Camille Paglia (a professed atheist) is also a strong advocate for art to reach for something higher and to regain its spiritual center. She delivered a lecture on the topic last year at Colorado College, which was later broadcast on C-SPAN. Her lecture is reprinted here.
She begins with an astute observation and challenge: “The state of the humanities in the U.S. 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?... I would argue that the route to a renaissance of the American fine arts lies through religion… Knowledge of the Bible, one of the West's foundational texts, is dangerously waning among aspiring young artists and writers. When a society becomes all-consumed in the provincial minutiae of partisan politics (as has happened in the U.S. over the past twenty years), all perspective is lost. Great art can be made out of love for religion as well as rebellion against it. But a totally secularized society with contempt for religion sinks into materialism and self-absorption and gradually goes slack, without leaving an artistic legacy.”
Her lecture is also a wonderful overview of the religious beginnings of art in America with particular respect to musicians, writers, and Hollywood. She concludes that the avant-garde is dead, killed by Andy Warhol more than forty years ago, and it’s time to move on. She concludes: “For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center. Profaning the iconography of other people's faiths is boring and adolescent. The New Age movement, to which I belong, was a distillation of the 1960s' multicultural attraction to world religions, but it has failed thus far to produce important work in the visual arts. The search for spiritual meaning has been registering in popular culture instead through science fiction, as in George Lucas' six-film Star Wars saga, with its evocative master myth of the “Force.” But technology for its own sake is never enough. It will always require supplementation through cultivation in the arts.
To fully appreciate world art, one must learn how to respond to religious expression in all its forms. Art began as religion in prehistory. It does not require belief to be moved by a sacred shrine, icon, or scripture. Hence art lovers, even when as citizens they stoutly defend democratic institutions against religious intrusion, should always speak with respect of religion… But when set against the vast historical panorama, religion and art--whether in marriage or divorce--can reinvigorate American culture.”
Filmmakers – are you listening?
