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oapen-20.500.12657-431932020-12-08T01:45:31Z Animism, Materiality, and Museums Peers, Glenn Byzantine exhibition animism art christian animism museum experience visitor experience bic Book Industry Communication::A The arts::AC History of art / art & design styles::ACK History of art: Byzantine & Medieval art c 500 CE to c 1400 bic Book Industry Communication::G Reference, information & interdisciplinary subjects::GM Museology & heritage studies bic Book Industry Communication::H Humanities::HB History::HBL History: earliest times to present day::HBLC Early history: c 500 to c 1450/1500 Among our most cherished modern assumptions is our distance from the material world we claim to love or, alternately, to dominate and own. As both devotional tool and art object, the Byzantine icon is rendered complicit in this distancing. According to well-established theological and scholarly explanations, the icon is a window onto the divine: it focuses and directs our minds to a higher understanding of God and saints. Despite their material richness, icons are understood to efface their own materiality, thereby enabling us to do the same. That the privileged relation of image to God is based on its capacity for material self-effacement is the basis for all theology of the icon and all art-historical description. It gets more complicated than this definition, to be sure, but the icon is positioned in this way in most straightforward accounts, whether devotional or scholarly. My position is to undermine the transcendentalizing determination of modern theology and aesthetics, and to lean very heavily on the materiality of these things to the point of allowing them, to the degree I can, a voice and life of their own. 2020-12-07T09:55:00Z 2020-12-07T09:55:00Z 2021 book ONIX_20201207_9781942401742_3 https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/43193 eng Collection Development, Cultural Heritage, and Digital Humanities application/pdf Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International 9781942401742.pdf https://arc-humanities.org Arc Humanities Press Arc Humanities Press 10.17302/CDH-9781942401742 10.17302/CDH-9781942401742 e8579ecb-7a9a-49c1-9777-413adf1559c9 Arc Humanities Press 167 open access
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Among our most cherished modern assumptions is our distance from the material world we claim to love or, alternately, to dominate and own. As both devotional tool and art object, the Byzantine icon is rendered complicit in this distancing. According to well-established theological and scholarly explanations, the icon is a window onto the divine: it focuses and directs our minds to a higher understanding of God and saints. Despite their material richness, icons are understood to efface their own materiality, thereby enabling us to do the same. That the privileged relation of image to God is based on its capacity for material self-effacement is the basis for all theology of the icon and all art-historical description. It gets more complicated than this definition, to be sure, but the icon is positioned in this way in most straightforward accounts, whether devotional or scholarly. My position is to undermine the transcendentalizing determination of modern theology and aesthetics, and to lean very heavily on the materiality of these things to the point of allowing them, to the degree I can, a voice and life of their own.
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