Two interesting articles on art.

1. Via Anti-Climacus, an NYT review of a book that wrestles with high art's often confused relationship with violence and violation. Excerpt from the review:

   This is an important and frequently surprising book. By reframing the history of the avant-garde in terms of cruelty, and contesting the smugness and didacticism of artist-clinicians like the notorious Viennese Actionist Hermann Nitsch and other heirs of Sade and Artaud, Nelson is taking on modernism’s (and postmodernism’s) most cherished tenets. After all, aesthetic shock has under­written most of our cultural innovation for over a century.

   This seems like a work that would fit comfortably alongside volumes of theological aesthetics.
2. An article at The Curator called "Eclipsing the Object," in which the writer first diagnoses pathologies in contemporary art criticism and then attempts a healthy essay that really looks at the art. Not that I can really vouch for the diagnosis, but it's quite certainly not the usual traditionalist rhetoric. (A quick side note: Maritain makes a big deal about concepts being tools by which we grasp things themselves. Perhaps the Thomist account of intellection pushes you inexorably toward the seeing described in this article, whereas a "modern" epistomology continually retreats into conceptual frames. If so, that's one answer to my earlier questions about intellection...)

Maritain.

I've started reading John Trapani's Poetry, Beauty, & Contemplation: The Complete Aesthetics of Jacques Maritain. I picked this one after reading Matthew Milliner's hearty recommendation in the pages of First Things (subscription required). I've been thinking about what I hope to get out of such a book.

Philosophical theories of aesthetics need to account for both the experience of the person encountering an artwork and the creative work of the artist. My particular interests follow that division. First, how do I account for my own range of responses to art, high and low? A good book on aesthetics will help me understand my own judgments, and perhaps render comprehensible works that have thus far been mystifying. Second, what is the proper function of artistic communication in a Christian community? This question takes special weight for an evangelical like me, who has concluded that the artists of his subculture, though well-intentioned, generally got it wrong.

Maritain is a promising figure. He was a Thomist philosopher, which certainly embeds his work in the Christian tradition. But he was also a well-connected Parisian intellectual in the first half of the twentieth century, and counted as his friends artists whose work is decidedly modern. So I expect to find his pre-modern philosophy in conversation with more contemporary theories of art.

My worry has to do with the Thomism. As best I understand the history, Thomas Aquinas follows Aristotle in positing a human faculty that deals directly with the essences of things. When I look at an apple, I get some information from sight, but my soul's grasping that this is an apple means not just that I've applied a label to what I take to be a single thing, but that my soul has perceived that this is appleness itself. (I'm writing roughly, and surely have all the terms wrong.) I expect that Maritain will also take this view of intellection in his discussion of beauty, and argue that encountering beauty is something other than finding a pleasing conceptual arrangement "in my mind" or experience a complex sensory pleasure. The problem is that this view of the soul doesn't seem at all natural or intuitive to me.

So what would it take to convince me? I'm not sure if this book will put Maritain's theories in conversation with those of other thinkers, or if it will merely give me the framework to chase down these conversations in Maritain's own texts. But judging from the first few chapters, the book won't be a bad read, and I'll post my findings here as I go.

"Discipline is not a mystery."

Via Meaghan Ritchey, an article on just sitting down to do it. Simple instructions for artists, which happen to line up perfectly with what Sertillanges recommended for aspiring thinkers:

Choose a time to make work and hold that time inviolate. If you lack inspiration, wait. Don't do anything else.

The work will come.

Artists and critics who will say the Credo.

Sort of puzzled by the closing sentences of Jonathan Fitzgerald's latest post at Patrol:

“We need critics who are Christians, who understand the importance of religious content in art and who can see it as art and not simply a means to an end. Likewise, we need artists who are Christians to make art and release it not only into the shallow pool that is evangelicalism, but to the world at large. This will be ‘Christian Art,’ and it will be art. It will be something we can be proud of.”

Is Fitzgerald suggesting that such artists and critics don't exist? Or is he just wrapping up an off-the-cuff blog post with a quick burst of rhetoric? At any rate, he's taking a swipe at Relevant Magazine here, which is almost certainly not where he's going to find what he's looking for.

