Art, Religion, and Nietzsche

After a little exploring, I came upon a nice website about the abstract expressionist painter, Mark Rothko. I found something there that supplemented today's reading about Rothko in regards to religion. In the reading, the author describes how Rothko was very concerned about letting his art speak for itself--even without the use of titles or explanations for the abstract paintings. On the same note, this page of the aforementioned website quotes Rothko as saying:

If our titles recall the known myths of antiquity, we have used them again because they are the eternal symbols upon which we must fall back to express basic psychological ideas. They are the symbols of man's primitive fears and motivations, no matter in which land or what time, changing only in detail but never in substance....Our presentation of these myths, however, must be in our own terms which are at once more primitive and more modern than the myths themselves--more primitive because we seek the primeval and atavistic roots of the ideas rather than their graceful classical version; more modern than the myths themselves because we must redescribe their implications through our own experience....The myth holds us, therefore, not through its romantic flavor, not the remembrance of beauty of some bygone age, not through the possibilities of fantasy, but because it expresses to us something real and existing in ourselves, as it was to those who first tumbled upon the symbols to give them life.

Interestingly, Rothko sees his art as serving basically the same purpose as religious symbols did in the past--"express[ing] to us something real and existing in ourselves." One could say that his art is his religion; despite the lack of community and morality, it does have a core "belief system" of a sort--those deep psychological truths he mentions--and a definite spiritual/mystical feeling. However, if this is his religion, he expresses it much differently than conventional religions do. As I stated previously, he doesn't like to explain the meanings of each of his paintings, unlike typical religions' constant reassertions of their doctrines. There is a common thread, though: the expression of his "beliefs" (if we can call them that) changes over time. It's completely subjective: the truths ("fears and motivations") expressed in the art are timeless and constant, but the way they're expressed changes with time and with the bearer/artist. In the process, they seem to change on the outside but remain the same at the core. This is the same process as we've read about in so many religions: the methods of interpretation change and therefore the outward appearance of a religion may change, but the religion itself remains steadfast (at least in the minds of its followers).

Another reason I find this passage interesting is the fact that Rothko was an avid reader of Nietzsche. I just read some Nietzsche in one of my other classes, and we learned today that he sees all human interpretations of reality as inherently wrong. All of them are projections of the human will onto surroundings. However, he rates different forms of interpretation based on whether they promote "health" or "sickness" in humanity. Religion, to Nietzsche, is just plain sick, whereas art is one of the best forms of interpretation. Art is good because of its master mentality as opposed to Chrisitanity's slave mentality; in other words, art concentrates on the ideal and the good first and only talks about the bad as the absence of the good, whereas Christianity supposedly begins by defining evil and only later defines good. How convenient for Rothko...