Spatio-Temporal Plurality in the Connection Between Art and the Sacred in Contemporary Society

Dear Colleagues,

A close reading of Mircea Eliade (Permanence of the Sacred in Contemporary Art: The Magical Flight and Other Writings on Religious Symbolism, 1995, Madrid: Siruela), reveals his idea that there is a parallel between the perspectives of the theologian, the philosopher, and the artist. For all of them, Nietzsche's "death of God" means, above all, that today it is impossible to express religious experience in traditional language—that is, there is no longer room for religious art in either the traditional sense or one that exclusively reflects classical religious conceptions. Therefore, modern society has "forgotten" religion, "disenchanted the world," and lost its magical and sacred meaning, according to M. Weber (The Disenchantment of the World: Six Studies on Max Weber, E. Schluchter, 2017, Mexico: FCE). Religion is replaced, in modern society, by scientific rationalization, bureaucracy, and the dominance of technology and economic calculation, and in late-modern society, it is replaced by a growing speculative and evanescent capitalism and individualism, extreme neoliberal ideology, the temporal acceleration of the rhythms of life, and the emergence of all-encompassing virtual technological social networks and new autocratic populisms.

Now, the "sacred" has not totally disappeared from contemporary, modern, or late-modern art, but has also been hidden within seemingly profane meanings, seeking to find, substantially, what defines society and contemporary art. In other words, the artist has forgotten, in their consciousness, the possibility of experiencing the sacred. However, it survives, buried in their unconscious, instinct, and intuition, and in their desire for primitivism, which is present in artists, various exhibitions, and the vast academic literature. This return to the ethnic and the wild—so typical of Eurocentrism—is driven by a sense of nostalgia in artists that immerses them in an auroral world, intensifying their desire to grasp the profound meaning of their artistic universe and to recreate or rediscover another universe, "new," "pure," "true," and "spiritual," uncorrupted by time and history—or, to put it another way, to create a world, a society, and human beings more suited to the present.

Consequently, modern art has produced two specific tendencies: the destruction of traditional forms and a fascination with the informal and elemental modes of matter. Both are susceptible to a religious interpretation. It is true— according to Eliade—that the artist's enormous effort to abolish forms and volumes, to descend into the interior of substance, to unveil the hidden, and, consequently, to free themselves from the "surface" of things, is linked to their intention to penetrate the original raw material and the embryonic modes of life in order to reveal the ultimate structures.

In this way, the artist's attitude and action toward matter rediscover and recover an extremely archaic type of religiosity that has been lost for millennia in the Western world. It is a pristine and auroral type of religiosity, characteristic of the old "cosmic religiosity" that dominated the world until Judaism and Christianity and has been relegated in the West.

On the other hand, this type of cosmic religiosity coexists with other, more up-to-date approaches to connecting art with society. It relates, for example, to New Age positions, in which Western and Eastern religiosities coexist; to diffuse religiosities; to new ways of seeing the ancient and the colonial, for example; to the recreation of a more substantial, more sacred, and less apparent or commercialized type of beauty; and to novel hybrid forms of fusion, traditional yet modern, rural and urban, Christian and secular, African and American or European. Therefore, the modern ages of different societies are diverse, and, with them, so too are the connection of art with the sacred. Likewise, the spaces and geographies involved are plural: the United States of America, Europe, China, Latin America, etc.

Furthermore, it is important to consider both the content analysis of the works of art and the sociocultural contexts in which they are developed.

We will try to address all of this in this Special Issue.

Prof. Dr. Juan Antonio Roche Cárcel
Guest Editor

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• sociology of arts
• sociology of religion
• contemporary society
• plastics arts
• musique
• architecture
• danse
• theatre
• cinema
• religious festivals