On the humanities

 

Museum Island, Berlin

Today marks one year since the WHO designated Covid-19 as a global pandemic. In a way, the year has been interesting, with the opportunity to observe all kinds of changes that happen when you remove (or add, I suppose) a number of variables from society. It feels like a million things have changed, but one that has especially stood out to me is how we as a public have lost access to the humanities. Obviously, there are other major factors involved as well, but I don't believe that it's a coincidence that the abrupt closure of museums, concert venues, theaters, etc. has walked side by side with expanding societal unrest. I think the impact of this temporary loss of our artistic institutions betrays the significant role these play in the human experience. It demonstrates how crucial it is to preserve them, because in many ways, they speak to our souls.

Since the nineteenth century, our culture has been steadily moving in a direction that could easily be called iconoclastic. The Enlightenment ushered in an age of science, empiricism, and materialism, putting everything Utilitarian on a pedestal. Within this cultural climate, technological or scientific innovation will always win out against artistic expression because there is no apparent "use" for the latter. Instead, the arts have devolved into mere ornamentation; something you keep on hand to make things look pretty or announce how important you are. We look down on the arts as glorified play; something the soft-minded among us need to leave behind as they grow up and get a real job.

Even modern art is an attack on art itself. Deconstruction has reduced the arts merely into a tool used to investigate or denounce how one demographic wields power over another. The creation of art is no longer possible, because all previously-held notions of what constitutes art are just arbitrary opinions of whatever group of taste-makers was most powerful, and therefore need to be abandoned if art is to be truly free. Thus, thousands of years of representational art give way to the abstract; the subjective pursuit of objective beauty gives way to a celebration of anti-beauty (ugliness); formal technique gives way to chaos. Since we don't like how everyone before us understood art, it's best to attack the concept altogether. It's an exercise in announcing that we aren't like other girls.

 

Both these conceptions of art - mere ornament or tool - strip everything numinous, transcendent, and desirable from it. Doing so has taken away the power of art.

STEM helps us in many ways, and I don't begrudge that at all. But we have done both STEM and the humanities a disservice by guiding the former into territories it has no business entering in the first place. The sciences might help us better understand the world around us, but they don't make the act of living in it any more bearable or worthwhile. This is where the arts come in. In the realm of the arts and humanities, the goals and priorities are different. It isn't really about innovating or discovering or improving something. Many people agree that it's impossible to truly define what art is, but most explanations come back to ideas of expressing, in a beautiful way, what we share in common as humans and how these participate in some greater meaning for our lives. It links us together with one another, but also with the transcendent - with the Divine. It is a balm for our souls. One look at the Psalms confirms this.

In a sadly-ironic turn of events, the last year has revealed the limits of modern science while simultaneously handicapping our ability to cope with that grim reality. We still have recorded music, streamed theatrical performances, and online collections, but the public/communal nature of art has been lost in translation. I miss the experience of responding to art in the company of other people; it makes me feel less of an individual and more of a human.

Keach and poetics (pt. 3)

Hohenschwangau, Bavaria

2. Christ is the Spring, or the Original
Of earthly beauty, and Celestial.
That beauty which in glorious Angels shine,
Or is in Creatures natural, or Divine,
It flows from him: O it is he doth grace
The mind with glorious beauty, as the face.

(The Glorious Lover, II.iii.49-54)

Following his discussion of the desirability of Christ's beauty, Keach turns his attention to its originality. 

Although there isn't any explicit reference to it, I think it's possible that Keach is interacting with Platonic thought in this passage. This comes through in several ways. In one sense, we see Plato's theory of forms in the tension Keach highlights between contingent, finite beauty we experience as humans and its relationship to its perfect, infinite “counterpart” in the character of God. Earthly beauty exists as a shadow of divine beauty, because the created by its very nature can only serve as a sort of typology for the creator. Earthly types and heavenly fulfillment is a common theme in puritan writing, as seen in Lewis Bayly's flagship text on spirituality, The Practice of Piety:

“...if thou believest that God is beauty and perfection itself, why dost not thou make him alone the chief end of all thine affections and desires? for if thou lovest beauty, he is most fair; if thou desirest riches, he is most wealthy; if thou seekest wisdom, he is most wise. Whatsoever excellency thou hast seen in any creature, it is nothing but a sparkle of that which is in infinite perfection in God...”

