[vannrox]

An awesome read.

[vannrox]

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Christ in the Wilderness
By Ivan Nikolaevich Kramskoy
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[Hank Kerchief]

• The purpose of all things is the enjoyment of those who use them.

• The purpose of art is the enjoyment of those that use it. Everything else said about the purpose of art is so much blather.

• The kind of art any individual will enjoy is determined by the kind of person they are. The trite mediocre majority will enjoy trite mediocre art. The exceptional individual cannot enjoy the insipid fare that satisfies the average. He can only be bored or irritated by it. But the art that the exceptional enjoy cannot be enjoyed by the average, because it is too difficult. One measure of art is the demand it places on those who enjoy it. The average person will despise great art because it is too difficult. The exceptional will despise the commonplace because it is too easy.

  The Autonomist Notebook - Art

[VRWC_minion]

Our eyes and visual cortex are designed to pick out shapes and hints of half-hidden presences, and to recognize the colors, textures, and fine details of natural objects. These are the necessary skills of a hunter-gatherer species,.... to resolve the outline of a camouflaged animal in hiding, to remember and find again a nutritious berry, root, or herb

And I thought our keen eye was so we could get laid.

[onedoug]

There's an implied certitude in this that art is an end in itself.

The 1st & 2nd of The Ten Commandments enjoin the notion of "false gods", of which art, beauty, money...for its or their own sake, diminsh humankind, by diminishing God in that image.

Only God is God. Not Creation. Nor even creativity.

[edwin hubble]

I thought, from the post, that this might be Frederick Jackson Turner, famous from the Turner Thesis in American History.

Just a coincidence.

[TradicalRC]

Interesting article. I have been wrestling with some of these things as well. Art does seem to exist on a spectrum: on one end you find art symbolic and transcendant, on the other end representational and immanent. Currently we find ourselves in a decadent phase of "pure" immanence without any representation. I believe that the best art is a sythesis of Truth, Goodness and Beauty and above all, serves God. Art that falls outside of that may still be art but of a lesser quality. I think that the art which comes closest to fulfilling those standards is found largely in Europe from Medeival to the Renaissance. Its ultimate expression has not yet been seen by me, although the level of craftsmanship in the nineteenth century French painter William Adolphe Bougereau comes close. Dorothy Sayers had an interesting essay titled Toward a Christian Aesthetic found in the book The Whimsical Christian. Representational art aims at the transcendant aesthetically whenever an artist arranges colors in a complex fashion and conveys a sense of light.