Episode #21 – The Death of Ritual, God, and Narrative

In this episode of The Art Coach Podcast, I dive deep into the disappearance of ritual, myth, and narrative in our lives and in the art world. We explore what it means that Nietzsche declared, “God is dead”—not as a simple rejection of religion, but as the collapse of the cultural frameworks that once gave us orientation and meaning. With that collapse came the unraveling of ritual and the loss of narrative as a central force in art.

Drawing on Carl Jung, we look at how archetypes give art resonance, and why avoiding them leaves us with banality and surface-level cleverness. Through Susan Sontag’s challenge in Against Interpretation, we examine how our obsession with “what art means” has tamed its presence and stripped away its ritual power. And we expand the lens outward, asking what narrative means for us as human beings and how modern culture has reduced it to something fragmented, ironic, and often empty.

This is a call to artists: to recognize your practice as ritual, to reintroduce presence and narrative into your work, and to reclaim art’s role as something that orients, enchants, and grounds us in a disoriented world.

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