Art originated as a means of representing the sacred. It originated to make visible what cannot be seen, to represent what is unrepresentable.
And as long as art was tied to the sacred, it had purpose and vitality.
The modern profanation of art was its undoing. Without a sacred purpose, art has no purpose.
The history of modern art is the history of the sterilization of art. Modernists went so far as to make the uselessness of modern art its distinguishing virtue.
Inexorably, art was forced to stage its own degradation as its purpose, incorporating into itself everything that was once foreign to it: ugliness, banality, artlessness.
But even in this fallen world, the sacred lingers.
Like the gravity well of a black hole, at once massive and invisible, the sacred inclines toward an abyss. It is a fall into ecstasy.
The closest to sacred art today is art that expresses a longing for self-extinction.
Music does this best, music that inspires trance and abandon.
In visual art, the ecstatic is misidentified as "expressionism,” but the truly ecstatic art is always about the obliteration of the self not its expression.
When painting, Jackson Pollock was not himself; he was channeling something biger.
Van Gogh's Starry Night is a samadhic vision.
Contemporary shamans must learn to fly on their own.
Many crash.