Forms of the sacred and contemporary art between material and immaterial

Abstract

Starting from the book Materia sacra (2014), the author aims to continue the dialogue with the thought of Ugo Fabietti by bringing the issues of the sacred and the profane, the material and the immaterial to the terrain of contemporary art in order to contribute, from this perspective, to shed a different light on some of today's dynamics of the religious sphere. After outlining some cultural-historical coordinates of the relations between contemporary art and Christianity, two specific ethnographic cases are analyzed: that of a public art project by artist Franco Ariaudo (Valle Camonica in 2011) and that of an ethnography related to the communicative aesthetics of the evangelical church of Sabaoth (Milan). In the first case, the transitions between public art and sacred art are examined; in the second the relationships between religious sacredness and communicative styles borrowed from art and marketing. In this way, religiosity is placed in relation to other forms of belief and the sacred: those of the art world and "consumer religion."