rusted steel sculptures leaning inwards and outwards ~ curving metal plates that we know would kill us ff they landed on us. We experience them by walking through them. We are getting the old abstract values of modern ert but in a theatrical way. We can't see the whole geometric shape all in one ~ parts loom over us, ‘The old values are being staged for us so we can feel distanced from them, as we feel distanced from any kind of idealism so now we can re-enjoy them, Where are our Jesus and the holy saints, our great philosophers and military leaders and explorers, the figures Of reverence that we always require, whatever age we live in? They are summed up in Jeff Keons’s Michael Jackson and Bubbles. Koons makes this life-sized statue out of a substance that we might have thought of as nothing to do with us any more: old-fashioned ceramic, the stuff of ornaments on granny’s shelf we would never bother to look atit. He gets this odd material and makes it huge so we can’t possibly miss what itis, and he makes a figure out of it that we can't possibly fail to recognise: someone totally of our time. ‘The result is a new kind of surrealism, a collage of mismatched. feeling, the impossible and the unavoidable. ‘Modern art re-did traditional forms so they fitted new conditions. ‘The human figure was broken up and distorted. The awesome religious monument became abstract metal beams and right angles. ‘And pictures of royalty and great leaders who stood for higher values became pictures of the higher values head-on, in the form of fuzzy abstract squares. Post-nodern art has all this mysterious stuff too, only refashioned for cur contemporary selves, Art's teaching is moralising now not aesthetic, The ideas we're offered must already be familiar to us. Accepted laws of new social cchat, jolly challenging of old taboos, awareness of the mutability of the self ~ contemporary art ungenerously reveals allthis already- ‘known faux-wisdom to us. Pury was the difficulty before, in the age of modernism, but purity made us feel put down, out of the picture. (Contemporary art triumphantly overcomes elitism. Now there are ‘many things, and not just one. Guidance, presence, reassurance Different approaches to being spiritual in the past brought ‘about changes in what we thought we were. The art that religion left behind shows points in time when civilisation says, Crikey ~ momentous shift in human consciousness! a7Kouro sixth century CE (National Archaoologieal ‘Museum, Athens) i ‘A line-up of gods the ancient Greeks carved them to look like themselves, like people. We can't exist emotionally in isolation, We can't be adrift and nothing. We have to believe there’s a place for us ina bigger picture, So we've alwayshad art. It shows us ourselves. But we didn’t always have it really /ooking like us. Greek art has a feeling of life about it: suddenly we're there, our detailed, physical, ‘muscular, sympathetic bodily reality is all mapped out in rounded, smoothed-out, life-size marble and bronze. Religion was in everything, There were great thunder gods like Zeus but also anything in nature was a god. A breeze could be a god. Every river was a god. There was a ritual action for each one: the point of it was to get the gods in a good mood. You offered something. Ttmight bea bit of your hair, or a part of an animal. For something really major it was a statue. The Greek world was full of offerings. In any city wherever you went you saw life-size realistic statues. ‘There are different looks: archaic an¢ classical Kouros (Bion fom Delph), 80 BCE (Delphi Arehavolgical Museum)Archaic is first. Relatively rigid, walking stiffly: this is the seventh and sixth centuries BCE. It’s as if the Greeks are in a room called ‘Not Totally Sure Where We're Going. Classical is next -this is the look that grips later civilisations, as if the Greeks find a magie portal called This Is It In the early fifth century BCE they go through it Zen Poseidon This is a statue from two and a half thousand years ago. Ithas all, the hallmarks of classical art: a sense of movement and human belicvability, and the emotion attributed to classical art by Johannes ‘Winkelmann, the eighteenth-century German historian (who only had later Roman copies to go by for his idealisation of a lost golden age of art) - “a noble simplicity and calm grandeur.” It had been inan ancient shipwreck, and lay on the ocean floor until 1926, hence its survival. It might never have been displayed. The sockets would have had glass or translucent stone eyes. The nipples would have been reddened with copper. Very few statues like this now exist because bronze was valuable and so it was melted down to make coins or weapons, and also because the pagan gods were damned by the civilisation that finally replaced the Grecks ~to a Christian, ‘god in human form was a threat. ‘This one might have represented Zeus, the father of the gods, or Poseidon, god of the sea. But whether he was hurling a thunderbolt or shaking a trident in his now empty right hand it’s clear he’s god in the form of aman. Don’t think about the god bit right now. Think about what it is you're actually seeing: ancient art in a museum. Normally we see this kind of thing without really seeing it. But what is it the Greeks really came up with? The statue is full of ideas about what a body is, how it works, what it feels like to have muscles, to be alive, to be triumphant =Zens Poseidon ‘Look at the flow and power of it: the concentration, the sweep through the right arm throwing and the eyes looking —and the ‘balancing left arm thrust forward. That type of excitement, the overall dramatic pose, is backed up by detail everywhere, the utter belicvability of the way parts join to parts~it all seems realistic ‘and natural but also it's an intensely attractive, inspiring object. It's gotall the power of an artwork of pure dynamic abstract form: the positive shape and the negative space around it. But at the same time in a parallel world of perception ~it'sa man. 11's true it's the body of a male and of a certain ethnic type, white, ‘western, on the other hand it hasn't got the head of a cat or six arms, which is how the gods were represented by other civilisations at the time of the Greeks. On some profound level it’s you. The look of Christ and the angels Educated middle class people used to be menaced by abstract art pictures of squares and lines what use were they? The look still exists in art but the whole idea of them has changed. It's been tralised and is just part of the art landscape. The new consensus in official art world culture, is that the sights in art today that are most vivid and urgent are not ebstract but figurative - they have to be readable by non-experts who are unfamiliar with t modern art, and so there mustbe some kind of directly discernible human activity on offer, or easily graspable idea about human concerns, Even if we don't know what the ultimate meaning is supposed to be there has to bea big blast of immediate literal “reality.” Unexpectedly perhaps, abstract art (abstract paintings and sculpture ecome more convincingly “human” by contrast; the subtlety of its humanistic concerns, and its deep e codes of