Entries Tagged 'Art' ↓

You have probably heard of that other example of monstrous evil, Aliza Shvarts, the Yale student who created a work of “art” that consisted of repeatedly conceiving via artificial insemination and repeatedly giving herself an abortion. Though some have said it was a hoax, Shvarts insists that she really did this to yourself and to her unborn children.

Washington Post editorial page journalist Charles Lane goes into what she meant with her work of “art” and what this, in turn, tells us about what she had been learning at Yale. From The Art of Folly at Yale:

Among her “conceptual goals,” she wrote in the Yale Daily News, was “to assert that often, normative understandings of biological function are a mythology imposed on form. It is this mythology that creates the sexist, racist, ableist, nationalist and homophobic perspective, distinguishing what body parts are ‘meant’ to do from their physical capability.” Shvarts wanted to show that “it is a myth that ovaries and a uterus are ‘meant’ to birth a child.”

Lane segues into a review of a book by a Yale professor who protests what his colleagues have done to the humanities:

Last year, Anthony T. Kronman, the former dean of Yale’s law school, published “Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life.” This superb book traces the historical rise and fall of the humanities, which, Kronman writes, “are not merely in a crisis. They are in danger of becoming a laughingstock, both within the academy and outside it.”

In the past, Kronman argues, colleges and universities understood that undergraduates were hungry for answers to the Big Question: What is the meaning of life? And schools believed that not only religion but also higher education could help students find them. Humanities departments focused on great works of Western civilization, from Homer to Shakespeare. In short, Kronman writes, they gave their students a four-year seat in the unending “great conversation” of their civilization.

But between political correctness and the “publish or perish” ethic of the modern research university, the humanities have lost the desire and the capability to guide students’ spiritual quests. Instead, humanities professors stake their authority on an unrelenting critique not just of contemporary society but of meaning itself.

Once, humanities teachers cultivated perspective in their young charges; now, many of them instill grievance. The biological function of female reproductive organs can be portrayed as some kind of injustice. Or so Aliza Shvarts learned.

As I keep saying, where I am, at Patrick Henry College, we still cultivate the Humanities as this book says we should, as opposed to the inhumanities that dominate higher education elsewhere.

Yesterday, April 6, was the day set aside to commemorate the two Reformation artists Lucas Cranach and Albrecht Dürer, this being the day the latter artist died. (Are Lutherans the only ones to mark this day? Did these artists get on the Anglican calendar? I believe the ELCA throws in Michaelangelo, the humanist Catholic artist. Does anyone know?)

Read A man for all seasons - Spring 2008 - RA Magazine - Royal Academy of Arts, growing out of the big Cranach exhibit at the Royal Academy that has the contemporary art world all astonished. The article surveys Cranach’s career in an interesting way, though the author does not “get” the Christian part, or how the Reformation put together what this critic assumes is contradictory.

Albrecht Dürer was an even greater and more influential artist. He pioneered highly realistic painting, including the genre of the human-free landscape. He was earlier than Cranach, captivated by Luther’s Reformation when it was brand new and he was in his last years. His most famous work: Those oft-reproduced praying hands.

Wikipedia has some good write-ups, with samples of their work, for both Cranach and
Dürer.

You might want to contrast the work of Cranach & Durer on their special day with another artist much in the news, the late Andy Warhol. The conservative art critic says this about him in a posting entitled Roger Kimball Warhol vs. art:

According to the philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto, Andy Warhol was the nearest thing to a “philosophical genius” that twentieth-century art produced. Why? Because he helped complete the assault—begun by Marcel Duchamp in the early years of the 20th century—on the traditional understanding of art as a distinctive, and distinctively valuable, realm of experience. Whether that activity is best understood as “philosophical” I will leave to one side. It certainly did a lot to change, not to say undermine, practice of art in the later part of the twentieth century. I have always felt that Warhol’s chief talent was not philosophical but promotional. The man had an uncanny talent—genius, even—for publicity. For me, his remark that “Art is what you can get away with” takes us close to the center of his achievement—not, I believe, an aesthetic achievement, or even a philosophical one, but assuredly something special in the annals of shameless cultural hucksterism.
Warholism is not the only perspective determining the shape of the art world today, but it is a strong, perhaps a dominant, force.

Think of that: a dominant force in today’s art world rejects the notion that art is a distinctively valuable realm of experience.

Warhol, of course, is the “pop-artist” of Campbell Soup cans, Marilyn Monroe prints, and films such as “Sleep,” consisting of 5 and a half hours that show nothing more than a man sleeping. That work was dutifully screened in Washington lately.

Christians have been accused, rightly in some cases, of rejecting art, but today it’s the art world that’s rejecting art!

Do you see why Christians have an ADVANTAGE over the secularists when it comes to art?

First David Mamet, now Tom Stoppard, the British playwright, turns away in revulsion from 1960’s-era radicalism to find his inner conservative. Read 1968: The year of the posturing rebel.

