If God is unknowable, and language is the limit of our knowledge, and art pushes the bounds of language, and true expression is dependent upon sincerity, then sincerity is the only avenue to spiritual seriousness.
This is what David Foster Wallace is getting at in his review of Feodor Frank’s Dostoyevsky:
Frank’s bio prompts us to ask ourselves why we seem to require of our art an ironic distance from deep convictions or desperate questions, so that contemporary writers either have to make jokes of them or else try to work them in under cover of some formal trick like intertextual quotation or incongruous juxtaposition, sticking the really urgent stuff inside asterisks as part of some multivalent defamiliarization-flourish or some such shit.
Which is to say, irony gives artists cover against sincerity. I think this gives more weight to the meaning of “meaning” in “the death of meaning”—not meaning literally, as in definition, but meaning as in the meaning of life.