Gothic Cathedrals and LSD

Art critic Ken Johnson, who visits Monday, talks about the differences between God and psychedelic drugs in an interview that appears in Art in America:

Q: If the essence of psychedelic art is that it stems from and/or induces altered consciousness, why limit it to the post-LSD period? Wasn't a Gothic cathedral totally far out—as mind-blowing as any Fillmore West concert and lightshow—for its era's trembling believers? Didn't certain Victorian viewers groove for hours on tobacco, brandy and high-gloss depictions of Oriental harems and imperialist battle scenes?

JOHNSON: Comparisons like these are certainly intriguing and relevant. But one difference is that psychedelic culture was a grassroots, popular phenomenon. Millions of people, in an industrialized society, taking psychoactive drugs for purposes of fun and consciousness expansion—this was unprecedented, as far as I know.Medieval Christian culture was popular in a very different way. Maybe Gothic art did induce altered states of consciousness, but to facilitate ecstatic enjoyment as an end in itself was not the conscious goal. The purpose was to cement people ever more firmly to Church dogma and institutional hierarchy. Medieval religious culture was far from pluralistic, and it was strictly administered from the top down. If we today find Gothic art trippy, that says more about us than it does about its audience then. We might wonder what Grünewald and Bosch were on, but the culture of their day certainly did not favor the use of substances as a way to get close to God....