Ezra Pound once said that artists are the antennae of their generation. They can capture what’s in the ether and show it to us in their dream images long before philosophers and critics can sense what is afoot. So looking at our art is a powerful shorthand to understand ourselves.

What follows is not meant to be a comprehensive theory of our history. I am only attempting to trace an arc of our artistic self-understanding. Neither is this a history of art, but a history of the central beliefs, struggles, and aspirations of our culture as captured by our artists. Their purview is always what might inadequately be called the moral aspect of culture. Not that they are moralists, but they are trying to convey what it is – after we’ve handled the physical necessities of life – that our existence is really about. What transcendent good, if any, sits at the center of all our buzzing activity?

The trajectory here is something like a car going over a cliff. You can see our culture evolve from a world endowed with mythical meaning to a nightmare of confusion and despair, like a man walking decidedly out of paradise.

1. Un-disenchanted Religious Origin: The Icon

Let’s take as our starting point the Christian icon, created at a time in which the spiritual and material worlds are not considered to be distinct. The very purpose of icons was to facilitate the suffusion of each with the other. When you look at an icon of Christ, you are not contemplating a fine idea, you are looking at the culmination of cosmic history and, by way of attention and prayer, bringing the ripples of that divine reality into further expression in our lives.

Similarly, an icon of the Resurrection, for example, can serve as a local focal point of attention and remembrance of Christ’s defeat of Death itself. One can hardly overstate the significance of this daily remembrance amidst our suffering. It serves as a kind of portal through which meaning on a mythological scale can come crashing into our daily struggle against poverty, plague, cruelty and all the other powers of Death.

Far from mere decoration, icons had the function of bringing the supernatural into common space. But even this formulation is misleading, because the division between natural and supernatural is a modern creation. Pre-moderns still lived in an enchanted world in which divine meaning reverberated through nature.

2. Separation of Divine and Natural Worlds: Jean Fouquet, The Melun Diptych (1452)

A primitive unity of meaning-bestowing transcendence found in nature could not withstand academic analysis. Catholic theologians articulated a distinction between the lower realm of nature and the higher sphere of divine grace. While it is fair to say that these theologians, such as St. Augustine or Thomas Aquinas, would never have wanted this distinction to rise to the level of complete metaphysical separation, as if nature could somehow get along on its own without God, nevertheless this is the path the West set upon. Making this distinction was our first step out of the enchanted pre-modern world.

Philosophical analysis tends to turn distinctions into dichotomies. Nature and grace evolved from complementary aspects of creation to opposed forces in a struggle for dominance. In his work How Should We Then Live? Francis Schaeffer points to this painting, sometimes referred to as “The Red Virgin,” as a cultural turning point toward nature superseding grace.

Naturalism comes to the fore in the exposed breast of the Virgin Mary. The question is thrust upon the onlooker: Is this a shocking degradation of a holy symbol, or is this an elevation of our natural humanity? But even if we allow the latter as an intellectual gloss, the art still fails to play the myth-infusing role of the traditional icon. It does not serve as an aid to prayer but as a distraction, bringing the mind down to earth rather than upward. This portrayal displays our tendency to prioritize the lower at the expense of the higher. And because the model for the Virgin was in this case the king’s mistress, it is difficult to take this work as anything other than pointed mockery of the sincere faith that traditionally undergirded iconography.

While moderns would laud this liberation from religious strictures, it comes at the cost of the Meaning encased within those strictures. There is no meaning without holiness, and there is no holiness without (moral) boundaries. As liberalism relieved itself of such religious burdens, it attempted to reconstruct meaning through pure reason. Not reason as Church theologians had understood it for centuries, who never separated intellect from higher spiritual perception within the human mind, but now the secularized reason of mere calculation.

They achieved some grand visions before it all collapsed.

3. Objective Rationalism: Jacques-Louis David, Oath of the Horatii (1784)

This painting is emblematic of the pinnacle of rationalism. The composition is precise, balanced, and conveys an idealized Roman scene of civic duty. The fascination with the ancient Republic is of course characteristic of the French Revolutionary era and is meant as a secular repudiation of received political structure based on religious hierarchy.

