That is how it is. Art does not know a beyond, science does not know a beyond, religion does not know a beyond, not anymore.

     The fact that things other and mysterious were relevant to us had led my thoughts to angels, those mystical creatures who not only were linked to the divine but also to humanness, and therefore expressed the duality of the nature of otherness better than any other figure.  At the same time there was something deeply dissatisfying about both the paintings and angels, since they both belonged to the past in such a fundamental way, that part of the past we have put behind us, that is, which no longer fit in, into this world we had created where the great, the divine, the solemn, the holy, the beautiful, and the true were no longer valid entities but quite the contrary, dubious or even laughable.  This meant that the great beyond, which until the Age of Enlightenment had been the Divine, brought to us through the Revelation, and which in Romanticism was nature, where the concept of Revelation was expressed as the sublime, no longer found expression.  In art, that which was beyond was synonymous with society, or the human masses, which fully encompassed its concepts of validity.  As far as Norwegian art is concerned, the break came with Munch; it was in his paintings that, for the first time, man took up all the space.  Whereas man was subordinate to the Divine throughout the Age of Enlightenment, and to the landscape he was depicted in during Romanticism -- the mountains are vast and intense, the sea is vast and intense, even the trees are vast and intense while humans, without exception are small -- the situation is reversed with Munch.  It is as if humans swallow up everything, make everything theirs.  The mountains, the sea, the trees, and the forests, everything is colored by humanness.  Not human actions and external life, but human feelings and inner life.  And once man had taken over, there seemed not to be a way back, as indeed there was no way back for Christianity as it began to spread like wildfire across Europe in the first centuries of our era.  Man is gestalted by Munch, his inner life is given an outer form, the world is shaken up, and what was left after the door had been opened was the world as a gestalt: with painters after Munch it is the colors themselves, the forms themselves, not what they represent, that carry the emotion.  Here we are in a world of images where the expression itself is everything, which of course means that there is no longer any dynamism between the outer and the inner, just a division.  In the modernist era the division between art and the world was close to absolute, or put another way, art was a world of its own  What was taken up in this world was of course a question of individual taste, and soon this taste became the very core of art, which thus could and, to a certain degree in order to survive, had to admit objects from the real world.  The situation we have arrived at now whereby the props of art no longer have any significance, all the emphasis is placed on what the art expresses, in other words, not what it is but what it thinks, what ideas it carries, such that the last remnants of objectivity, the final remnants of something outside the human world have been abandoned.  Art has come to be an unmade bed, a couple of photocopiers in a room, a motorbike in an attic.  And art has come to be a spectator of itself, the way it reacts, what newspapers write about it; the artist is a performer.  That is how it is.  Art does not know a beyond, science does not know a beyond, religion does not know a beyond, not anymore.   Our world is enclosed around itself, enclosed around us, and there is no way out of it.

--Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle