The relationship between art and the sacred has been a constant since time immemorial. From the Renaissance on, art distanced itself from religion, as Panovsky (1927) points out, but little by little it will come to be understood as a religion, especially in romanticism. Walter Benjamin considered this vision consummated with the loss of the auratic character of the works (1935). Along the same lines, it was the artists themselves, especially after Duchamp, who tried to desacralize art, stripping it of its romantic categories. Arthur Danto sentenced the end of that stage with his thesis of the end of art in the mid-eighties. The transfiguration of banal objects into works of art today can be analyzed from the aesthetics of the everyday (Saito 2007).

The current, plural situation of the world highlights the need to rethink the construction of the image of the real (Didi-Huberman 2008), as well as the relationship between art and the sacred. Debates about the manifestations of the sacred (Eliade 1994), about what can or cannot be represented (Agamben 2005) or what is directly forbidden to represent (Nancy 2006) allow us to reread history from new categories, as well as to analyse artistic practices in a global world. Within this aspect we find the sacralisation of spaces, especially museums and galleries (Bown 2010), as well as the sacralisation of objects (Sudjic 2008).

The expansion of art has gone beyond its limits, so that these considerations reach human life itself. It is possible to observe how today the desacralization of life and the human body by science and the divinization of techno-science, in which contemporary redemptive aspirations, bordering on transhumanist theories, coexist.

The specific themes to be addressed are: The (de)sacralisation of art in the modern and contemporary world; the sacralisation of spaces and the transfiguration of everyday aesthetics; art, technology and religion: desacralisation of the human and the divinisation of technology.