One time (around the days of MOCA/LA's "Public Offerings"), an art dealer I once knew said he thought that the artworld was so advanced and complete that at any given time, we (the art system) know of all artist's potentials, who is good and who is not. According to this view, there are no new artists to be discovered. The system had flipped over all the rocks on the beach.
Kierkegaard?s relentless polemic is not, in the first place, against what is today called "institutional religion." It is, in the first place, a polemic against the deifying of the social order, which can happen with or without Hegelian philosophy. It is, in the second place, a polemic against the church for letting itself become party to this blasphemous fraud and thus betraying Christianity for the sake of Christendom. Since a person?s relationship with Christ, however, is of infinitely greater importance than his relationship with his society, the main fire of Kierkegaard?s polemic is directed against the treason of the church. In this connection, Kierkegaard makes a lasting contribution to the endless?or at least unending until Christ returns in glory?debate over the proper relationship between, as the twentieth-century American theologian H.?Richard?Niebuhr titled his classic book, "Christ and Culture." Niebuhr proposed five main "types" of that relationship as Christians have thought about these things over the centuries. Kierkegaard, one might suggest, is polemicizing against the type of Christ as culture and is arguing for the type of Christ against culture.
Where you see "Christ" or "Christianity", substitute "Art".
Where you see "Religion" or "Christendom" or "Church", substitute "Artworld".
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