Page 37 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

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Aesthetics

Birgit Meyer and Jojada Verrips

From aisthesis to aesthetica
Kant’s legacy
Religion as mediation and the “aesthetic turn”
Religious aesthetics

Time and again, artists have presented work to the world that has been
perceived by believers as shocking, insulting, and hurtful. A famous case in
point is Piss Christ by Andres Serrano (first exhibited in 1989), which upset
many Roman Catholics so much that they initiated lawsuits to have this
“obscene” piece of art removed from exhibitions. A few even went so far
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as to try to destroy it, such as the Melbourne teenager who attacked it with
a hammer because his mother had wept on hearing that a judge had ruled it
not “offensive per se.” According to Alison Young, who has dealt with this
case in detail, the judge’s problem was

that the image can easily be described in aesthetically pleasing terms (the
sunset hues), but it is the ordinary person’s imputed understanding of
the title and knowledge of the manner of the image’s making that might
evidence the offensiveness and the possible obscenity. The judge might
wish to locate legal obscenity or indecency in the artwork, but is ultimately
unable to do so, due to the conflict he finds between the aesthetics of the
image (the “beauty of its appearance”) and the prepositional condition of
the artwork (the “disgusting” nature of its creation confessed by the title).
And it seems to be this surface “beauty” of the image that saves it from
obscenity.
(2005: 32; italics added)

It may seem counterintuitive to some readers to find “aesthetics” included
as a key word in the study of religion and media. If so, that could be owing
to the limited sense that the word has acquired in its modern career. In
the passage above, aesthetics occurs with the meaning it gained at the end
of the eighteenth century and which it still has in both professional and