I am a painter and when I look at a painting I make a judgement as to whether the piece is 'good' by determining if it 'works'. Financial value, popularity, critics, art historians,curators,etc. don't figure into my judgement. I can see if the work is 'good' or not immediately because it either has presence or not. any artists have written about this ability over the centuries in different terms. Unfortunately not everyone has the ability to experience presence. The ability appears to be a gift which cannot be gained through education, familiarity, or profession. The first thing to know about art is that it is not an object but a method. If the piece works then it becomes a window through which a person encounters a presence. It becomes an 'I-Thou' experience in Martin Buber's terminology. The encounter is the subject of the artwork not the image or whatever material apparatus was used. The successful art work is an epiphany, not a revelation. Epiphanies are windows, as the term's etymology suggests. Revelations are messages. Art that works doesn't reveal but rather it opens the opportunity for a relationship with an 'other'. The growing relationship will gradually influence what the person thinks and how he/she acts. This process has its own time span and may be immediate or germinate over time before coming to fruition. No matter who the artist is or what medium of expression is used not all pieces that he/she produces 'work'. An artist needs to 'edit' his/her work and destroy the pieces that don't work if he/she wishes to protect his/her reputation.
I as listening to the so-called Roman Catholic 'Synod of Synodality' where the fight is to try to bring back the Vatican Council 2 initiatives that recent Popes have almost fully removed. I listened as one of the theologians spoke of 'mystery'. He used the term to refer to a belief that cannot be understood by human intelligence alone. In other words it is irrational. He used the term as a way of ending a conversation. A way of saying that this is the end and we can't go any further. I though how different this is from the way we look at 'mystery' in the arts. In the arts 'mystery' is a way of seducing the person to move beyond it to encounter another presence. Mystery is an invitation not a 'do not pass' indicator. In the context of the synod 'mystery' blocks and pulls the person back to the past in the arts it opens the person to the future..
Spiritual art doesn't have meaning. It has mood which when caught invites you to encounter the presence through its portal. The ensuing dialogue between the two of you, one on this side of time and the other no longer bound by it, will do what is needed.
Curators kill the art by reducing it to explanations, biography, narratives and movements. They are the butchers of the art world killing the art so that they can dissect it for the museum's cafeteria.
Spiritual art is an ambiguous term that can mean anything from art based on an established religion, abstract works that rely on a theory of 'natural' spirituality, to Romantic figurative works from 'super-hero' aesthetics. As in the case of all art, what a piece of art portrays is the personality of the artist and his/her spiritual depth. Spirituality begins with a personal encounter with the reality of one's own death. If there is no visceral encounter with death then the artist is only illustrating some religious or secular ideology about the spiritual. The spiritual is the non-material existence that exists after death but seems to be the force that invades our mortal life. Of course there is no proof that a spiritual world exists other than what we perceive to be spiritual. I have found that some artists have been able to take the images of their religion's mythology and encounter the frontier of death/life but most artists that use their religious mythology only produce propaganda and kitsch. The abstracted art that is said to be spiritual are based on the spirituality that arose out of the late 19th and early 20 centuries and owe as debt to R. Steiner and H. Blavatsky. Many of the art works that say they come out of this type of non-sectarian 'natural' spirituality are little more than wall paper because the artist has not viscerally encountered death through his/her art. Again what is expressed is the artist's soul/personality. Spiritual art should take a 'prepared audience' to the encounter with death. In this case there will be either of two experiences. The artist and the audience will either experience a feeling of mystery and presence or a feeling of non-presence and the eternal void.
