​

I bought this really nice used laptop on Facebook Marketplace recently. I’d been thinking about it for a while and finally I made an offer to the seller, which he refused; but I was afraid it would sell so I bought it anyway. Probably paid too much for it—it was, after all, a used laptop—but there was something about it that I liked. I think it’s the peculiar purplish sheen of the custom metal case, or maybe some of the stickers on it: a lot of old random stickers from before the days of Temu and AI-generated sticker packs, which are so ugly; this was decorated back when your sticker collection was a curated expression of your true self . . . actually I don’t want to talk about what it looked like. The point is, I had been using it for a while and it was perfect except the CD drive wouldn’t open. It didn’t bother me because who uses optical media anymore these days anyway? I was mainly using it for writing. So: I was getting ready to go out of town for Christmas and I was going to bring this laptop with me to do some writing, but first I had to print out my itinerary. And wouldn’t you know, the laptop was stuck shut. The little clasp in the front had, I guess, finally gotten pressed down enough that it broke, and the laptop wouldn’t come open. This was extremely frustrating because I wanted to print my itinerary from the laptop so I wouldn’t have to fumble with my devices while boarding the plane (I like to keep them zipped up in my carry-on bag so I don’t have to worry about them). My Uber was in front and I was getting impatient; in a fit of rage I threw the laptop onto the floor . . . and it opened, but so did the previously-stuck CD drive—and out popped a CD. It was a CDR with the words “VICTORIOUS HERMIT PODCAST SCANS” written in sharpie on it. Weird . . . I brought it with me, of course. The CDR was full of image files of cuneiform tablets. I translated the first few using ChatGPT. Within the limits of how true the result might have been, it appears the tablets are all transcripts of podcast episodes. Episode 1 was some sort of mission statement, introducing the two hosts of the podcast (two social theorists: Amanda Agathina Atrantarnita, who—understandably—goes by “A,” and Beatrice Williams, who goes by “Bea”) and stating that their goal in transcribing them into cuneiform was because they didn’t trust digital media longevity, or something like that. I never really pay too close attention to the intro episodes of podcasts because they’re usually rather pretentious, with all their talk of lofty goals, all the famous guests they’re going to have, and so on—promises which they inevitably break over the course of the podcast, since a good podcast will range all over, not sticking to one subject. The second episode was a discussion of what is meant by the concept of “truth” in the context of art; and though I don’t agree with everything the hosts say I thought the readers of this blog might find it interesting; but I must warn you they do a ton of name-dropping and the podcast really seems more like a brain dump or two friends chatting than any kind of actually well-reasoned argument. Maybe someday I will translate and publish the other episodes, but for now, this one is enough to start us off. Without further ado, then, here you go: an episode of Victorious Hermit Podcast for your reading pleasure.

A: First we ought to define what is meant by “truth.” In the context of art, what does that word mean?

Bea: Right. The word “truth” can mean the same thing as verisimilitude, which is how many people first think of it. You know—a portrait is a true likeness, and all that. A landscape is considered “true” if it looks real.

A: But that can’t always be the case, because there are some paintings that look real yet obviously could never happen—like Botticelli’s Birth of Venus—

Bea: Right! Or that one by Dalí where his wife is being menaced by two tigers and a gun. That could never happen in real life, but nobody expects it to; is the painting a lie, then? In what way is it “true” or “not true”? I mean, no one is looking at Botticelli’s Venus to determine the correct appearance of the historical Venus!

A: Another meaning of “truth” in art would then have to account for what the painting is saying. Is the painting—however weird of impossible its subject—saying something true about reality?

Bea: That’s where it starts to get really interesting, because lots of pictures that we think are realistic are actually saying something that isn’t exactly true when you think about them closely. My favorite example of this sort of thing is that painting by Luetze of Washington crossing the Delaware. It shows Washington as supremely confident and assertive, resolute . . . but the reality was that he was at his lowest point at that event in the war. Morale had bottomed out and he was seriously considering surrendering to the British. So the emotional content of Leutze’s painting is, when you think of it, kind of a lie.

A: Right. Another example would be all those Thomas Kinkade paintings.

Bea: I was hoping you would bring up Kinkade! His pictures are . . . well, not really truthful, but not really not, either, right?

A: Right. They’re technically competent, they have that realism that we talked about; but there’s some sort of lie going on there. There’s some kind of uncanny off flavor to them.

