A good way to understand the history of modern art is through a lens of desacralization.

It is a movement away from the sacred art and, let's say at least an art that pointed

towards the sacred in the Middle Ages, you know, in the Byzantine era as well, and how

this this art move towards secularization,

towards desacralization,

sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly in the art.

And at the same time, it feels like that movement has come to an end.

And so we're going to look at some of the history of some of the artists and see what that means.

Why do I think that in some ways we've reached the end of desacralization in art and how there is an opening, even within the very

narrative of fine art and contemporary art, that there is a narrative for re-sacralization

possible in the moment.

This is Jonathan Pajjo. welcome to the symbolic world.

So the first thing to understand when we're looking at this question is to understand how ancient art worked.

You know, not just in the Middle Ages, but I would say art in many of the traditional cultures, that, you know, art was integrative. And in some ways,

that is the meaning of art itself. The word art means to gather together things, and the way

that the ancients understood art was in this way. That's why they

could talk about the art of rhetoric or the art of, you know, the art of painting or the art of poetry,

you know, or we could even say the art of making cheese or making wine. That is art was in some

ways gathering multiple elements together towards one purpose,

one, you know, one vision. And so that is, that is what it means to be, that is what it

meant to be an artist, someone who had the skill and the capacity to take a bunch of stuff,

went to materials, and gather them together towards a common meaning.

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