Keach also emphasizes way God's beauty is the origin or source of beauty as we experience it. Its function as a fountainhead for created beauty establishes its authority over the latter, as well as showcasing its role as the source which creates and empowers it. Because of this relationship, earthly beauty, at its best, is characterized by its humility. It is not something that is meant to draw attention to itself, but rather to draw the beholder's attention back to its divine origins. Yet, at the same time, this relationship also elevates earthly experiences of beauty because of their ability to connect humanity with the numinous.

I think it's also important to note that while the philosophical undertones are an interesting possibility here, it's likely that Keach is primarily focused on emphasizing orthodox trinitarian concepts like God's aseity and simplicity, and the way we bear his image in His communicable attributes. Not only is He the font from which we receive our experience of beauty or even beauty in its perfection, He is beauty. There's a sense that this portion of The Glorious Lover synthesizes New Testament discussions of God's ontology with the bride's joy in the beauty of her beloved in the Song of Solomon:

“For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be the glory forever.” (Romans 11.36)

“The God who made the world and all things in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands; nor is He served by human hands, as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives to all people life and breath and all things; and He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their habitation, that they would seek God, if perhaps they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us; for in Him we live and move and exist, as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we also are His children.’ Being then the children of God, we ought not to think that the Divine Nature is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and thought of man.” (Acts 17.24-28a)

“My beloved is dazzling and ruddy,
Outstanding among ten thousand.
...And he is wholly desirable.
This is my beloved and this is my friend,
O daughters of Jerusalem.” (Song of Solomon 5.10, 16)

-----

Keach concludes the passage with an interesting distinction between beauty of the “mind” and beauty of the “face.” On one level, this can be understood as a comparison between inner and outer beauty. In Sonnet XV of his Amoretti cycle, Spenser devotes the first twelve lines of his poem cataloguing his beloved's appealing physical traits, but, in the turn, he declares that her most important/precious feature is her character:

“But that which fairest is, but few behold,
  her mind adornd with vertues manifold.”

However, it's crucial to recognize that this is not simply a distinction between internal and external qualities (I'm staring at you, Every Contemporary Beauty Movement), but more precisely, a focus on the relationship between beauty and intellect. In the Renaissance context, beauty was not valued only for carnal/physical considerations, but, more importantly, for its intellectual qualities. To view it as a merely material phenomenon was to debase it to an animalistic drive and turn it into lust. This is where we get all the epithets about “brutish” appetites. Beauty was pure and true when it engaged all aspects of being human; in this context, it elevated the individual. Thus we see in Shakespeare's (most?) famous sonnet language that glorifies the enduring nature of an intellectual love connection over the vanishing appeal of the senses:

“Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
...Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come...” (CXVI)

All in all, it's an emphasis on conceptual beauty, or, in other words, virtue gained through understanding. For Keach, this ties back to the reformed dogma that faith and knowledge necessarily go hand in hand. Hearing the Word brings about faith (i.e. the ability to see Christ's beauty), and once we have this faith, we can finally begin to know Him.

Finally, I find it interesting that Keach doesn't mitigate material/earthly beauty here, but rather, affirms it. The key is that it must always be tied to virtue. And so we circle back to the ubiquitous Renaissance understanding of aesthetics, of art as something intended to “delight and instruct” (Sidney). I think that we can see this as yet another instance of Keach's project of reinventing the romance genre into something fundamentally wholesome - a marriage of aesthetics and devotion.

[Part One]

[Part Two]

On galleries

Cole: "The Arcadian or Pastoral State"

Recently, I went to the Milwaukee Art Museum to check out its (AMAZING!!) temporary exhibition "Nature and the American Vision." The collection focuses on the Hudson River School and features several early paintings of Niagara Falls, upstate New York, and - my favorite - Thomas Cole's 5-part series, The Course of an Empire. Highly recommended.