Bea: But it’s a flavor that many people consider to be a good flavor. He was, after all, the most financially successful painter who ever lived.

A: Kinkade was extremely popular and still continues to be. His pictures are a vision of a world which seems to match up with an ideal world—

Bea: Ideal—that’s a very important word in this context. Because Plato believed the material world that we see isn’t the truth about reality; he talked about the ideas behind the phenomena as being more true, more real, than the phenomena themselves. So if that’s true then maybe Kinkade’s pictures are truer than all that honest, gritty, “realistic” art out there which is trying to portray the current realities of the moment.

A: Kinkade is portraying the truth of the idea of cozy domesticity. And everyone wants to be cozy and comfortable , right?

Bea: It’s just that his idea of “cozy” sure looks a lot like an English country cottage! What if your ideal of cozy and comfortable doesn’t match with Kinkade’s? Who is right? Whose ideal is more closely aligned with the Platonic ideal?

A: It’s ideals all the way down. (Laughs)

Bea: Right!

A: What about other kinds of ideals? Ideal landscapes, like in Claude or Poussin? Ideals of beauty, like Michelangelo’s David, or all those Pre-Raphaelite pictures?

Bea: Landscape is an interesting case, because of how fashions have changed constantly throughout the ages. Back in the medieval times landscape was hardly more than some rocks for the people—the real point of the picture—to stand on. Then it changed over time for landscape to become the focus of some paintings; but it wasn’t necessary or important for those landscapes to be directly copied from reality, from a model. Then in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries we had painters who would make sketches from life and assemble finished paintings in the studio, but they would resemble actual real-world landscapes and trees and whatever; then, with the impressionists, painters would go outside and copy directly from the view in front of them and present the result as a true likeness of reality—but no actual landscape ever looked as splitchy-splotchy as, for instance, those Monet waterlily paintings.

A: So there were all sorts of ideas about what counts as “real” landscape.

Bea: Right. At any point in the past three or four hundred years you could have found some artist who was working according to a belief about what was the true way of painting the landscape in front of them; and their idea would have been corroborated by the people around them—despite, in some instances, their own sensory impressions contradicting what they see in the pictures.

A: Fascinating.

Bea: And in the middle ages you would have encountered people who would have said “Landscape? What’s that? The reality is the people and what they are, what they are signifying; who wants pictures of just trees and rocks? What truth is there in painting rocks? Landscape doesn’t have a moral or ethical element, and since the spiritual side of reality is the truest side, to paint landscape is to deny the truth!”

A: Yet in the nineteenth century there’s John Constable who painted landscape specifically for the purpose of conveying moral ideas!

Bea: Right! Amazing, isn’t it, how fashions change! (Laughs) But you mentioned the Pre-Raphaelites earlier; and theirs is an interesting case. Talk a little more about them.

A: Right. With the Pre-Raphaelites there’s this simultaneous attempt to capture both the literal reality of what’s in front of their eyes—every leaf, every blade of grass—and also the ideal conception of feminine beauty.

Bea: But they did so by favoring the same models over and over again—Jane Burden, Elizabeth Siddal—so in a sense, they were copying the reality in front of them, instantiated in their model who also happened to represent the ideal of physical beauty.

A: True. The early Pre-Raphaelites did that, but I’m not certain the second generation of them did so. If I recall, Bourne-Jones and Lord Leighton and those guys were painting from memory.

Bea: I’m not sure either. I don’t know the exact truth about their working methods.

A: Now I want to bring into the conversation that famous quote by Picasso: “Art is a lie which makes us realize the truth.”

Bea: Yes. It’s quite a bold statement but it needs to be unpacked. Is he saying that all art is a “lie”? What does he mean by “lie”? He’s really assuming the reader understands the word to mean the same thing as he does. And “truth” is also undefined in that statement.

A: Exactly. Anyone can use that quote to reinforce whatever theory they hold about art; it means nothing at all when you think about it.

Bea: At best I think it would be possible to say that some art could in some contexts be seen as not telling the complete truth about some aspect of reality, and that the non-truth-telling could, again depending on context, lead some people closer to what could, perhaps, count as certain kinds of truths; but I don’t think you can get any more dogmatic about it without making some pretty big assumptions.

A: True.

Bea: There’s so many definitions of art swirling around. It can be tedious to sort through them. And everyone with a definition of art seems to want to say that their definition is the only valid one. Critics are always going on about how such-and-such art is the best, that this-or-that painter isn’t a “real” artist . . .

