This is an unusually good essay by Sells.

Among other things this reference describes the origins and consequences of the entirely godless (control & power seeking)perceptual strait-jacket in which we are now ALL trapped, including all conventional religionists, including Charles Taylor and everyone connected with First Things.

1. http://www.adidabiennale.org/curation/index.htm

A power and control seeking strait-jacket which INEVITABLY created the situation described in this reference.

1. http://www.ispeace723.org/realityhumanity2.html

Plus another reference on the topic of Truth, Reality and The Beautiful

1. http://global.adidam.org/books/transcendental-realism.html

Also Art Is Love

1. http://www.aboutadidam.org/readings/art_is_love/index.html

The Realization of The Beautiful---on the HEAVY taboo against ecstasy and pleasure at the root of the entire Western "cultural" project.

1. http://www.adidamla.org/newsletters/toc-aprilmay2006.html

The Art presented in the first references was/is quite specifically, and very deliberately,"designed" to stimulate and awaken the subtle neurological perceptors of the brain and nervous system. Subtle perceptors which our barbarian "culture" suppresses, and indeed has no knowledge of.

Plus you might like to check out a book titled Art and Physics by Leonard Shlain which gives a unique and sophisticated explanation of what is being communicated in the best of Modern Art---art informed by the discoveries of Quantum Physics as signalled by the equation E=MC2.

I have to agree with much that Sells has to say in this piece. Art, of any sort, that is the creation of an individual is bound to have limited appeal and even less social value. Much of what passes as art is just the technical work of individuals who have skills but precious little to say.
Sometimes a work of art grows beyond the artists personal conception and in this case it becomes possible to say the it was produced by a community, a society and a culture. Some works of art reflect back on a society in such a way that the work itself participates in the changing shape and self-understanding of the society. Modern art attempts to achieve this but only very few pieces ever actually ascend into this realm of art.
What art can one expect from a world that has become so confused about what it means to be spirited.. where even the Church teaches a dualism which permits of disembodied spirits occupying heaven and hell? Or is this a mis-conception that owes much to the work of medieval 'artists'?

Here we go again with another desperate attempt to find some justification for Christian religious belief. Evidence? No, that doesn't work. Good behaviour? No, that doesn't work - see http://atheistwiki.wikispaces.com/Outrage+scoreboard for plenty of evidence to the contrary. But -- ooh! -- it enables you to paint pretty pictures...

Even if this was true it would be no reason to cram your head with lies and delusions. But of course it isn't true. Atheists have produced great and inspiring works of art -- and so have Ancient Egyptians and Greeks, Mayans and Buddhists, Muslims and Navajos and tribes and peoples too numerous to mention whose deities and practices bear no resemblance to those of Peter Sellick and the Reverend Bob.

Monotheistic religious belief a must for fine art? Come off it, Peter!

The silence of the art world in Adelaide is deafening. Oh that's right he is not a Priest.

I recently went to see a marvelous exhibition of bark paintings from Arnhem Land at Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art. Sadly I can't recommend a visit as it finished yesterday.

While in the MCA I looked at some of the contemporary art on display, which looked pretty shabby by comparison with the Aboriginal art I'd just seen. What struck me was however not the lack of craft, nor its try-hard cleverness, rather it was that most of it was so self-referential. The theme of much of the work was art and the art world. A series of postcards, mailed to prominent gallery owners and artists; a series of photos taken in galleries and museums etc etc. In my view this obsession with art-making as the predominant theme of art isn't so much navel-gazing as narcissism of the worst sort.

Picasso and Braque exploded painting via Cubism and Duchamp's urinal showed a new way to view art, but a century later no-one's come up with much that's new. It seems to me that what's wrong with contemporary art isn't the fault of secularism, its that Modernism has reached a complete dead-end.

Sells I really think you draw a very very long bow by suggesting that we're seeing a delayed reaction to the Enlightenment. We've had a century of Romanticism (19th) and a century of Modernism (20th) since the century of the Enlightenment (18th). The tortured artist, for example, is a Romantic invention. An Enlightenment artist would most likely have laughed at the idea, thinking that an unsuccessful artist was obviously a bad artist.

Perhaps though, I can agree that contemporary art is spiritually impoverished. I suspect we are about to see the emergence of anti-rationalist art (neo-Romanticist perhaps?) to supplant the austere rationalism of modernism. The upsurge of interest in Aboriginal art may reflect a hunger for mystery and authenticity, because the best of it hints at meanings we can never fully grasp.

I'm going to see the Papunya exhibition at the Australian Museum shortly. If anyone wants to see some of Australia's finest art I'd suggest they do the same.

“There has been a tradition in the West of the artist being fraught, agonised, drug addicted and living a chaotic life that leads to early death.”

