Art and Image: essays from CTMS, ed. Mitchell and Hansen

As I read Drucker's essay, "Art," I enjoyed her take on the place of art in western society from antiquity to the present. It's obviously a vast topic, which can't be easily distilled to a few pages.

I wondered if she isn't oversimplifying a few points. I think it's worth mentioning that there was a lot more going on with religious art than she eludes on page 4. My studies on this have identified a few more motivations than "the application of technical skill" which she discusses. Agendas were served and I think that ties into the concepts in all three essays.

Statuary and other iconography -- I can think of examples in both Christian and eastern religions that I've seen lately in museums -- often were produced to accommodate the populace to the preferred belief systems of those in power, when they differed from those of the masses. There are examples in early Christianity of Jesus figures adapting to styles that would have been familiar to the people. The recognizable characteristics helped the local people gradually adopt the new belief system by first incorporating it with the one they had. Further, despite his origins in the Middle East, Christ is depicted with distinctly European features in much renowned European art, another example of appealing to the audience and adjusting the image to one they already know.

Similarly, Hindu and Buddhist traditions blended in Cambodia, and an exhibit we saw recently contained examples of statuary and religious objects that bridged the two theologies through incorporating imagery associated with both traditions, reflecting religious practice in that particular locale.

In times of illiteracy, religious art mediated the religious experience for a populace that could not read and could not understand the words of religious ceremonies that they attended. Church windows, carved relief and statuary containing symbolism were tools of education, meditation and reinforcement in the time of the Latin Mass.

Is this what Benjamin meant when he wrote about how art can provide us with "distractions," in Section 15. The mediated experience of film, Benjamin says, makes the audience an "absent minded examiner." Are we not paying attention to the subtle bits of influence in our perceived "art experiences?"