A: I’m tired of all that kind of thing as well. I’ve bumped into a lot of Christians who point to abstract expressionism or conceptualism and say “that’s not art!”

Bea: Regarding Christianity and art, I think it’s insightful that Tolkien talked about sub-creation. He said that God is the supreme creator, and people are subcreators, working in God’s universe but making little universes of their own. He was talking about literature but the same thing applies to visual arts.

A: Right. And to say that certain kinds of art aren’t legitimate, aren’t “true art,” whatever that is, would be like, I suppose, saying that some animal or plant God made isn’t a “true” animal or plant.

Bea: That’s a good way to put it. And it shows that art is capable of being part of many different contexts and environments. A cactus isn’t appropriate for a jungle—it will die in there—and what’s good art for, say, the inside of a church might not be good in other places, and vice versa.

A: But here we’re getting off our subject. Truth in art shouldn’t necessarily have any relation to goodness any more than it ought to have a relation to beauty—right?

Bea: (Just smiles knowingly)

A: Right??

Bea: Well . . . there’s a long history of philosophers and thinkers who say that the three concepts of truth, goodness, and beauty and rather tightly linked. If something is true it’s necessarily beautiful and good; if good, it’s necessarily beautiful and true; if beautiful, then it’s true and good. That explains all those paintings of things that are rather ugly at first look but in fact are possessed of a sort of higher beauty allied to their truth, which makes them good.

A: Could you give an example?

Bea: There’s Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, for instance. The crucified Christ covered with wounds and sores is a ghastly sight by anyone’s standards; but because it signifies a good and loving action, it becomes a beautiful picture. Or, similarly, Rouault spent most of his artistic energies depicting outcasts and marginalized people who we would not conventionally think of as beautiful. But because Rouault was looking at them with compassion and through the lens of Christ’s having suffered and died for them—similar to Grünewald—his pictures become beautiful.

A: And therefore true and good.

Bea: Yes. At the same time.

A: So it is possible that a painting could be true because it’s beautiful and good—and all those other combinations. But is the reverse true? If a painting is false, does it cease to be good and beautiful? If not beautiful, is it not true, and et cetera?

Bea: That’s hard to answer because I’m sure there is some admirer out there, there’s probably someone who, for every painting, you can find someone who loves it and therefore thinks it is beautiful and true and good. I mean, how could you decide that some work of art is objectively, and for everyone and all time, not good? Not true? not beautiful?

A: What about something that was very obviously made just to pander to some client’s taste, without any sincerity at all on the part of the artist?

Bea: Ah, but you’ve come upon a big ambiguity there! Oscar Wilde said “All bad art is sincere” . . . but he didn’t explain what kind of “sincere” he meant. What is meant by that word? If I make a Basquiat because I have nothing to say and I don’t care about skill but I have a client who will pay me lots of money for it, is that art “sincere”? If I make a Bouguereau, not because I love pretty girls, but because I hate abstract expressionism, is that art “sincere”? If I DO love pretty girls and DO have something to say but can’t draw to save my life so I make something derivative of late cubist Picasso, is that “sincere”? If I make a Kinkade because I feel like I need to prop up some sort of fantasy version of reality—even though I might not believe in that fantasy myself—is that “sincere”?

A: But even a lie can be sincere. “Sincere” and “true” aren’t perfectly synonymous.

. . . And I think that’s probably enough. The podcast kept going on for a while in the same vein; they kept picking away at the definition of “truth” until by the end they had definitively proved that no picture, ever, under any circumstances, could ever be said to be “true” for any possible meaning of the word. Then they got kind of off topic and started to talk about something funny that happened once at a wedding they attended. So there you go: Victorious Hermit Podcast episode 2—or at least most of it. Like I said, maybe I will publish a transcription of another episode sometime, once I get the time to upload the image files to ChatGPT and translate them. By the way if anyone knows a better way to translate these cuneiform tablets please let me know.

