Art as a Cultural System by Clifford Geertz

Although Geertz said, “Art is notoriously hard to talk about,” I found this essay topic hard to read about. Some parts of the article seemed very wordy to me at first. However, the points made became clearer to me after the second read. A line that stood out to me was, “…only in the modern age and in the West that some people have managed to convince themselves that technical talk about art, however developed, is sufficient to a complete understanding of it.” I agree that many art critics and so-called connoisseurs of art have convinced themselves that using big words to describe an artifact or a painting shows that they have knowledge about it.
Quattrocento painting from Renaissance Italy and Qur’anic poetry were discussed at length in this article. Italian paintings were meant to deepen human awareness of the spiritual dimensions of existence, and reflect the truths of Christianity. Geertz quotes a Dominican preacher: “For it is one thing to adore a painting, but it is quite another to learn from a painted narrative what to adore.”
From this article, I learned a great deal about Islam and the Quran. The fact that the Quran contains exact words of God, rather than reports by prophets of what God said, was interesting. This makes the reading of the Quran solely an act of worship, rather than for artistic beauty or poetry. This point is made clearer by a quote in the article, “…one such poet said, trying hard, to explain his art, ‘The I forgot the verses and remembered the words.’”