For me to be an art critic in the modern world would be an odious job. I would feel obliged to rail against almost everything that people produce in the name of creativity. I can say this with some confidence because I have just returned from a trip to Florence, Italy, where they keep the good stuff. Of course, every age has had its hacks. But, the gap in competence between hack and master in the Renaissance might be meaningless today.

One could blame Marcel Duchamp, that trickster who deliberately set out to destroy the recognized category of fine art. Or, one could blame Andy Warhol, the industrial revolution, and the inevitable rise of a market for middle class consumer kitsch. The fault may not be in our stars, however, but in the standards for stardom. What, after all, do we now expect from “art,” except to fill blank space with a little colour, shape, or texture?

Florence was the epicenter of the Renaissance, the rebirth or rediscovery of antiquity. Greek sculpture and painting—of the human figure, especially—set the ideal for Renaissance manual skills, while Christianity and ancient mythology set the themes for cultural production. The influence of Greek individualism and humanism eventually transformed the social standing of the anonymous craftsman into that of the recognized master. The mystery of the divine Creation, which these genres had served to reveal in medieval Europe, gave way to the mystique of creativity and the secular cult of artistic genius.

We never recovered from that myth. Vasari saw the culmination of art history in his contemporaries, Michelangelo and Leonardo. In terms of technical skill at depicting the human figure, this may have been a fair assessment. But “art” carried on long after these masters, even without a religious context. Is it a historical coincidence that the art we still revere as great was religiously inspired, or at least arose in a deeply religious world? For modern society, is there some relationship between the waning of religion and impoverished standards of technical mastery? To put it more bluntly, does what passes as art today lack both quality and meaning because it has turned its back on what our ancestors called the Great Mystery? Did art die with God?

Now, a myth is a belief we honour in the measure it is not literally true. For example: any scrap of thing put up on a wall can be “art”; any tinkering is creative expression. Just put a frame around it or a pedestal under it and voila! It may be personally satisfying as a hobby. It might even be saleable. After all (to misquote P. T. Barnum), a consumer is born every minute!