cultural relevance?

[Norman Watts <Norman_Watts@zzzzzzz>]

This is sort of a non-technical question. I was reading an article about the
movie "The Passion" in a recent issue of Time mag. The writer made the point
that both he and the audience were at first moved by the movie and then
deadened by it -just too much violence and emotional upheaval. Meanwhile,
I've started reading the intro chapters in the book on sculpture by Cami and
Santamera, particularly the ideas that early sculpture was full of meaning
for the people at the time and that it was not really for decoration.
Sculpture was an expression of the culture, often loaded with religious
symbolism. I've always been interested in how people might think
differently, and especially how they might have done so earlier in history.
This goes to notions such as that maybe humans had no clearly defined sense
of self up until Homeric times. Also, they must have thought differently
(not just with less info, but fundamentally differently) because concepts
such as monotheism or even atheism, let alone reductionist science, had not
been invented yet.

So where am I going with all this? It seems to me that of the arts,
sculpture is one of the more subtle in its messages. Certainly any art like
drama or poetry retains some ability to evoke a reaction. But how much can
and does sculpture still do, beyond mild pleasure or puzzlement? At one time
humans never saw huge or abstracted representations in their daily life, and
so sculptures and pyramids were no doubt very powerful things. Nowadays
we've sort of seen it all -in motion, in color, in pixel perfect reality-
and its been tweaked by a huge industry to be as effective as possible. Can
sculpted stones be more than just "pretty" these days? And while it sounds
good to say that sculpture can be symbolic of this or that in the culture,
if really pressed just what would that be in a modern piece? Yesterday I
received an e-mail from a college friend with a picture of a painting that
she did. It loved it, mostly for its great technique that I could never
match, but was it more than just "nice"? Anybody I showed it to said only
that.