​

Share

Subscribe now

​

VINCENT VAN GOGH: SORROWING OLD MAN

KAWS: COMPANION (PASSING THROUGH)

Grief. Sadness. It’s one of the easiest emotions to read via body language; therefore it’s one of the easiest to make art about. Also it’s one of the most universal and basic emotions because we live in a fallen and broken world and there’s a lot to be sad about. There’s something universal about grief, and I would argue there’s something pervasive about grief the older one gets, the longer one has spent on this planet; so if you’re an old man you probably exist in a state of near-constant grief. What do old men have to be sad about? Basically everything. They were once young and virile and now they are humiliated by the weaknesses of their aging bodies. They remember what it was like to be young yet they can see the “kids these days” making the stupidest of choices. And on and on. So when Van Gogh painted a picture of a crying old farmer he was tapping into something universal about the human condition. We have all been sad like Van Gogh’s old man. Thus when Brian Donnelly makes a goofy statue that looks like Mickey Mouse with a kawaii-ified skull and crossbones instead of a normal head and makes it in the universally recognized weeping / grieving pose, his character suddenly becomes someone we can relate to. We can look at his ugly sculpture and think about the human condition.

​

What does it feel like to come face-to-face with a ferocious predatory animal which could instantly kill you if it wanted to? The closest that the mid-17th-century Dutch bourgeoisie would get to such an encounter would probably have been via paintings such as this one by Frans Snyders. It is life-size and you can walk right up to it and look at the lion’s fangs and claws for as long as you want to since it’s not actually a real lion and can’t actually kill you. Today we have a modern equivalent: we can stroll around Damien Hirst’s stuffed shark and admire the beast’s ferocity, which has, similar to that of Snyders’ lion, been rendered harmless by being encased in glass. Hirst specifically asked for a really fierce shark, a potential man-eater, for this artwork. Snyders’ work was only ever little gobs of colored oil on canvas, though—Hirst’s was a real live shark once; that exact creature could have potentially killed and eaten a human being—does this fact affect your experience of looking at it?

​

Seurat’s young woman is shown beautifying herself, but she doesn’t seem aware that we are watching her doing it. Why is she doing her makeup? What is she thinking? She is forever at a distance from us, forever objectified—we can never really know her mind and can only project ourselves on to her. I suppose this means Seurat’s painting is a good one on which to hang any of our theories about the male gaze, beauty standards, domesticity, and on and on. But we can’t really know why Seurat painted her either or what he himself was thinking. Not so Serebriakova’s self-portrait. She’s doing the same thing as Seurat’s mistress: “preparing,” as Eliot says in Prufrock, “a face to meet the faces that we meet” . . . but we can know exactly what Serebriakova is thinking. She projects a kind of confidence not often seen in pictures of women done by men. I maintain this is the most self-confident woman in all of art; the only picture even remotely close is Ingres’ portrait of the sitting Madame Moitessier, and that one is full of a calm confidence, but this one is full of an active confidence. And the light! In the Seurat it gets diffused all over the place into his fussy little dots; but Serebriakova is apparently lit from the mirror: everything is bathed in the most radiant white light imaginable; Seurat may have broken the light into prismatic colors but Serebriakova is painting the beam before it gets into the prism.

​

Ah yes, sewing . . . a stereotypical female occupation. What were medieval maidens supposed to do for the war effort anyway? . . . they couldn’t go off with their menfolk and fight in the crusades; they supported the effort at the home front, and in this case we’re shown one such medieval damsel preparing the flag that her knight will take into battle. Why is she doing it on the rampart? I don’t know. Leighton was fond of making these pictures of medievalism which, to be sure, have the same sort of fan-service sourness that many of the Pre-Raphaelites indulged in: I’m being too forcefully invited to stare at the pretty girl, and I don’t like it. Norman Rockwell, on the other hand, never to my knowledge painted a woman as an object. His girls are all being a part of the world; either working on the home front riveting or volunteering; or they’re holding up the machinery of the judicial system or being utterly ignored by oafs, or pondering their own selves or all sorts of other things. In Rockwell’s picture of a woman messing about with fabric our attention is actually directed away from the woman and towards the man who is undoubtedly thinking something like “okay now what’s she going to do to my favorite comfy chair?” and we can build a whole narrative around this painting. There ought to be fanfiction about it.

