of ing the domain of reflective goods different than commercial or didactic art judgment, a choice for some works and inhabit-
in order to respect and enhance the integrity of reflective life.of art. Consider one example, the intermedia artist Hans Breder. In addi-tion to many incredible digitized works, prints, and photographs, Breder Each of us would have candidates for the renewal of art beyond the end