Art Reboot

73 longer light candles to the art itself, but the equivalent revenue- booster for the faith exists in every museum shop. Yesterday we arrived with a purse of money, bought candles or incense, and left a donation in the collection plate; today we arrive with a wallet of credit cards and leave with a carrier bag full of art books and museum trinkets. What hasn’t changed with the modern western revolution is the capacity of art to reach us in often indefinable ways. It still moves us beyond reason. All that has changed in modern times is that art has become emancipated, or fully mature, even in the West, efficiently allowing access to esoteric meaning beneath its surface. Today, even religious art in a museum setting acts on its audience very differently than it did centuries ago; we focus less on literal surface meaning in order to experience more profound aesthetic communication. Critically, it is not the art that has become more powerful; we have become more powerful in approaching it and inferring its meaning, granting it greater efficiency to fulfil its most important role. I emphasise here that I do not claim that pre-revolutionary western art had a diminished capacity to move its audience, or that it is in any way inferior as art. Artists do what artists do, and always have done, regardless of significant levels of cultural constraint. The power of premodern religious art moved the audience then as modern art moves us now, and probably just as efficiently as it did when Neanderthals stood before images of man and beast on cave walls. All that’s changed is that we have taught ourselves to unlock layers of meaning in ancient religious artworks that were perhaps only subliminally appreciated at the