A "meta-argument" against all future arguments for God's existence ?

[Belacqua]

No evidence exists that consciousness survives the death of the brain.  As Dr. Michael Shermer said, "Talking to the dead is easy; getting them to talk back, that's the hard part."  As for immaterial substances causing unconscious processes, one must wonder how such gets measured on an EEG?  For instance, Broca's aphasia is very well understood, and the consequences to the victims of it are absolutely devastating; where is the immaterial soul in all of that?

Right. We don't believe in life after death.

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Anyway, just out of curiosity, what do you think of modern art? I realised when I was talking about it before... about agreeing with you guys in principle... I realised that to the extent that I like it or try to create it, it's kind of reductionistic and symbolic... ie I like the concept of it as a useful way of representing information/ideas by visual analogy as it were. But that's very different from what I think of as modern art. So this is me being a Philistine again I guess, unless that is doing that but at a much more subtle level. I guess to me there's skillful art and there's symbolic/meaningful art, but I'm not really sure where a lot of modern art fits into that, but granted I haven't shown much interest in it.

Interesting and difficult questions. 

As with Christianity, anything I say in general won't be true of every artist. They're a varied and ornery bunch.

I'd like to think that art isn't simply "representing information/ideas by visual analogy." This would make a painting the same sort of thing as the graph in an economics paper. With a work of art there is always a fundamental integration of form and content -- they're not separate things. So a painting's content may just be the way it looks, the way it's painted. 

There is a potential richness in each painting. It can have story-telling or message-type content, as in a narrative Rembrandt. It can be about looking carefully at everyday items, as with a Chardin. There can be a kind of wit or playfulness in how the thing is presented, as with Picasso. 

Except for the obvious story-subject these things reveal themselves over time to people who have spent a lot of time looking. Everybody's a philistine about some things, just because we haven't taken the time with them yet. One of the great pleasures in life is when some work or genre which didn't speak to you before starts to make sense to you, and its value becomes apparent at last. Fortunately there is so much in the world that no lifetime is long enough to exhaust all the potential pleasures. 

That said, much of the art of our own time has little or nothing to enjoy. Up through Picasso, Balthus, or Lucian Freud, painting was still about looking at what's on the canvas and benefiting from that. With the latest crop, however, that's all over. Banksy, or Jeff Koons, or Damian Hirst, have nothing in their work that repays actually looking at it. Their medium isn't in fact paint but exchange value. Their talent lies in taking worthless things and making them extremely expensive. They don't manipulate visual materials but resale value, and they're really good at it. The work is about as interesting to look at as a stock certificate, and serves the same function. It is the perfect art for the age we live in, where capitalism supersedes all other values. So if you wonder why those works don't move you, it's not your fault. There is nothing in the work to see.