Anyways, since the museum's completed renovation this past November, I've acquired a much deeper appreciation for both gallery-visiting in general and the museum itself. On our breakneck joyride around Europe's greatest galleries, my friends and I often hurried from one famous painting/sculpture/building to another, in a frantic effort to see as many masterpieces as possible. Given the time restraints, I don't necessarily regret such a decision, yet I find myself wistfully remembering what it was like to stand in the presence of such workmanship. I wish I could have taken in more of each piece.

I returned to Milwaukee with a bit of a cynical attitude toward American art collections (and to be fair, it is hard to top the decadent concentration of art in places like the Vatican Museums or the Louvre); however, in the past several months, I've had the happy realization that this mindset wasn't fully justified, especially in Milwaukee. Weaving between the temporary exhibit and the permanent collection, I was struck by an awareness of the richness of every single piece. Of course, you have your mediocre ones, or those that fail to capture your interest; for every one of those, though, there is another that is quite good.

In the end, it actually began to be overwhelming. It made me realize that I have played the tourist even at my own, "home" art museum. Rushing from one painting to another, blazing through entire rooms in 3 minutes, I never stopped to cultivate a meaningful encounter with the pieces.

While I love the diverse gallery opportunities presented by large art museums, the sheer volume of art they offer can be dangerous. Living out one of the classic American stereotypes, we can easily fall into the trap of valuing quantity over quality. In focusing on the whole, we take each particular piece for granted.

The reality is that you could easily spend several hours - a whole visit - on just a room or two. It's an experiment I would like to try the next time I go. Instead of doing what I usually do - make value judgments based on my taste/mood, I want to pay closer attention to what the artist is telling me. To borrow a page from Shakespeare and his strategically-placed plays-within-plays, I'm learning that there needs to be a sense of humility, a willingness for art to change you. It isn't there just to look pretty (well, unless you're fond of Oscar Wilde & co. But I think I'd challenge even that).

On O'Connor (on Easter weekend)

"O'Connor's stories are about people struggling with one another, trying to wrest victories from the recalcitrance of love and fate. They are about the triumph and failure of the will, the divine and the human, and about the tragic consequences of our flawed perceptivity, which quietly stalk us all, like age and death. In spite of the brutal fates that so often befall her characters, O'Connor possesses a genuine sympathy for them, even as she modelled the majority after the secular humanists and materialists she so vehemently decried. This sympathy is born from a common humanity, the awareness on O'Connor's part that all of us share in concert the fundamental condition of sin and the possibility for spiritual advancement once we recognize the devil's hand within our own.

Flannery O'Connor remains one of the most difficult writers of the modern period, not because her tales are necessarily more complex than another's, but because her sensibilities and values are so foreign to her era. O'Connor's literary vision comes burning out of a distant time and place; it slashes like a demon's talon, repudiating modernity's complacent conviction that God had died a Victorian. To appreciate fully O'Connor's art, we must accept it in the religious context from which it was written. To do so requires the type of struggle that virtually forces the reader to identify with her own children - Francis Tarwater or, better still, her uncle Rayber. The secular reader wrestles with O'Connor in a manner similar to a willful child who is forever testing his parents' authority. The child may well become an adult with his own values that differ greatly from those of his parents, but in the end he will somehow show the influence of his parents' vision. He has to: it is in his blood."

Tony Magistrale, "'I'm Alien to a Great Deal': Flannery O'Connor and the Modernist Ethic" (97-98)

The penultimate book in my 20th Century class is Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood. Up till this point, the only other piece I had read was A Good Man is Hard to Find, but her reputation for strong Christian themes had left me interested in reading more. I'm about 3/4 the way through, and it has been one of the most difficult books I've yet read. Very dark, very bleak, very off-putting.

Bosch, "The Garden of Earthly Delights"

Even though I don't enjoy reading the novel, it's a fantastic piece of literature. I think the above quote is key to "getting" O'Connor. The characters/stories are distasteful on purpose; O'Connor is demonstrating for us the horror of a godless, thoroughly-secular life. I admire her for her willingness to stand alone amid the dogmatism of mid-century modernism.

