[389] LECTURE XXXI, March 1, 1956 QN: Please differentiate between great art and art^a that is religious in style. PT: This is a question returning to the former period of our lecture[s] on religion and art. Now the question was: How would one differentiate between great art and art which is religious art? The word "GREAT art" should be used only for "highly qualified" art. What makes a work of art a good work of art, or even a great work of art, belongs to the aesthetic analysis and to the principles which are developed there. It is of course a union of artistic expressive power, of form, of content, which has one moment of indescribable character, but where we at least can approach, in a kind of immediacy, works of art. It is an interesting thing that if, under the sands of the Near

East, or in the caves of China or of India, we find very old parts of very old creations, those who have an artistic ability at all would immediately say "This is quality," and they find something else and would say "This is not quality, this is average, or even lower than that." Now the mystery of this belongs to another realm than that which we have to discuss. Religious art with respect to style was characterized as an expressionistic art^b. Expressionistic art can be poor, average, good, and great. Here we have exactly the same thing. There was a moment, perhaps ten or fifteen years ago, when modern art^c came first into the field of attention of larger groups of people; before that, it was rather kept in smaller circles of esoteric character. In this moment in which it became open and exoteric, the danger developed that everything which has a modern style (is either abstract or expressionistic or surrealistic) was admired. And the criteria of poor, average, good, and great were not applied any more. And this is always hard, there is always a large margin of error,