Art and the Sacred

The text offered to the reader served as the source material for the last (XXVI) chapter of the forthcoming book “Theory of Art. Introduction”. This is the text of lectures given by the author about 15 years ago at the History Department of the Lomonosov Moscow State University for art students. The range of topics discussed in the text reproduces the conceptual situation within the context of art functioning, which should be called ‘Artistic and Sacred’. This field reflects exactly art historical (not religious, aesthetic, anthropological or historical) view, which always sees art as a creative practice, i.e. shaping and meaning-generating human activity. The stylistics and rhetoric of the proposed text are characterised by a combination of scholarly discursiveness and lightened conceptual essayism. A sign of a semi-popular, semi-didactic narrative is the absence of a scientific apparatus (with a sufficiently detailed bibliography). The author very much hopes that this – partly incomplete, partly intricate – flow of thoughts and feelings will be suitable for both scientific tasks and circumstances of life.