I’m William Collen, and I like to think about art and aesthetics—specifically, the ways in which artists get their point across through the choices they make in their art. Thus my writing usually takes the form of analysis of specific artworks, or things artists have said about their work. I don’t try to thoroughly ground my interpretation of an artwork within a cultural moment or within an artist’s career arc, although I will do both those things from time to time. Since I’m a Christian, I will also bring matters of faith to the fore occasionally; one of my major preoccupations is how Christians, specifically, can approach the art world—a place which can often seem foreign and unfriendly to Christian sensibilities, but which doesn’t turn out to be as hostile as some Christians think. My aesthetic tastes run towards the decorative and the clever as opposed to the profound and the propositional—to the beautiful more than to the good or the true. Of course, everything I say about my own views and ideas can probably be contradicted by a passage form my own writing. “I am large; I contain multitudes.” I prefer the local to the global, and the present to the past; but my guiding principle is “here are the remains of the works of past ages; what can we learn from them in our current cultural moment?” My point of view is essentially that of the writer of the Saxon poem “Ruins” (from which this blog takes its name).
Well! You probably want a tour around the place. Here is a list of what I think are my best writing:
AESTHETIC / ETHICAL CRITICISM
On the tendency to use aspirational imagery to shape our view of reality
On the Male Gaze as a problem of Christian ethics
On what to do with damaged artworks
On aesthetic subcultures (such as punk, goth, and cottagecore)
MUSIC
On what will probably always be Arcade Fire’s best album
More on vaporwave, and why Christians, specifically, should listen to weird online music
AI ART AND OTHER COMPUTER STUFF
The results of, and subsequent philosophical musings on, an attempt to get the AI image engines to create a picture of Sailor Moon making a salad
On the artistry inherent in Conway’s Game of Life
On a certain Pharisee’s philosophy and how it relates to AI-generated art
On the strange affair of the war between the furry community and the NFT boosters
FILM REVIEWS
Dune (The Villeneuve version)
THOUGHTS ON BOOKS
On Craig Thompson’s Blankets, interpreted as a cautionary tale
On some of the aesthetic theory espoused by Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
On the strengths and weaknesses of graphic novels
Speaking of which . . . Rusty Brown
On the artistic / critical “Culture Care” philosophy of Makato Fujimura
More about art criticism as Culture Care
On Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word
On James Elkins’ thoughts about how images communicate meaning
On how the contemporary art world and the institutional church could interact beneficially
PAINTINGS AND SCULPTURES
A tour through Omaha’s art museum
On the animal paintings of Josh Tiessen
On a sculpture of a vacuum by Jeff Koons
On the local college’s student art show
On how we should approach art which communicates pain and sadness
And if that’s not enough for you, you can always do a deep-dive into the archive. Do you want to communicate directly with me? You can do so via this link.