I'd suggest Books and Culture as a place where Christian critics — evangelicals, even! — are doing good work right now. There's almost too much Christian blogging about the visual arts: see Dan Siedell, Matthew Milliner, and Curator, for starters. I'll admit I'm not sure where to go for music criticism; there used to be a magazine in New York that pressed hard on questions of faith in music, but I think they changed their focus. I'd like to give my friend Dave Zahl some attention, though with the warning that his writing on music is part of a much bigger blog. Also, Calvin College's Festival of Faith and Music just happened.

So much for the critics. As for the artists: do I really need to write another paean to Marilyn Robinson, Sufjan Stevens, Whit Stillman, or Terrence Malick? If the response to my praise would be another essay trying to explain why these mainliners are so much better at art than Evangelicals, I suppose I'd just have to break out my contrarian-hipster defense of Rich Mullins, Amy Grant, and Michael Card. And does anyone really want it to come to that?

Milliner on beauty: Barth and Maritain.

I'm more or less recording this for my own reference, since I have absolutely nothing to add, but Matthew Milliner's been on a roll, writing-wise.

He wrote a blog post called “Beauty and the Barthians,” which explains why, for all the good things to be found in Barth's theology, Barth is a dead end as far as theological aesthetics are concerned. I'm just dipping my toes into Barthian waters now, and I'm really glad that Milliner has already mapped out how Barth relates to Hart, whose book The Beauty of the Infinite I read and enjoyed several years ago.

And then, a few days after showing us a dead end, Milliner points to the more promising paths explored by Jacques Maritain in an article for Public Discourse about “The New Maritainians.” Clearly, I'm going to have to chase down some of the books he's mentioning here.

Really, millinerd.com just keeps getting better and better.

Beauty absorbing sublimity.

Eve Tushnet has an article up at Inside Catholic on beauty and sublimity. It's well worth reading, but her definitions of beauty and sublimity are not quite the same as mine (which I have poached more or less whole from David Bentley Hart's The Beauty of the Infinite).

Tushnet wants to start with Burke:

“It's just about impossible to talk about the sublime without reference to Edmund Burke's rakish essay, ‘A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful,’ although we shouldn't end there . . . Beauty, in this understanding, is found in those objects and people we can cherish; and therefore in those we can master. The sublime, by contrast, inheres in what masters us.”

She rightly goes on to distinguish the Christian sublime from the Burkean sublime. For Tushnet, the most important difference is that, for the Christian with eyes to see, sublimity is to be found in what is humble, even ridiculous. Saintly foolishness is sublime.

But is this really the best way to parse out beauty and sublimity? Well, David Bentley Hart managed to write a whole book about beauty, with a large section on various postmodern sublimities, without mentioning Burke, except perhaps by including him in a broad allusion:

“As it happens, beauty has fallen into considerable disfavor in modern philosophical discourse, having all but disappeared as a term in philosophical aesthetics. In part this is attributable to the eighteenth-century infatuation with Longinus's distinction between the beautiful and the sublime, one of whose unfortunate effects was to reduce the scope of the beautiful to that of the pretty, the merely decorative, or the inoffensively pleasant; in the climate of postmodern thought, whose humors are congenial to the sublime but generally corrosive of the beautiful, beauty's estate has diminished to one of mere negation, a spasm of illusory calm in the midst of being's sublimity, its ‘infinite speed.’ ” (15)

It could be that that Hart and Tushnet don't have much more than a terminological disagreement; they may be working within roughly the same conceptual scheme. For Hart, “beauty is the true form of distance,” (18) which means that it includes what we master and what masters us as part of the same right order of creation.

I can't help but think of Sam Gamgee and the Elves in Tolkien: the Elves mastered the hobbits and were therefore Burkean-sublime to Sam, whereas the simplicity and courage of the hobbits was Burkean-beautiful to the Elves. Yet Sam's Burkean-beautiful dedication to Frodo becomes nothing if not Christian-sublime by the time they arrive in Mordor. For Hart, this would all be Christian beauty, all covered in this single term.

