Art as Spiritual Technology

The story begins somewhere unexpected: in the early relationship between an infant and a caregiver.

Ellen Dissanayake argues that some of the behaviours from which the arts developed are already visible in early caregiver-infant interaction. Adults spontaneously alter their voices, facial expressions, gestures and movements when communicating with babies. They repeat, exaggerate, formalise and vary rhythm in response to the infant. The exchange is embodied, affective and largely non-verbal.

Developmental neuropsychology gives this interaction a regulatory dimension. Allan Schore describes early attachment as a process of affective attunement and co-regulation in which touch, prosody, facial expression and rhythm help regulate arousal and establish safety. Dissanayake's proposal is that these proto-aesthetic behaviours later became available for wider social purposes. What first helped coordinate and bond a dyad could be extended into the group.

Dissanayake calls the human tendency to deliberately make things special artification. Ordinary movement becomes dance. Speech becomes chant or poetry. Bodies and objects are decorated. Actions are formalised, repeated, exaggerated and elaborated until they acquire an intensity they did not previously possess.

Artification therefore changes more than appearance. It changes significance. It marks an object, event, place or action as worthy of heightened attention.

This is where artification can be compared with sacralisation. The two are not identical. Artification describes how something is made special; sacralisation describes how something becomes set apart and invested with exceptional or sacred value. Artification may nevertheless be one of the principal human means through which sacralisation becomes experientially compelling.

Religious and ceremonial rituals across cultures combine music, rhythm, dance, chanting, poetic language, costume, masks, image, architecture, ornamentation and dramatic gesture. Dissanayake's argument is that these are not decorative additions to ritual. They are among the behaviours through which ritual becomes effective.

Brown and Dissanayake describe ceremonial ritual as fundamentally multimodal and participatory. Remove its artifications one by one and the exceptional event collapses back towards ordinary behaviour. This makes possible a stronger proposition: the arts may not simply have served religion. Art and religion may have developed together through ritual.

The arts embedded in ritual do not merely carry messages. They help produce the conditions in which those messages are felt.

Rhythm, repetition, coordinated movement, music and collective performance can organise attention and arousal, increase feelings of connection and synchronise participants in time. Malinowski understood ritual as a practical response to uncertainty and anxiety. Durkheim described the heightened emotional state created by collective ritual as collective effervescence.

Dissanayake helps explain how such effects may be generated. Artistic behaviours that regulate and coordinate early dyadic interaction can, when elaborated collectively, become technologies for group cohesion and emotional regulation. Contemporary research on interpersonal and musical synchrony adds physiological mechanisms to this older anthropological insight.

The implication is important: art may not merely express collective effervescence. Artistic participation may help generate it.

Once ordinary time, space, objects, bodies and behaviours are transformed, they can acquire exceptional significance. A place is separated from ordinary space. An image becomes an icon. A garment becomes ceremonial. Repeated movement becomes rite. An object becomes worthy of protection, reverence or pilgrimage.

This observation does not require us to settle the metaphysical question of where sacredness ultimately comes from. Anthropology and material religion allow us to ask a prior question: how do bodies, images, objects, sounds and spaces make sacred or spiritual realities experientially present?

This is also where the modern artwork becomes interesting. Walter Benjamin's notion of aura, David Morgan's work on sacred seeing, and scholarship on material religion all help explain why presence may be produced relationally through object, history, place, framing, bodily perception and cultural expectation.

The shaman offers a particularly clear example of the convergence between artistic performance, unusual modes of attention and social responsibility. Yet the word shaman has been applied so loosely to modern artists that it can easily become an empty metaphor.

Denita Benyshek proposes a more rigorous operational definition. A shaman is socially designated, engages in spiritual practice, obtains information in ways unavailable to the community through voluntary regulation of attention, and uses that capacity for the benefit of the community.

The final criterion is crucial. Extraordinary experience alone does not make someone a shaman. The role is socially directed. Spiritual technique is placed in the service of others.

My research on Marina Abramovic uses Benyshek's criteria as a test rather than simply calling the artist a shaman. Abramovic is an especially revealing case because her practice combines disciplined control of attention, fasting, silence, repetition, pain, duration, bodily endurance and audience participation.

Works such as The Artist Is Present and 512 Hours move beyond the autonomous art object. The artist constructs conditions in which people participate, attend, wait, encounter one another and sometimes report powerful emotional or transformative effects. Victor Turner's idea of communitas helps describe the temporary bonds that can emerge in such liminal situations.

The broader question is not whether all artists are shamans. It is whether some artists, in secular societies, can perform functions structurally analogous to older spiritual specialists: organising attention, creating ritualised encounters, mediating exceptional experience and directing it towards a community.

The spiritual did not disappear from modern art as institutional religion declined. It migrated through abstraction, Theosophy, spiritualism, occultism, Surrealism, visionary art and other practices that explored the invisible, the unconscious and the numinous.

The same question applies to artistic practice itself. For some makers, art is a discipline of attention, self-knowledge, integration and encounter. Robert Wuthnow's interviews with artists, Pat Allen's work on art as a way of knowing, meditative art practices, and first-person accounts by artists all show how making can become spiritually meaningful without requiring adherence to a religious institution.

The artist may work from an explicitly religious, esoteric, mystical or metaphysical worldview, while the viewer may encounter the work spiritually without sharing those beliefs.

This matters in post-religious and secular cultures. The arts can preserve some of the experiential and communal capacities historically concentrated within religious ritual without requiring participants to accept a theology. Art can focus attention, regulate affect, create symbolic meaning, connect people and sometimes enable experiences interpreted as awe, transcendence or the sacred.

Altered states are therefore one possible outcome of artistic practice, not its definition. The stronger claim is functional: art can operate spiritually because of what it does to attention, affect, meaning, relationship and lived experience.

The spiritual function of art does not reside only in individual artworks. It can be distributed across artists, objects, architecture, institutions, audiences and collective practices.

Museums and galleries set objects apart. They regulate light, distance, silence, movement and touch; preserve originals; create thresholds; and invite forms of concentrated looking. In some circumstances they can function as secular spaces of reverent attention. Immersive installation goes further by placing the viewer inside an environment of light, sound, scale, duration and sensory disorientation.

Festivals such as Burning Man bring still more elements together: temporary separation from ordinary life, collective participation, monumental art, costume, music, fire, ritual destruction, shared labour and return. They combine ritual, community, enchantment and, for some participants, altered experience. Music festivals can generate related forms of synchrony, collective intensity and temporary belonging.

Art fairs and biennales provide a useful contrast. They too gather communities periodically around special objects and spaces, but they may reproduce hierarchy, status and market power rather than suspend them. Not every collective art event produces communitas.

Modernity is often described through the language of disenchantment: rationalisation, scientific explanation and bureaucratic life appear to strip the world of mystery. Yet the human appetite for wonder, symbolic intensity and exceptional experience has not disappeared.

Cinema surrounds us with darkness, projected light, sound and impossible worlds. Concerts and festivals use rhythm, spectacle and collective movement. Immersive installations alter perception through architecture, light and sound. Virtual reality and digital effects construct environments that could not exist materially. Generative AI now produces images and worlds that previously existed only in imagination.

Modernity may not abolish enchantment. It may continually invent new technologies for producing it.

The important question is therefore not whether these technologies are themselves spiritual. It is whether they can become new means through which humans create wonder, presence, meaning, connection and experiences that exceed ordinary instrumental life.