Art as Spiritual Activity

The most fundamental issue for the arts today... is the spiritual foundation of the arts.... Steiner demonstrates that our individual creative activity is not solely a personal affair. Our creations do not originate out of nowhere, nor solely out of ourselves, but from an objective world of spirit with which we are intimately related in the depths of our being. He shows that our creations have significance beyond ourselves and beyond the recognition they receive: works of art are vehicles of spiritual qualities. In bringing these spiritual qualities into the sphere of human life, the artist becomes responsible for the spiritual effects the work has on the artist, other people, and ultimately on human evolution.Seeing his task as the renewal of the lost unity of science, art, and religion, Rudolf Steiner created in the worldview he called Anthroposophy a new, cognitive scientific-and-religious art, the implications of which - recognized by such divergent artists as Wassily Kandinsky and Joseph Beuys - are only now becoming fully apparent.