I have to admit that I have a preference for Hart's definitions. Take the music of Bach (whom Hart terms “the greatest of Christian theologians” (282) ). In the biggest works, there is plenty that is pretty and comforting, but there is also much that is awesome in the old sense. Or in the fugues, where the “beautiful” upper voices are so often set in play with the strong, even fearsome bass counterpoints. These sorts of beauty and sublimity do not seem to me to be ultimately separable.

But not all that is sublime is beautiful in this sense. For Kant, Hart says, sublimity was a rupture in the scheme of beauty, and contains within itself a violence. European philosophers developed this sublimity of violence and rupture in four relevant ways. I'll attempt to sum them up based on my reading of Hart, but I'm far out of my depth here. We have the differential sublime, as described by Derrida, in which difference continually escapes from metaphysics; the cosmological sublime of Deleuze, where a chaotic violence is the order of things and representation is but another manifestation of that violence; a Heideggerian ontological sublime, which I simply don't understand at all; and the ethical sublime of Levinas, in which duty and obligation to the Other take on a staggering, stupefying dimension. These sublimities—they clearly are not beauties—oppose theological beauty.

I wonder where Tushnet and Hart would really disagree. Hart seems to be much more committed to Christian beauty as an expression of the primordial peace of the Christian creation and the inner peace and harmony of the Trinity. And Hart argues for the ancient doctrine of divine apatheia, which holds that God does not suffer in his divine nature because the Trinity is, has always been, always will be, infinitely peaceful and infinitely complete. I wouldn't presume to read a position on apatheia into Tushnet's article. (Lee from A Thinking Reed had an informative post on apatheia last week.)

I suppose my basic point is this: isn't the “Christian sublime” just the sublime that is covered by a robust Christian definition of beauty? Failed beauty—saccharine kitsch, for example—is just not beautiful enough. It would be better if it were more deeply beautiful. But human cruelty can be as fully sublime and incomprehensible as any frozen waterfall: no additional amount of sublimity will fix the problem. Indeed, it seems to me that no true beauty is without a place in Christian thinking, whereas many kinds of sublimes fail to make the cut. Can I go so far as to say “Christian sublimity” is only Christian insofar as it is also beautiful?

UPDATE: Eve asks, “Can there be a peaceful rapture?”

Which is a great question, and I'm going to leave it at that for the time being.

“Sculpture can speak where words fail.”

Normally, I'm not a fan of hoax art or shock art. But I think David Cerny's big prank on the EU is hilarious, albeit somewhat distasteful. I wish I could find the full statements he included with each so-called “entry.”

Jumping into a good conversation about Damien Hirst.

I'm going to aim at renarrating the dispute between Helen and Freddie on the subject of Damien Hirst, the man who put that poor shark in a tank of formaldehyde, and then got the tank into the contemporary art wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Helen has already responded once; we'll see where it goes from here.

If I'm reading Helen's article correctly, the line that explains her approach is “[e]dgy bobos admit — and real bohemians insist — that art can be both immoral and ugly, as long as it's interesting.” But art doesn't get in a museum at all unless someone out there thinks that it's interesting. The key question is: interesting to whom? And in what way?

One thing about interest—shall we say desire? appeal?—is that, although it is subjective, it's also interpersonal. We're always trying to convince each other that something is interesting or uninteresting. And while it usually works better in the first direction, there have been times that I thought something was absolutely fascinating until someone pointed out to me that it was a bad copy of something better. (Case in point: me, middle school, Christian rock music.)

I mean, I thought the shark tank was interesting on several levels. For one thing, it was big, and you I walked around it, and saw how the light bent through the liquid. The shark itself still had that creepy dead-eye shark-stare. If the tank were just in some natural history museum, I'd find it interesting in the same way. But then there was the next level, which was: “Why is this thing sitting here in the Metropolitan Museum of Art?” On this level, it was interesting in the same way that a well-dressed man on the sidewalk shouting nonsense phrases at the top of his lungs would be interesting, with the difference that the man on the sidewalk interrupts my day, but I walk through the Met to have my day interrupted.

But to live in a world where people found men shouting nonsense consistently more interesting than good conversations, or sermons, or philosophical lectures: that would be strange.