​

One of my favorite quotes about artists comes from Andre Breton. He said “The mind is wonderfully prompt at grasping the most tenuous relation that can exist between two objects taken at random, and poets know that they can always, without fear of being mistaken, say of one thing that it is like another.” What is applicable to poets is applicable to other kinds of artists as well. Here we have two examples. Sometime in the mid-nineteenth century an unknown jeweler in India was given this absolutely enormous baroque pearl, all knobbled and lumpy; this jeweler puzzled and pondered the pearl and in the end thought “you know what this looks like? A torso. A big muscly man’s torso.” So the jeweler made this brooch with the pearl in the center. Now it’s in the Victoria and Albert museum, having been brought back from India by Earl Canning, viceroy of India, in 1863. But the most glorious instance I’m aware of in which an artist said “that looks like something else” was made by Claes Oldenburg in 1977. His Mouse Museum is, basically, an enormous collection of random junk. But next to Mouse Museum is a building called Ray Gun Wing; and inside this building, Oldenburg has presented for display a different collection of junk—this time, the junk is all vaguely L-shaped. First there are actual toy ray guns, pistols, etc.—but then there are bits of metal, broken pieces of plastic or stone molding; suddenly everything begins to look like a ray gun; there’s no end to this metaphor; after looking at Ray Gun Wing a person begins to see other ray guns everywhere . . .

​

Share

Subscribe now

​

Another difference: the mood was not exactly optimistic but it wasn’t pessimistic either; if anything, it was full of a rather wry humor, a sort of weary yet not defeated mood similar to how blue-collar people sigh and say “it is what it is” when faced with any of the numerous maddening difficulties and frictions of modern life. But the biggest difference between the two shows was that this time it seemed the art was drawing on a more populist tradition for its vocabulary and iconography. This show contained very little reference to the depth of art history, especially the history of what counts as “fine art”; more than anything, I was reminded of the lowbrow art of the last fifty years—comic books, video games, graphic novels, graffiti. Lurking within the show there was also a subtle “commercial” or even “capitalist” strain (one which I’m not sure the artists would have approved of had they noted it—capitalism is rather out of fashion these days). Many of these artworks reminded me of T-shirt designs, the “edgy” or “attitude” ones found at Hot Topic—and there were a number of “collectible” sculptures for sale (which I will discuss further in a moment).

But as I said, I’m not sure what to think of the show, because . . . I don’t know, it felt like the art was not connected in any way to the long tradition of The Beautiful which has been the focus, more or less, of almost all the art in the Western tradition for the past two and a half millennia or so. Since the Greeks, artists have been trying to capture some sort of sense of the ideal beautiful, to varying degrees of success. And these ideals of beauty were, for better or worse, founded on things the Greeks thought were beautiful: the human form, mostly, but also pastoralism of various types and kinds.

These sources of imagery served artists well enough until perhaps the beginning of the twentieth century. I really don’t have the space or inclination, here, to discuss what happened to art circa 1900 or so, but you can read the full account in the beginning of Robert Hughes’ The Shock of the New and the end of Kenneth Clark’s Landscape into Art. Hughes discusses how the technological advances of the late nineteenth century gave artists a new vocabulary of images with which to make their art. Clark’s book describes how, when artists turned to the beauty of the machine, they of necessity turned away from the natural world. But this was not a coincidence. Clark argues that as a consequence of the Darwinian worldview the natural world was no longer seen as a place of peace and refuge; it was a hostile, fierce, ferocious place. Tennyson wrote of “Nature red in tooth and claw”; no happy garden of peace anymore, nature was! And the artists decided not to look to nature anymore for their ideal of beauty. In the aftermath it seems beauty as a whole has been more or less set aside; these days it is extremely rare for an artist to trade in beauty at all—or, at least, in the idealized beauty which fascinated the Greeks. Along with a fascination with machines and surfaces, the art of the last five quarter-centuries is interested in particulars instead of ideals.

Alright, that’s enough theory, let’s go look at some art. Modern Arts Midtown was showing quite a large number of what I like to call fake Basquiats: mannerist paintings of various scribbly figures and scenes in the style made famous by Jean-Michel Basquiat in the eighties. Probably the best was this one by Bishop Frost. The imagery is memorable, if not readily interpretable, and the gold paint lends a nice touch: it reminds me of how the painters of the medieval period were fond of putting gold leaf on things, especially depictions of heaven. Does this picture seek to reference that? It’s hard to say; these days, gold might simply refer to wealth, bling, filthy lucre, and all that sort of thing.

Mykl Welch, whose works I’ve seen before and greatly admire, produced the strongest works in the show. Here are a few. I was especially fond of the painting of the bottle opener. However, I was confused by the background. It seemed to only exist because the space needed to be filled. What’s wrong, these days, with an empty background such as is found in many still life paintings, from the masterworks of Cotán to Dalí’s Basket of Bread to Wayne Thiebaud’s cakes and pies? I’ll give Welch the benefit of the doubt, though, since this kind of treatment of the background is common in his paintings and it’s always interesting to look at.