A seismic cultural shift occurs here that might almost be called a rebirth of “morality” itself – an understanding of “good” without God. It was nothing new to philosophize about the good, but even going back to Plato and Aristotle, ethics was always concerned with bridging the gap between human imperfection and the perfection of the Divine. Classical and Catholic thinkers agreed at least that reason was a bridge to connect us with God, even if they disagreed on the nature of God.

But Enlightenment ethics set us on a new trajectory that uniquely attempts to ground morality in human reason, to the exclusion of the Divine altogether. We don’t have to appeal to God to explain the authority of human government when we can explain our emergence from a state of nature via human reason. The rational moral systems of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau did not serve to connect the human and divine realms, but to further sever them.

The stage was set when the higher realm of grace was conceptualized as separate from the lower realm of nature. One would think that moral significance could only be found in the higher realm, but the Enlightenment, though it decked itself in the trappings of mythical imagery, sought to ground morality squarely in an unenchanted earth. If natural human reason is enough to properly order our world, religion becomes extraneous. All that is needed is a rational system that can orient our actions and structure our society. The Oath of the Horatii gives voice to the hope of a moral and civic ideal.

We should note that now the framing of the scene becomes a more pronounced part of the artistry. There is some kinship between the philosophical impulse to contain morality within propositional reason and the role of the frame that contains the image here.1 There is a heightened awareness of the frame and perspective as devices that cordon off the scene as a static, separated object of contemplation. This reinforces the object/subject division endemic to rationalism itself. The viewer is stuck on the outside looking in.

Morality in this era itself becomes much like the images in paintings. It is no longer a divine force rippling through human experience; morality is now an intellectual concept to be framed, contained like conceptual baubles to be held in the hand. Moral theories have a beauty of their own, but they are unable to come out of their frame into reality, nor are we able to enter into them. Ironically, amid this era of profound optimism, the doors to the transcendent are closing.

We can see how thin this conceptual morality feels when compared with the divine world of iconography. The icon’s limited use of perspective and framing, while it looks flat and unsophisticated to modern eyes, gives an underappreciated effect of life and liveliness to the piece. We are not forced into the position of being stuck outside of the scene; we are better able to project ourselves into it, to give into the dreamlike images and imbibe the poetic multiplicity of meanings – not as concepts for objective contemplation, but as images in which we subjectively participate. The icon is always understood to be more than an image of goodness; it is a conduit of the Good itself into the room, or a point of perforation between Heaven and Earth. It is a vehicle for our relationship with the God who grounds goodness, so it can extend beyond the frame in a way that the framed work of Jacques-Louis David never could.

But the conduit can only function if nature and grace are united, if there is some divine immanence in the mundane. If, on the other hand, there is a divide or even an opposition between nature and grace, rationalism is the throwing off of grace altogether. There is no need for the supernatural or religious, because all moral elements of existence, while they might seem transcendent, can in the end be accounted for by our reason.

So David here illustrates the apex of optimistic objectivism. But like any extreme, it draws attention to the opposite side of the spectrum that has been shunned. What about the subject? What about direct human experience that abstract frameworks could never capture? What about me?

4. The Return of the Subject: Claude Monet, Impression, Soleil Levant (1872)

With impressionism comes the interjection of the subjective into the art, and the whiplash upset the critics. The impressionist is emphatically NOT trying to capture an eternal ideal. He is trying to convey a moment of experience, as it was experienced, in light. This development precedes by decades Einstein’s discovery in physics, that light is the universal constant by which the perspective of the individual is known to be relative. Just as Einsteinian relativism ousted the clockwork objectivism of Isaac Newton, equally in art, once it is acknowledged that the perspective of the artist precedes the “objective” image, objectivism, as well as its attendant optimism, is largely cast away and never recovered.