I like the last few sentences of the quote's first paragraph as well. As a great supporter of the liberal arts as a way to unite - rather than divide - humanity, I have often struggled to reconcile the humanism of such a worldview with the reality of Christian theology. The talk about "celebrating the human experience" etc. makes me nervous, because while humanity does have great potential (we are image-bearers of God) it will never be able to fulfill this potential on earth. I appreciated the alternative perspective O'Connor brings to the conversation: We do indeed share many qualities in common, but rather than puff us up, this knowledge ought to lead to humility, because ultimately, we are all united in our fallen need for a Savior. Our common humanity is both beautiful and broken. O'Connor demonstrates the world's vital need for the promise of Redemption.

Like everything else

N.D. Wilson:

"What is the best of all possible things? That which is infinite, always present and undecaying. That which is both many and one. That which is pure, ultimate, and yet humble. That which is spirit and yet personal. That which is just and yet merciful. Yawheh, God. Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. 

What is the best of all possible Art? That which reveals, captures, and communicates as many facets of that Being as is possible in a finite space." 

(Notes From the Tilt-a-Whirl, p. 108)

THANK YOU LELAND RYKEN

The other day, when presenting my paper on Christian literary theory, I matter-of-factly stated that Christian theory should not be afraid to promote the Christian agenda (duhhh). I'm pretty sure I annoyed several of my classmates. That made me happy. Anyways, I am finishing up said paper and came across this quote by Ryken, which I am going to appropriate as validation.

Modern literary theory has championed the idea of interpretive communities - readers and authors who share an agenda of interests, beliefs, and values. Christian readers and writers are one of these interpretive communities. Everyone sees the world of literature through the lens of his or her beliefs and experiences. Christians are no exception. As an interpretive community, Christians should not apologize for having a worldview through which they interpret the world and literature.  

("A Christian Philosophy of Literature" in The Christian Imagination, p. 31.)

Literature is all about understanding said  "beliefs and experiences." Reason #83582950 why I hate postmodernism is that it strips literature of all meaning. Wayne C. Booth, one of my Chicago School (=great books) homies, described two possible functions of art: "showing" and "telling." "Showing" simply draws a picture; "telling" comments on it. We have a word to describe art which simply "shows": BAD. That kind of thing is the realm of art students in Drawing 101 who need to practice their drapery, or the budding poet who needs to master the form of a sonnet. But postmodernism seems to believe that complacently stalling here indefinitely is ok. In reality, it's sophomoric. Also naïve, because who are we kidding? Everybody has an agenda, whether they admit it or not.

 

Rant over, carry on.

Art history shenanigans

We are now studying Byzantine Art in our class, and today we looked at this mosaic of the emperor Justinian from the church of San Vitale in Ravenna (Italy). Does anything seem unusual about this?

THE BEATLES ARE STANDING ON THE LEFT.

THE BEATLES DISCOVERED TIME TRAVEL.

8am redemption

So today is Wednesday. I do not like Wednesdays. Up until this semester, they were never offensive to my delicate sensibilities, but this Fall.....whew. My schedule blew up and I am running around from one place to another from 8-5 before I meander back home to go to church. Somewhere I fit all my homework in. Oh my, it's a party.

 

This morning I was radiating joy, what with running late to school and panicking about an exam I had not studied for in a class by a famously difficult professor in a department where blow-off classes do not exist (HISTORY ALWAYS AND FOREVER BABY!!!). The day did not bode well.

 

But then it happened.

 

It was the end of Art History and we had just been discussing this sculpture. The key thing to understand about this period of Greek art is that they had apparently just discovered the smile, and naturally they overdid it and tacked one onto EVERYBODY. Think I'm exaggerating? Just google "Archaic Smile."



My apologies for the naked man, I know this is a family-friendly blog



I think this short exchange just about sums up the class's appreciation for the glory that is this piece of art:

Prof: "What does it look like is happening to him?"

