Implicit in religion and art is the capacity to stimulate our sense and feeling of wonder. Driven by wonder, this faculty not only makes us human but inspires us to refine, to civilise in the fullest meaning of the term, our aptitudes. It encourages us to become more than we presently are…It is this capacity to be touched and moulded by wonder represented in both religion and art that locks them in a mutual embrace….To deny either of these spheres of expression in the domain of public life is to deform and unbalance who and what we are and how we have come to be ourselves….I would argue that Europe’s construction of the Other, both inside Europe and outside in the non-west, is largely responsible for the suppression of wonder. It leads directly to the creation of separate audiences who contest the public space, and the failure of shared understanding and hence the loss of mutual wonder that it can generate. And it continues to deform the public space, fracture and fragment audiences, and impoverish social discourse by losing touch with the mutual embrace of religion and art as representations of wonder….So here we have the crux of the matter: in the dispensation of secular modernity art has acquired high purpose… However, the artist has acquired an enhanced status as not merely the explorer of sensibilities and feelings but as important arbiters of meaning in the public space…We need to uncover the possibilities of pluralism that is more than the celebration of cultural differences. Europe’s historic mission of defining its identity made ‘orthodoxy’ a keystone value, a foundation stone of identity. The trouble was these foundations were cemented with fear, the fear of falling from grace back into barbarism; the fear of being seduced from the civilised and orthodox by fascinations of Other ways which were in truth nothing more than masks for the devil…I am, for example, as religious as I am secular, as traditional as I am modern, and value spiritual experience as much as I value art. Public space has to be open to my multiple selves if I am to express my full humanity…We cannot continue to proclaim freedom and liberty for all while we withhold equity, dignity and respect from whomsoever does not endorse the dominant orthodoxy of today.... ziauddinsardar/2013/07/touched-by-wonder-art-and-religion-in-the-21st-century/
Posted on: Mon, 03 Mar 2014 23:58:56 +0000