Art Striving to be a Religion

“Perhaps one of the main problems of art today has been the result of giving art the wrong function. Formerly art was ‘an art’, just as we still speak of arts and crafts. Art as a higher function of mankind, the work of the inspired lofty artist, comparable to that of the poet and the prophet, was the outcome of the Renaissance with it neo-platonic way of thinking” (H.R. Rookmaaker, Modern Art and the Death of a Culture, p. 230).