Spirituality’s relationship to the production of art is a largely ignored subject, for many reasons. One of the most likely is the political potential that spirituality possesses. Clarity and awareness within oneself can obviously lead to clarity and awareness in (and for) the world around us. In Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky quotes Madame Blavatsky as writing, “The Earth will be a heaven in the twenty-first century in comparison with what it is now.” Unfortunately, the start of the twenty-first century is not making Madame Blavatsky’s prediction look likely to happen.

With the recent global economic meltdown and its subsequent economic impact on the art world, maybe the dialogue will loosen up; as business slows, maybe artists will feel more comfortable talking about spirituality without hiding behind irony. The kind of radical irony that also functions on a spiritual level began with the most obvious examples in the work of Duchamp and goes right through Rauschenberg, Johns, and Warhol, up to the gravel piles of Robert Smithson. The alchemy of transforming supposedly nonartistic materials or images such as toilets and soup cans into high art has become academic and hollow in many cases, entirely devoid of any spiritual content.

Maybe the fact that one of Warhol’s last major bodies of work was a series based on the Last Supper is a portent of or model for art’s near future. The positive spirituality that artists like Kandinsky, Malevich, and many others expressed through abstraction could not find a moment more potentially like a tipping point than the current one. The spiritual might just find it an ideal time to come out of its hiding in artists’ studios and regain centrality in the ongoing discourse of contemporary art.

The book has been reprinted by the Museum of Fine Art, Boston, in a series called artWorks. The rationale for the series was explained like this: “For as long as there has been art, there has been discussion about art.”

But then I read the next sentence: “Over the past two centuries . . .”

Art is only two hundred years old; that is the strange idea I would like to use as my point of entry into this forum.

The idea goes something like this: I gaze upon a Greek statue in a museum today, and I see it as art. I do not see it as religion, though in most cases it was originally placed in a temple. What accounts for this incredible shift in modern vision, the subtle detachment of art from religion?

For the past five years, I have been exploring that question in a unique (and newly popular) location: the Secret Archives of the Vatican Library. I have found surprising records for the Vatican’s first Museo Profano, which opened to a select public as early as 1767, fully a generation before similar classical art museums emerged in northern Europe. Rome, it turns out, is a more important city than Paris or London for understanding the emergence of modern art.

Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768), the father of modern art history, was directly involved in the creation of this public (and “profane”) museum in the otherwise very private Vatican Library. He was instrumental in the creation of the modern conception of art and the artist, too. In Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Sculpture and Painting, he argued for what he called the “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur” of Greek art, juxtaposing this with Baroque “bad taste.”

The cultivation of good taste was equivalent to the cultivation of a beautiful soul, in Winckelmann’s brave new world. It was a spiritual as well as a moral practice, and the artist was a new kind of priest.

It is easy to miss the extent of Winckelmann’s achievement, both as a curator and as a writer. His profane museum was destined to trump the sacred collections also housed in the Vatican Library. He set in motion a sea of forces that resulted in the detachment of the Vatican Museums from the Library, images from texts, and modern art from religion.

But this is not a story of the “secularization” of Greek art, nor of art more generally. Rather, the story of the emergence of modern art is the story of the dispersion of religion into new forms and new institutions. Religion is now housed in novel places, like the modern university and the modern museum.

And that is the world in which both Kandinsky’s challenge and our forum make sense. .

As we begin our conversation, I would like to clarify one point that Krista made in her opening remarks. I have not argued that there is a hostility between modern art and prominent strains in American life; to the contrary, I think modern religion and art are inextricably entwined with twentieth-century American life. This line of analysis, however, presupposes a more expansive notion of religion than most people have. Religion is not restricted to what goes on in churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques; rather, there is a religious dimension to all of life. Indeed, so-called secularism in the West is, in fact, a religious phenomenon that evolves from traditional Judaism and Christianity. In the course of Western history, God disappears in two opposite ways: either God becomes so transcendent that he is completely removed from the world, or the divine becomes so immanent that there is no difference between the sacred and the profane. Within a theological trajectory that can be traced from Nietzsche through Hegel and other romantics like Schleiermacher, Wordsworth, and Coleridge to Luther, the doctrine of divine incarnation ushers in the sacralization of the world, which is at the same time the profanation of the sacred. To miss the sacred shadow of the secular is to misunderstand our era.

During the latter half of the twentieth-century, the commodification, corporatization, and financialization of art seem to have made its spiritual components a distant memory. But the spiritual traditions that were so important for Kandinsky and his peers—the vision of Mondrian, too, was informed by Theosophy, for example—have continued to influence important artists. Joseph Beuys was committed to Anthroposophy, which grew out of Theosophy. Celtic spirituality pervades the work of Mathew Barney, and James Turrell’s vision has been decisively shaped by his Quaker heritage as well as his appreciation for Native American spiritual traditions. And Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiritual proclivities were an important factor in his selection to be the architect of the New York Guggenheim.

With the collapse of global financial markets and the implosion of hedge funds and private-equity companies created to speculate in art, I suspect the work of artists whose work is sensitive to the spiritual dimensions of experience will become increasingly popular. Though Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst may continue to attract interest, their work is symptomatic of the age that is now past. Puppy dogs, balloons, dead sharks, and diamond-studded skulls will give way to art that probes deeply as we head into a more sober period of enormous challenges and broad reassessment of social, cultural, and political values. Art’s role will be to help us understand our recent excesses critically and imagine alternative futures toward which we might move.