Class: "Dying."

Prof: "How does he feel about it?"

My friend Bethany: "Fabulous."

Anyway, as if this could not be improved upon, within the last minutes of class, I sensed my professor was beginning to feel conflicted about something. After a few moments of consideration, she announced, "Ah, what the heck, we have time. This sculpture reminds me of a video. Have you guys ever seen the worst movie death scene ever?" What followed was the best 68 seconds of class I have yet experienced.

 

 

You'll thank me later.

A quick aesthetic rant

I'm starting to get a little impatient with the people who automatically dismiss a work of art as soon as they hear it is religious. They associate "Christian art" with "bad art." I'm also impatient with the "Christian artists" whose low standards perpetuate the stereotype.

 

Time to revisit the expectations we used to hold ourselves to.

 

Christian Art

 

Christian Art

 

Christian Art

More art history

Once again, the school year is about grace us with its presence and as I have another art history class this semester, I am reminded of my aforesaid textbook plans. This time, as selfies are the current film-related craze, I would like to honor them here. I hereby subtitle this post, "Memorable 'But First, Let Me Paint a Selfie' Moments in Art History."

Without further ado:

Van Eyck in The Arnolfini Marriage

Raphael in The School of Athens

Velasquez in Las Meninas

Van Gogh...well, this one is more after the fact. Just making sure everybody's paying attention.

Wait...what?

That college tuition being put to good work

My friend Bethany and I are in art history together, and we've decided we're going to write our own art history book. Unlike most tomes gracing the halls of academia with their presence, this magnum opus would be the fun textbook. Of course, we would include such timeless advice such as "It's all about the drapery" or "They're not naked, they're nude," but we would mainly focus on blessing the world with our "unique and peppery analysis" as one advance reviewer put it.

Anyways, now that I'm looking at art with the eyes of an author, I'm finally seeing all the classic archtypes that had never come to my attention before this class. Like photobombing ("Paintingbombing" just doesn't have the same ring to it).

A few examples, for now.....

Everyone else is distraught, and this guy is just chilling, slightly bored, in the corner

That facial expression is gold.
"No really bro, I think I made it into the painting!"

It's a photobomb flash mob

How's that for business?

Highlighting America's pragmatism from the beginning:

The first American painters were generally self-taught portrait or sign painters. Their work was flat, sharply outlined, and lacking in focal point. Portraiture was, not surprisingly, the most sought-after art form, since politics stressed respect for the individual. Itinerant limners, as early painters were called, painted faceless single or group portraits in the winter and, in spring, sought customers and filled in the blanks.

(The Annotated Mona Lisa p. 72)

Oh, the possibilities for today. Haha.

I love this guy

Being a bit of an art history aficionado, I'll occasionally find myself staring at random pictures for extended amounts of time. It's almost never to admire the composition or the brilliance of the symbolism like someone who just called herself an "art history aficionado" ought to be doing. No, I'm usually just fascinated by what the people inside it are up to.

Marriage a la Mode is a series of paintings by the English artist William Hogarth ridiculing standard aristocratic marriages of the day. The second painting in the series shows a married couple the morning after an all-night party:

Notice that guy in the left-hand corner?

Is his facial expression not awesome? One look at him and you know exactly what he's thinking. How many times have we all felt the same way? You can't not sympathize with him. I just love it.

Best Picture Ever

The Bookworm by Carl Spitzweg

 

"A room without books is like a body without a soul."

Cicero

Gotta love art history

I've been reading The Annotated Mona Lisa because I'm doing a little Renaissance history, and found that Michelangelo was quite the character:

"His wit could be cruel, as when he was asked why the ox in another artist's painting was so much more convincing than other elements. 'Every painter,' Michelangelo said, 'does a good self-portrait.'"

NICE. Oh, and then there's this one about Leonardo da Vinci:

"He died at the age of 67 in France, where he had been summoned by Francis I for the sole duty of conversing with the king."

That's an original job. Now, I know plenty of people I'd pay not to talk........