Art and the Question of Meaning

First US edition. Translation by Edward Quinn of "Kunst und Sinnfrage" (Benziger Verlag, 1980). Volume, measuring approximately 5.75" x 8.5", is bound in dark blue cloth, with stamped gilt lettering to spine. Book is like new. Dust jacket, preserved in mylar cover, shows very light shelfwear. 71 pages.
"Many people draw a blank when confronting contemporary works of art. So much of it seems arbitrary and meaningless. Is this an unfair judgment? Has contemporary art not in fact done away with centuries of inherited tradition and thus with a great reservoir of significance for today's viewer?
The questions of meaning and of inherited tradition are ones that the theologian as well as the artist faces. In "Art and the Question of Meaning," Hans Küng rejects dismissals and one-sided judgments of contemporary art. With an eye to history he shows how in an age when meaning seems to have disappeared, art, even by what appears to be meaningless, provokes and confronts us with the question of meaning. Moreover, art today, the work of art, he agrues, holds out the possibility of overcoming the one-dimensionality of our ordinary daily existence. With its signs and symbols, colors, shapes, and forms, art contributes to an increased sense of the meaning and joy of life and may enable us to perceive something of that which involves us unconditionally -- the hidden and incomprehensible mystery all around us, the supra-sensible ground of mystery in the midst of a world of sense."