In a comment to “Aesthetics & American Idol,” Reader Mason Ian perfectly describes the “arduous” process of perceiving the greatest beauty:

Learning to subjectively like what is objectively good at first bounced off of my 3am quick-read blog-scan. But then I realized that this exact thing happened to me and I shall anecdote-ize it thus:

When first I approached Milton’s Paradise Lost I knew that I “should” treasure it as a sublime and beautiful epic of written art. But i could only (at first) force myself to appreciate it from the outside, like looking at an utterly alien thing that all others considered beautiful. You look at it sideways, squint a bit, trying to see what they see… but it is unutterably alien. Perhaps you see an angle here or there that has a symmetrical form that is pleasing, a curve here, a line there… but the whole is so beyond your current vantage point that the beauty is lost by your own unelevated perspective.

Then, after forcing yourself to merely “mentally ascribe” the designation of beauty to the form, you slowly achieve the ability to connect the slivers of recognizable traits of beauty that you CAN see from your current state.

This is achieved in literature by reading more. The more you read, the more you read. Sounds like very droll truism, but by it I mean the process by which reading one book end us turing you on to several other books, other authors, different ideas and concepts and styles. I read Samuel Taylor Coleridge and find a dozen more obscure authors through his quotes and references, which in turn leads me to more reading. Then, after ten years I come back to Milton and find that Paradise Lost IS beautiful to me in a very different way than the alien beauty I had firs admired as an outsider.

So at first I liked it for reasons outside of myself (others regarded it as the pinnacle of English poetry, etc, etc) then I learned to love it myself, through my own tastes and my own reflection.

We go from being outsiders to being insiders.

However, as it was pointed out, hollywood goes another way. The simple and quick way. the way of the lowest common denominator. Grasping beauty and goodness is a slow art that requires years of honing and exercise. Who has time? Pare down the representation of love to three lines of cheesy dialogue and a wet kissing scene and the audience is satisfied right?

Hardly. Here’s to those who take the time to find and create what is beautiful. It is a long and arduous journey but one which holds the most epic of rewards.

See, Milton and Shakespeare don’t make concessions to our impoverished vocabularies. You may have to read them with a dictionary at first. And they don’t pause every twelve minutes for a word from their sponsors. They go their own way and we have to catch up. But it is worth it when we do. The very subjective pleasure, if you want to reduce everything to this, is so much greater and deeper and more intense with these writers than with the lesser entertainment we content ourselves with (for one thing because we don’t always want to involve ourselves so much or work so hard–which is fine sometimes, as long as we don’t reduce our aesthetic standards to our own lazy pleasures and exclude what is really objectively good).

Grunewald’s “Crucifixion”

(Note how the same artist of this utterly dead Jesus renders Him at Easter, below. You may want to save that view, as well as the other posts on the Resurrection, for Easter day.)

OK, OK, I know I was bad-mouthing “American Idol” this season when it first started, but nevertheless I have been watching and it has gotten interesting. The certain winner will be David Archuleta, who has all of the teeny-bopper votes of last season’s Sanjaya with the added advantage that he can actually sing well. The two best singers, however, in my opinion, are the Irish waitress with the unfortunate tattoos Carly Smithson and the rocker with Tulsa connections David Cook.

That doesn’t mean I LIKE them the best. In this ongoing seminar on aesthetics that we have been conducting, it is important to realize that there is a huge difference between saying “that is good” and “I like that.” The former is an objective statement. The latter is a subjective response. Most confusions about aesthetic matters come from mixing up the two kinds of judgments. Indeed, ignoring the first one, considering the objective merits, and thinking that LIKING something is that same as recognizing its beauty. We can LIKE all kinds of things–things that make us feel gooey inside, nostalgic associations, easy jolts of hedonism, things we agree with, appeals to our sinful nature (which is why Hollywood goes the way it does)–whereas discerning beauty requires knowledge of the art form and careful attention and reflection. Growing in taste involves learning to subjectively “like” what is objectively “good.”

Anyway, the two performers on Idol that I LIKE, though I’m not saying they are necessarily as good as the others, are Brook White, who sends forth such a positive and joyful vibe, and Michael Johns, the bloke from Australia, who sings with soul but who does not overdo the special effects like the others tend to.

Remember the aesthetic lesson of the day: DON’T GO BY WHAT YOU LIKE. GO BY WHAT IS GOOD.

Grunewald’s “Resurrection”

(By the same artist who painted the Crucifixion, above. From the deadest Jesus to the most alive Jesus.)

We’ve been bragging about Lucas Cranach as an artist, but what about a contemporary artist from our very own Cranach community, Sarah Hempel Irani, a.k.a. Sarah from Maryland? She too is a very gifted artist who expresses her faith in her vocation. Check out her website, which includes information on how you or your church could have or even commission some of her portraits or sacred art: hempelstudios.com

Consider this example of her work, a sculpture of Mary at the Annunciation. Note how expressive Sarah has made this block of marble!