The moral significance of impressionism is that it is the first raising doubt toward objectivism. Philosophers can try to nail down universal theories of morality, but how can they succeed? However precise our clockwork theories are, they must still accommodate the infinity of human experience. Enlightenment reason was supposed to be a panacea without limit, but growing awareness of the primacy of individual perspective cast doubt on this grandiose project.

Discovering the limits of objectivism is the beginning of the dissolution of the enlightenment project. There is no view from nowhere. The perspective of the individual is unavoidably primary, and if the world from that perspective changes moment to moment, how much more does it vary person-to-person, culture-to-culture, century-to-century?

When enlightenment objectivism confronted the perspectivism of artists, and later the philosophers, the outcome was a schism after which the objective and subjective developed in parallel tracks. The optimistic march of science progressed, bringing ever more of the natural world into its totalizing system. With Darwin’s theory, even life itself could finally be explained rationally, and nature could finally be severed from any reliance on even the most pallid conceptions of deity.

But that was the outer world. The inner world of the individual, the qualitative world where truth, beauty, and goodness could be experienced, were cut off from these theories, as mysterious as ever. At this moment of triumph for the rationalists, the artists could feel the meaning of existence drain out that system.

5. Last Bastion of Moral Significance: Egon Schiele, Self-Portrait (1910)

As we came to understand our universe in terms of a totalizing mechanistic system of natural laws, moral questions of the free will, meaning, or dignity of human life reached a new poignancy. We all experience vast contours of joy, suffering, beauty, and grief. Is all that just part of the clockwork? What does any of it mean?

Philosophers continued to build secular moral theories, but they all ultimately rested on the same clockwork conception of mere materialism. None could escape the gravitational pull of a self-existent nature with no ultimate purpose. This purposelessness cut the legs out from any moral theory, no matter how high-minded it sounds from the podium. All morality collapsed into social function: Human rights don’t exist in any robust super-material sense, but it’s better to live in a world in which people believe in them.

The significance of this collapse was first perceived by artists like Egon Schiele. In the face of relentless scientific optimism, expressionist artists like Schiele exposed a glaring blind spot. Without an absolute reference point by which we can make sense of our own existence – a reference point that must be in some sense transcendent or divine – then our existence is absurd, meaningless, and agonizing.

The arc that began in the enlightenment ends here in a self-defeating inversion. Reason began as a liberating force by which we could first understand and finally master the nature around us. But this endeavor succeeded to such a degree that we ourselves became cogs to be mechanically understood, and finally pinned down, explained, and mastered.2

The frame in Schiele’s portrait now has almost the inverse effect. Whereas Jacques-Louis David’s frame neatly held a cold, clean, conceptual ideal – a small slice of moral perfection according to the clockwork of reason – the frame of Schiele brackets out the complete domination of ruthless clockwork reason in all other aspects of human life, leaving only the ineffable experience of the individual. This is existentialism. And what is existence like? The figure is trapped, boxed in, without hands or feet of its own, lacking agency, unable to communicate, isolated.

The link between outer, clockwork reality and the moral/qualitative world of the interior is completely severed. We want to dress up our humanity with all the glory of Jacques-Louis David, but here Schiele betrays the endpoint. If the outer world is just a ticking clock, our moral inner world is an absurdity. The sexual suggestion of the pose here – the desire of the trapped individual – only enhances the revulsion we feel looking at it.

But it is the will and desire of the individual that is the last remaining bulwark against the totalizing system of modernity. Only the individual remains ineffable. Naïve religious ideas of morality are abandoned altogether, and all that remains of the “moral” world is achieving our desires, accomplishing our will. (It’s a short step from there to re-casting all moral discussion as, at root, nothing more than expressions of power.) And it is these desires that technological mastery of nature, even of our own bodies, is meant to serve.

The last tragedy of Egon Schiele is that even his last bit of human individuality, his desire, gets metabolized in the system of modernity as consumer choice. Alongside the totalizing theoretical system that explains all, there inevitably grows a technological, industrial system that accommodates all. Its driving purpose is achieving the last remaining moral imperative: giving us what we want.