Benvenutu Cellini sold the tin he was given to commission his statue “Perseus with the Head of Medusa” for wine.

That was a little while ago

More recently :

Pro hart died but not in a excessive manner and, imho, was more gifted than Whitely.

Hepworth (another favourite of mine) burnt to death, however it was an accident, no spontaneous combustion

Roy Lichenstein (another fav) pneumonia

Henry Moore (not a fav) expired aged 88 (old age?)

Andy Warhol (never a fav) heart attack after gallbladder surgery.

Salvador Dali (once a fav) heart failure at 85 and did lead a very active life.

Picasso (definite fav) expired over dinner with friends at 92.

That’s a few “famous modern artists” who did not meet their maker on the end of a needle or through the bottom of a bottle.

“Secularisation has removed from us the Greek notion of Truth, Beauty and Goodness.”

“truth, beauty and goodness”, I can see it in almost all the above (more so than in the sackcloth of the cleric).

“Boredom is the telling thing with art. How long will it remain interesting?”

I had the same problem with irrelevant sermons.

The challenge to finding out of any contemporary work, is simple.
It has not been around long enough to have stood the “test of time”.

However, I do believe, add another couple of centuries to the clock and we will see some contemporary pieces, which have been traded for millions discarded and others revered, as we revere Michelangelo and Leonardo and as I have stood in awe on viewing the work of Canaletto, Cellini and Botticelli.

Its always down to the test of time.

“We have lost contact with the radiance of being, that radiance that is inextricably associated with God.”

Well you won’t find that in a church or cathedral,

but you just might discover it in the sweat of ones own personal efforts.

Most secular people support democracy, intellectual freedoms, take responsibility for personal development, free speech, and promote science and art as a means of human development towards an altruistic society. I suppose my personal interest has been one of good art ("the what") and good science ("the how") with philosophy as the causal "why". It also assumes that we are all artists, we are all scientists and we are all philosophers. One question here to Peter is why do some people decide it proper to embrace totalistic "belief systems" which ironically attempt to take away our individual capacities? i.e. Why should we allow vested interests try to take these abilities from our lives?

At some level, most people do learn, though not consciously, to construct some higher-order patterns. But the pattern-of-patterns we learn to construct are those of "our culture" in the narrow sense. Even to a new class of instances, we may simply find in fact to have not really acquired a flexible intellectual tool at all. We may simply be following a kind of learned habit. I feel Peter to be putting this point forward with the look and put paintings of his friend the Rev. Bob Booth.

I feel art is very much about people being free not to merely copy nor render impressions of nature (which Peter calls the creation) but to create because we are nature. A very big difference. Our minds are simply not separate from our biology or our environment.
e.g.
Dale Frank creates these swishy pools of viscous, resinous colours that defies description. They are so beautiful as to embarrass.
http://www.roslynoxley9.com.au/artists/13/Dale_Frank/553/

The under appreciated prophetic seer William Blake had much to say about the relation between art culture and war. His prophetic writings gave quite accurate "descriptions" of American "culture" in 2008.

Blake was rare being who was still in touch with the RADIANCE OF BEING. Such radiance being the source and wellspring of true art and culture, and individual sanity.

Art degraded, Imagination denied
War governed the Nations

By imgination he meant anything inspired and nourished by the radiance of being.

Blake also pointed out that Empire FOLLOWS Art.

The objcetifying perceptual strait-jacket that emerged at the time (and was signalled by the new perspectival art) of the Renaissance provided the impetus for all kinds of developments (especially of a technocratic nature) that allowed for the big-time expansion of the latent European drive to power and control.

Hence the humungous expansion of European imperialism, the ultimate result of which is the USA empire and the Pentagon military-industrial complex---with its "culture" of death infecting the entire planet even the skies of "heavens"

War truly does govern the nations----as Blake prophesied.

Blake was also a trenchant ctitic of the single "vision" of Newton's sleep and its one-dimensionl "reason". Pointing out that the effect of such "reason" was the killing or shuting down of the Radiance of Being.

The sleep that IS reason inevitably produces monsters.

What is the point of all of the above.

Because the author who prompted Sells essay. And all of his "right"-thinking fellow travellers, including the benighted "religionists" at First Things are all fully paid up cheer-leaders for the Pentagon war machine, and USA Empire

The death machine that now ensures that the warfare state now rules to here. "War truly governs the Nations".

The same benighted ghouls are also very strong advocates of the one-dimensional spirit or radiance killing "reason"(Newtons sleep) that Blake criticised, and foresaw the dreadful cultural consequences of.

They even have "religious" websites which promote such "reason"---offering reasoned "proof" of the superiority of their "religion"---the "religion" of Empire.

So me thinks that their protests about the end of art are hugely hypocritical.