Posted on 12/27/2008 12:54:23 PM PST by mojito
Nearly everyone caresor says he caresabout art. After all, art ennobles the spirit, elevates the mind, and educates the emotions. Or does it? In fact, tremendous irony attends our cultures continuing investmentemotional, financial, and socialin art. We behave as if art were something special, something important, something spiritually refreshing; but, when we canvas the roster of distinguished artists today, what we generally find is far from spiritual, and certainly far from refreshing.
It is a curious situation. Traditionally, the goal of fine art was to make beautiful objects. The idea of beauty came with a lot of Platonic and Christian metaphysical baggage, some of it indifferent or even hostile to art. But art without beauty was, if not exactly a contradiction in terms, at least a description of failed art.
Nevertheless, if large precincts of the art world have jettisoned the traditional link between art and beauty, they have done nothing to disown the social prerogatives of art. Indeed, we suffer today from a peculiar form of moral anesthesiaas if being art automatically rendered all moral considerations gratuitous. The list of atrocities is long, familiar, and laughable. In the end, though, the effect has been anything but amusing; it has been a cultural disaster.
(Excerpt) Read more at firstthings.com ...
Not me, I don’t care about art at all. I don’t buy art and I don’t sell art. The artists can all starve, I don’t give a fig.
OTH, I do spend money on superbly crafted items of great beauty. I care about fine craftmenship quite a bit.
I thought your name sounded familiar. You're the guy who thought the story about 'Santa' shooting up a Christmas party was funny. Talk about morons. I was just showing a couple of examples of how the left is trying to destroy art in America. You, on the other hand, made a sick remark about a mass murder.
To: mylife
There are no words
How about, "Duck!"?
2 posted on Thursday, December 25, 2008 10:13:43 AM by the invisib1e hand (appeasement is collaboration.)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2154166/posts?page=2#2
“...Deconstruction throws all objective meaning into question, so no one has to have the disappointing experience of being wrong or denied tenure, no matter how stupid one’s ideas. The burden of personal responsibility is mitigated, because one’s being is determined by accidental factors such as race, class and gender, not one’s owns values, decisions and actions. Skillful knowledge acquired by intense effort (or just being born smarter) is replaced by an obnoxious, hypertrophied adolescent scepticism that knows only how to question but not to learn.
It is grounded in a sort of bovine materialism that is not the realm of answers, but the graveyard of meaningful questions.
The primitive is idealized, because it is within everyone’s reach—I remember Rudy Giuliani’s comment about an artist’s rendering of the Virgin Mary with elephant dung: “If I can do it, it isn’t art.”
Of course, Giuliani was pilloried by the sophisticated N.Y art crowd, and with good reason. It is painful to have standards, because not everyone can attain them. ...” ~ Gagdad Bob (Robert Godwin, PhD)
Never Make a God of Your Irreligion
http://onecosmos.blogspot.com/2005/10/never-make-god-of-your-irreligion.html
Which is willful denial, which is the flaw in your original premise.
I was mistaken. You’re a petty moron with far too much time and toys.
Bookmark
Aha. So that’s your idea of art.
what about all that beauty on the inside stuff?
Well, if you’re going to call people ‘morons’ on a public forum, people ought to know what kind of a creep you are. Joking about a mass murder, especially one involving women and children, is beyond sick.
Don’t have time to read the article now. What happened to art, did morons committed mass murder on it and laughed?
I gather that's the effect of said Presidential Library.
He has now found his vision and will open on January 17 with a fabulous new show.
Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball have both been invaluable critics of the decay of art in the postmodern world.
This is a thoughtful essay. I think a bit more could have been made of the Platonic/Aristotelian trio of trancendentals: truth, beauty, goodness. Perhaps Kimball just assumes that everyone knows about that, but I’m afraid most people no longer do.
That, for a Christian, is where art ties into religion, because religion is all about what is real, true, good, beautiful. When you trade in the real for the material is where you run into trouble. Or, what I think he’s referring to when he says that the problems began back in the middle ages, when you trade in Aristotelian universalism for Ockham’s nominalism, that’s also where you run into trouble.
I had several opportunities to meet with Kramer and Kimball, and in their early years after founding their new magazine they thought very highly of high modernist art but hated pop art and postmodernist art. Perhaps Kimball is reconsidering that, too, in this essay, although he doesn’t quite say so.
“I haven’t really made a decision about what I think of Pollock, but it made me at least take a look and see if there is any there there.”
I don’t know if he mixed his drinking with his artwork.
I find some of his canvases pleasing to the eye. Interesting colors. Interesting textures. Interesting shapes.
He has now found his vision and will open on January 17 with a fabulous new show.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2154166/posts?page=67#67
now we’re talking.
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