This is where Freddie's historical narrative comes in. The “crisis of representation” that we all know from our “boilerplate undergrad art history” courses really happened. If I may keep extending my metaphor, we miscommunicated so badly with ourselves that we began to suspect that conversation itself was nonsense. And we wanted something that could escape nonsense: authenticity. So the fact of a dead shark in a tank in the museum is partially explained by the story of this crisis, which is in many ways an interesting story. We are all trying to figure out where we go from here.

Helen is basically saying that the “reductive mania for honest communication” is a little bit played out at this point, and she would like to see something else. But she's making a traditionalist argument, which, in this case, is not the same as a strictly conservative argument.

“Art has never really stopped being in crisis,” says Freddie. The conservative wants to end the crisis by going back to some ideal past when men were men and painters could paint some real purty horses: to keep talking about the things we were talking about before we got into this mess. The traditionalist, on the other hand, just wants a good conversation. The traditionalist says: “You can keep talking nonsense, and about nonsense, if you want, but some of us would like to talk about something else.”

Insofar as contemporary art represents what we might playfully call the tradition of no more traditions—and let's go ahead and admit that it would be wrong to claim that all of it does—it's like a group of people who just can't stop talking about something. And insofar as I am a member of a group or two that was not completely embroiled in the crisis of representation, I might be legitimately interested in other things: religious art, for instance.

It seems that Freddie's ultimate problem with art traditionalism is that it “privileges just one damned thing after another.” Well, yes, of course, but so does any good conversation.

Robertson Davies on the task of the modern artist

It's too bad that the Shvarts affair happened during my break. I suppose it's too bad that it happened at all, but I wish I had sorted through it in writing as it happened. (If you don't remember Aliza Shvarts's infamous senior project, read Roger Kimball's entirely justified moral condemnation and almost certainly justified aesthetic disapproval.)

Too many conservatives, however, have quickly moved from a judgment against the excesses (often silly, sometimes repugnant) of much modern art to what seems to be a condemnation of all twentieth-century art and its apparent rejection of transcendence. Let me turn to Robertson Davies for a more sympathetic account of the Sisyphean task of the modern artist. The speaker is Saraceni, the talented expert in art restoration from “What's Bred in the Bone”; the interjection comes from Francis, the protagonist:

“[Modern art] is the logical outcome of the art of the Renaissance. During those three centuries, to measure roughly, that we call the Renaissance, the mind of civilized man underwent a radical change. A psychologist would say that it changed from extraversion to introversion. The exploration of the outer world was partnered by a new exploration of the inner world, the subjective world. And it was an exploration that could not depend on the old map of religion. It was the exploration that brought forth Hamlet instead of Gorboduc. Man began to look inside himself for all that was great and also—if he was honest, which most people aren't—for all that was ignoble, base, evil. If the artist was a man of scope and genius, he found God and all his works within himself, and painted them for the world to recognize and admire.”

“But the moderns don't paint God and all his works. Sometimes I can't make out what they are painting.”

“They are painting the inner vision, and working very hard at it when they are honest, which by no means all of them are. But they depend only on themselves, unaided by religion or myth, and of course what most of them find within themselves is revelation only to themselves. And these lonely searches can quickly slide into fakery. Nothing is so easy to fake as the inner vision, Mr. Cornish. Look at those ruined frescoes we were examining this morning; all the people who painted those—Rossetti, Morris, Burne-Jones—all had the inner vision linked with legend, and they chose to wrap it up in Grail pictures and sloe-eyed, sexy beauties who were half the Mother of God and half Rossetti's overblown mistresses. But the moderns, having been hit on the head by a horrible world war, and having understood whatever they can of Sigmund Freud, are hell-bent for honesty. They are sick of what they suppose to be God, and they find something in the inner vision that is so personal that to most people it looks like chaos. But it isn't simply chaos. It's raw gobbets of the psyche displayed on canvas. Not very pretty and not very communicative, but they have to find their way through that to something that is communicative—though I wonder if it will be pretty.”

-from What's Bred in the Bone, by Robertson Davies (1985)

Yes, there are charlatans, ideologues, and confused undergraduates who win great acclaim though they deserve nothing but scorn. Yes, one may suspect that the unaided inner journey will terminate in something like hell. But these are two different things, and we should not confuse them. A true artist, working in the modern idiom, can still reveal to us aspects of the human condition, even though he may not be able to point beyond it.