Page 41 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

24 Birgit Meyer and Jojada Verrips

According to this view, religion was supposed to gradually lose importance
in the course of the modernization and rationalization of society, whereas
high art would be the site par excellence for the generation of sublime
experience. As a consequence, artworks made by religiously inspired people
considering themselves to be serious artists were relegated to the realm of
low art or kitsch and therefore deemed not worthy of study by art theorists
(see Elkins and Morgan 2008).
As a consequence of these divides, neo-Kantian aesthetic discourse became
confined to an exclusive field of study that became rather narrow, at least as
seen from an aisthetic perspective in Aristotle’s sense. It was not only the body
that was discounted but a wide range of imagery and objects that were rather
arbitrarily disqualified as low-brow or religious(ly inspired)—or both—and
therefore uninteresting. In addition, there is a tendency to disregard the
social and cultural context in which aesthetic experiences are generated
and theorized. All this yielded rather static and disembodied approaches to
aesthetics. Taking for granted the gaze as the central sense through which
beholders engage with images, these approaches fail to take into account
the ways in which the tuning of the sensorium has undergone actual
transformations under the influence of the invention of new technologies,
especially in the sphere of the production and consumption of, for example,
modernist imagery and texts (Danius 2002; see also Crary 2001). In other
words, in their insensitivity toward the significance of social and cultural
contexts and the sensorium as a whole, such approaches neglect the specific
tuning of the senses in consonance with the rise of modern subjectivities. 3

Religion as mediation and the “aesthetic turn”

Though these typically modern distinctions between mind and body, high and
low art, and art and religion long informed approaches of aesthetics, there is
currently a trend toward a broader understanding of the term. Recognizing
the need to account for the affective power that images, sounds, texts, and
other cultural forms wield over their beholders, scholars seek to develop
more integrated understandings of sensing and knowing. Obviously, this
inquiry no longer locates aesthetics in the domain of the high arts alone (as
opposed to popular arts and religion) but rather in everyday life. This implies
moving beyond the divides entailed by neo-Kantian aesthetic discourses
toward a recognition of the more encompassing Aristotelian notion of
aisthesis. The emerging field of religion and media is one of the sites where
a turn is being made toward a broader understanding of aesthetics. This turn
has been instigated by the spectacular rise and circulation of religious audio-
visual cultural forms, from cassette sermons broadcasting Islamic preachers
to radio programs advertising the Catholic Renewal, from religious sitcoms