Thanks–again–to Paul McCain at Cyberbrethren for keeping up with the Lucas Cranach boom. This achingly lovely portrait of Princess Sybille of Cleves is on sale for $4-$6 million.

And Paul quotes from the catalog description. Here is just a sampling of what it says about this young woman, a true saint of the Reformation:

This portrait of Princess Sybille of Cleves (1512-1554) was painted when she was fourteen years old and newly betrothed to Johann Friedrich I (1503-1554), the future Elector of Saxony. The oldest daughter of Johann III, Duke of Cleves, and Maria of Jülich-Berg, Sybille grew up at court in Düsseldorf with her sister Anne, one of the future wives of Henry VIII. Her marriage into the House of Saxony placed Sybille in the middle of the greatest ideological struggle of the sixteenth century, a reformation not only of the church but also of the state. A committed friend and supporter of Martin Luther, Johann Friedrich was actively engaged in the Reformation and took dramatic political and military risks to protect the reformatory movement. Sybille conducted a correspondence of her own with Martin Luther and actively supported her husband’s many campaigns, defending Wittenberg in his absence during Emperor Charles V’s siege of the city in 1546.

The Emperor’s siege of Wittenberg after Luther’s death was a huge conflict. Luther’s son Hans is said to have fought on the walls. That this woman led the defense is incredible. The Emperor eventually won, thinking he crushed the Reformation. Little did he know.

Anyway, that Cranach’s art speaks so strongly to people today should be an opening for us to explain the faith and the worldview that underlies his greatness.

Consider the range of his work and notice how free Cranach is. Notice how he appreciates individual human beings. Notice how he appreciates the beauty of nature and of ordinary life. Notice his edge in ridiculing vice and condemning corruption in both individuals and in the church. Notice how he experiences no contradiction between creativity and order, Biblical reality and his own reality. Notice his sense of vocation, of loving and serving his neighbor through his God-given gifts as an artist, a businessman, the mayor of Wittenberg, a lay leader in his congregation. How can we get this Christian sensibility back in our own times?

Paul McCain points to even more critical acclaim for our man Lucas Cranach, whose art is being featured in a major exhibit at the Royal Academy in London. Listen to Laura Cumming marvel at how modern, how new, how relevant Cranach seems. She even says he is “our contemporary”:

It is hard to believe there could be any great masters of the past still waiting to be rediscovered, in this country at least, but so it is with German painter Lucas Cranach. Apart from a tiny glimpse of him at the Courtauld last year, this is the first show ever mounted in Britain. Exhilarating, dramatic, humorous and harrowing by turns, Cranach turns out to be an artist for our times, despite being 500 years old, and with 70 works representing his amazing range, this is an almost perfect exhibition. . . .

It is easy to make a modern figure out of Cranach, about whom an unusual amount is known. Thrice mayor of Wittenberg as well as its richest citizen, property developer and founder of the first licensed pharmacy, in his considerable career - he died in 1553 at 81 - he worked for three successive Electors of Saxony. He introduced colour to printmaking, printed Luther’s version of the New Testament and depicted all of the major public intellectuals of the day, often many times over with the help of assistants, leading to the crass misconception that his studio was something like Warhol’s Factory.

But Cranach’s is a singular imagination, shining clearly even in works begun by other hands. It is in his sympathy for women, children and peasants, in his narrative elan, his penetrating empathy and his uncommon use of humour to emphasise horror. . . .

The overwhelming revelation of this show is of an artist who believed that nothing - no emotion, no experience, no vision - was beyond figurative depiction, from the most primitive instinct to the most numinous ideal. And the whole spectrum is there, above all, in his paintings of Christ. On the one hand, he is all warmth, not just blessing but kissing the little children. On the other, in an image as direct as a photograph, he stares straight back at you, devastatingly close but worlds away: God made Man, yet forever unknowable.

Unknowable? It sounds like Cranach knows Christ very well. The critic also says that he is religiously complex because he painted also for Catholic patrons, but she doesn’t understand that there were not “two churches” in the early days of the Reformation, but that the expectation is that the true gospel would spread all the way to Rome.

But this is what these critic’s response to Cranach’s art tells me: If Cranach’s art resonates today, I maintain that his theology would resonate today. His freedom and the exuberant life the critic senses comes from Cranach’s grasp of the gospel of that Christ he portrays so powerfully.

Cranach’s faith, grounded as it is in doctrine and expressed in his vocation, is what the emerging church is looking for. His is the true ancient-future worship.

I think that we stodgy and out-of-touch Lutherans–though I’m not talking just about Lutherans–can amaze the postmodernists just like Cranach does this art critic.

David Mamet is one of the few contemporary playwrights and screenwriters whose work, in my experience, is always worth taking in. He has announced, in an essay in the Village Voice, no less, that he has experienced a change of heart and is now a conservative. The piece is entitled Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal’.

Caution: some bad language, always a Mamet weakness.