Art and the artist : profane and the profound

The provocation for this piece is two accidental inputs. On reading Orhan Pamuk’s novel My name is Red one came across the trials and tribulations, political intrigues, murder, personal ambitions, artistic aspirations involving a milieu of book illustration artists in the late 16^th century Turkey. On a casual perusal of a tourist guide/information booklet on Khajuraho, India, one found comments by some western writers on the extensive erotic sculptures found on the site, some of which did not praise the tastes of the artists, while others found the prevailing tantrik traditions behind their apparently degraded taste. 

The points that I was provoked to ponder are somewhat different :

1.      How is the specific tension of uniting the profound and the profane common enough in the Indian artistic (especially in sculptural masterpieces) traditions rationalized, if at all, by art historians, writers who wrote about Indian art ?

2.      Secondly, as was most likely, these works of art must have had long gestation periods in the making and the artists would have to spend good parts of their lives secluded mostly in same-sex artist villages/communities for long periods, probably without contact with their families. Even when they were living with their families the long preoccupation with their art must have weighed on their mind as they went about their daily normal human lives over substantially long periods of time. How did they manage to dissociate the issues relating to the technical problems of their art from their appreciation of the explicit eroticism in their artistic subject ? Given the presumed education level of average artisans, workmen, was it possible that the majority of them were led in some way by their artist leaders to conjure some sort of rationalization for the same tension of uniting the profound and the profane ?

3.      It is important to bear in mind that artists are not a monolith, also they are normal human beings. In most cultures, like most ordinary people, they are steeped in tradition and normally not in a position to question spiritual concepts, divinity, the purity and the sacrosanct nature of these concepts. Thus it is somewhat remarkable that so many of these artisans/workmen, who must have been fully aware of the erotic nature of their artististic depiction on the one hand and the divine subjects or at least proximity to these subjects (within the same temple precincts) on the other, managed to create masterpieces that held the viewers over centuries in thrall.