6. Only Irony Remains: Banksy, Love is in the Bin (2018)

It’s not difficult for artists to perceive that a society based on material consumption and comfort is, in the end, inhumane and unsustainable. They sense that there must be some higher meaning or value that humanity reflects, but what moral vision is available to artists on the far side of the existential crisis that Schiele displayed? The further we progress, the harder it is to come across any optimistic imagery that doesn’t reek of mere nostalgia or marketing.

Unable to cast a grand moral/qualitative vision, serious artists could only express the pain of the contempt that modernity has for our humanity. A necessary message, perhaps, but one that is more on the scale of a comment than a vision of transcendent beauty.

Banksy was successful in establishing himself in this place of artistic social criticism. Being a street artist placed his work in the ideal context in which to express the pain of common people as they try to retain some connection to humane qualities of love, family, attention, and care. Behind the dark and shimmering glass facades of corporate headquarters, elites enjoy the best of what materialism has to offer: ease, luxury, and the satisfaction of financial logic. But in the ramshackle streets and alleys of common workers, the logic is failing, the ends aren’t meeting.

It is here that Banksy paints a little girl whose heart-shaped balloon floats just out of reach. She has lost her last, fragile tether to the love that bestows meaning on a bleak world. The poignancy of his images had a wide cultural resonance that rocketed Banksy into prominence.

I’m far from the first to point out the irony of such an artist becoming wildly commercially successful. His moral indictments are catnip for our self-flagellating cultural elite, who will gladly shell out millions for a Banksy piece, if only it can display how in-touch they are with the failures of the culture whose benefits they enjoy more than any other.

“Love is in the Bin” adds several layers of irony to this strange dynamic. It was a framed piece of Banksy art sold at a Sotheby’s auction for nearly $1.4 million (irony level 1). After the gavel came down for the sale, a shredder built into the frame activated and “destroyed” the piece, to the supposed chagrin of the buyer (level 2). This turned it into a piece of performance art meant to oppose commercialization and commodification of art. But the shredder only destroyed half of the painting, which was left hanging rather picturesquely from the bottom of the frame. It was preserved in this state, and sold again at auction for $25.3 million (level 3).

Evident here is the ultimate victory of the dehumanizing forces that this art decries. Far from mere failure, this mode of art actively fuels the supposed target of its criticism. When Banksy succeeds as an artist, his pieces end up behind those glass facades that he holds in such contempt, a line item on someone’s list of assets. This hopeless self-defeat is the product of the same clockwork materialism that so horrified Schiele.

One can see that the trail is coming to an end. Where else can we go from here? It seems the only purpose left to our artists is the horror of Schiele or the criticism and “comments” of Banksy et al. To the extent that the critical artist succeeds, he becomes the beneficiary of the culture he decries, happily reaping the rewards of a supposedly broken system. But this was the system the artist was meant to help us escape.

This is end point, half a millennium into the ceaseless divisions of our western analytical mind. What began as a division of nature and grace became an opposition, a showdown won decisively by nature – now a nature thoroughly articulated by baroque arrays of data and theories, but a nature without grace, without beauty, without hope. The meaning that once pervaded heaven and earth was shrunk down to fit in our heads, floating in absurd suspension, connected to nothing. Religious Man became Psychological Man. Egon Schiele stuck in a box.3

How do we escape the box? Our only hope may be that the wisdom of our theorists is false, that it only ever obscured a God both transcendent and immanent. We need to decide whether our never-ending analysis of nature woke us from dogmatic slumber, or hypnotized us into one.

If there were a 7^th step in this moral history, it must be a rebeginning, a reunification of nature and grace. For in the icon of Christ, many today are rediscovering everything that our culture has lost. In Him we find not some subjective preference, but beauty itself. Yet it is beauty that is not objective but can come to unique expression in each human life. His image is no conceptual bauble, no moral ideal or theoretical nicety. It portrays the absolute anchor point by which our lives becomes un-absurd, meaningful, even eternal.