WHAT IS SACRED IN CONTEMPORARY ART?

Sergey Dzikevich
Moscow State University, Faculty of Philosophy, Department of Aesthetics

   It seems contemporary art is absolutely opposite to everything that could be identified as sacred in any kind or aspect. The reason is based on some real features of contemporary artistic practices. A contemporary artist is not oriented on fixed norms of any sort if these norms are coming from outside the artworld. Theoretically the artworld as a special form of social community was shown by Arthur Danto, George Dickie and some other theoreticians in 1960s when artistic practices turned almost independent from external control. Aesthetic theories of that period (for instance, institutional theory of art) just fixed the reality of contemporary relation between art and the rest of society: art is not one of many public professions; it generates a special horizontally coordinated social community, or sphere that is called the artworld. 
   All norms, ideas, theories, habits, patterns, manners, images all other means of public coordination circulating in the contemporary artworld are either generated within it or horizontally accepted and spread within it. Aesthetic and artistic ideologies really circulating in the artworld are now something very deeply differing from other public ideologies, external to the artworld. This way, current contemporary art could be actually inspired with current political or economical situation, but to turn the acts of art these inspirations are at first passing verification in the artworld inner self-consciousness. For instance, in Russia one of most outstanding cases of contemporary art of the recent period is the case of two mutually affiliated art groups: The Voina (The War), and The Pussy Riot. 
   Artistic actions of these groups were held with serious public and even political inspirations that are very well known thanks to international mass media. But the thing is they are not political in that sense in which an action could be political outside the artworld. They are political only that way that is acceptable within the artworld: at first the action must be accepted artistically (here, as a fact of actionism), all are other meanings are secondary, and their interpretations are dependent from this, primary, one. So liberalism, anarchism, communism and all other ideologies can’t be the direct keys to contemporary art interpretation even when you see political signs of any kind in it. 
   But what happens with religious connotations of art if they are traditionally coming from such external sources as Divine Revelation or Church of any kind? Romanticism liberated many aspects of artistic will from external religious ideology, but this process finished only after World War II when thanks to Jacques Maritain and some other thikers religious art was interpreted as art of free creative intuition first of all (for instance, Georges Roualt and Marc Chagall). Contemporary art is really opposite to all elements that are institutionalized as sacred externally to artistic experience and horizontal verification of the artworld. Moreover within contemporary art we could identify a new tendency to reality of the sacred: for instance, in Russia where confessional processes are very complicated, and Russian Orthodox Church is trying to play more and more serious role in ideological trendsetting, we could see as contemporary artists are turning to the very nature of the sacred in art itself. We must even fix sort of culmination of this tendency in attempts to create contemporary icons that were exhibited, for instance, by Evgeniya Maltseva at The Vinzavod Center of Contemporary Art (2012, fall). During the exhibition the icons were supposed to get even sanctified by a priest accepted as an authority within the artworld.
   We must shortly conclude: as well as political contemporary art can be religious and sacred but only according internal criteria of the artworld. Than speakers of the artworld translate the meaning of new sacred art to the rest of society, institutionalizing them in this quality in process of public dialogue until dominating acceptation in longer or shorter historic time.