CONNOR ADDISON


 
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Postmodern Artists
Can Inherit the Sacred



On this note I want to return to my original point critiquing the artistic pursuit of expanding “what art can be” for “art historical” breakthroughs. I’d like to see this abandoned in favour of secular allegory, that is, using archetypal imagery to convey conceptual meaning that resonates with the personal lives of those outside the art world.

But this can only be possible if artists, who today are mostly non-religious, liberal post-modernists, realise this goal. The religious function of encoding universal patterns: suffering, morality, and asking questions about our place in the world, how it came to be, and what to do about it, can be deeply secular and post-modernist. We are already over-consuming Marvel films, aren’t we!? Why not find better forms of seeing to counter our spiritual nihilism?

Tapping into the substrate of the collective unconscious to create artistic allegory, in a space without religious dogma or clichés, we can find connection to the sublime, that is, something beyond the immediate confines of the ego, populism and materialism.

Because without something transcendent, we are empty.































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