​

Jamie Burmeister’s painting-sculptures provided an element of humor, but I thought the humor was a little sour. I get it: abstract expressionist paintings of lines (such as those produced by Morris Louis or Barnett Newman) are a little bland, but if we’re just going to giggle at them we won’t be able to understand what their makers were trying to say. Burmeister’s pictures felt too ironically detached from the source of their imagery. (I did manage to get some cool photos of his little models at their job of paintings spots in a wall. If you use your imagination they look like actual full-size painters who were cursed by some witch and turned to bronze.)

​

Fredy Rincon made several pictures of people wearing animal masks and looking tough. Here are some representative examples, as well as a picture of a snake which I rather liked; there’s quite a lot of depth in the symbolism in this one and I found myself taking much more time looking at it than I did any of Rincon’s other works. Rincon’s works epitomize what I was saying earlier about the source of the imagery in these pictures being derived from sources outside the Greek ideal of beauty. Everything was edgy, gritty, broken, beat-up, worn-out, and had some sort of attitude.

​

In the farthest back room of the gallery was a surprise: several sculptures—or should I say “collectible figures”—by the likes of KAWS, Superplastic, Murakami, and other artists of similar stripe. I honestly have no idea at all why these sculptures were in this show. None of the people who made them are Omaha artists. Were they on consignment or something like that? Also, why are the sculptures by KAWS and Coarse so similar to each other? At least there might be some sort of narrative element to them—their figures are at least doing something. But the sculpture by Superplastic is just sitting there, doing nothing at all except existing. Maybe it is the descendant of Lipchitz’s “smokers’ articles.” Also . . . there’s some of that gold again.

​

So, what to make of all this art? Is it any good? What’s it about?

recently wrote a manifesto detailing the relationship between pop art, “art-pop,” and fan art. It includes some useful points and definitions which are particularly applicable to what is going on at Modern Arts Midtown. Towards the beginning of the manifesto Asemlen divides pop art into two great sub-movements—corporate art and indie art—which are surprisingly similar despite the latter nearly always being positioned as antagonistic to the former. I don’t know if the artists at Modern Arts Midtown would consider their work “indie” or not; but the pieces I saw would definitely match some of the principles that Asemlen lists as the defining features of pop art today. The statues by Murakami et al. are most certainly part of corporate pop art. These artists’ wikipedia pages are mostly long lists of tie-ins with hip hop producers, tech companies, sports figures, “top brands,” and other corporate entities. Asemlen then pivots his essay into a manifesto for the renewed acceptance of fan art as a legitimate endeavor for artists. Much of what I saw at MAM falls somewhere in between pop art and fan art; its pop elements would be its witty, gimmicky, glamorous aspects, but its fan-art connotations are a little harder to define. If the MAM artists are “fans” of anything, it would be the aforementioned contemporary imagery (video games, animation, etc.) and it would correlate very neatly with what is undoubtedly the most widespread and noticeable fan community of all time: that of the fans of Greek and Roman art. The history of western art, from about the time of Botticelli and Mantegna until that of Gêrome and Bouguereau, and with important exceptions, was an emulation of the model of antiquity: the pursuit of idealized beauty which I mentioned earlier. If my hunch is right, what I saw at MAM were the creations of artists who aren’t part of the antiquity fandom; perhaps it could be said that they are members of the contemporaneity fandom? There’s got to be a better word for the focus on imperfect, unidealized, particularized imagery, drawn from popular sources of the last few decades, that I’m seeing here at this art show.

Or maybe what’s happening is these artists are changing the focus of their attentions from the set of beautiful objects in general to the set of cool objects. A few years ago published an elaborate Venn diagram as part of an attempt at a taxonomy of beauty. In the middle of his Venn diagram is a circle labelled “elegant” and one labelled “sexy / hot”; the overlap of those two circles, I’d argue, is the focus of attention for most of the art of the antiquities fandom—the art with people in it, that is. The art not peopled by people—the perspective work of the Renaissance, the still lifes, the landscapes—would fall somewhere else within the big circle labelled “beautiful.” Today, at Modern Arts Midtown, what we’re seeing is art made by people who are focused on the oval Étienne labels “cool”—and, perhaps, depending on whether or not you actually enjoy this kind of art, the part of the oval which is flopping out of the “beautiful” circle, lying only within the “interesting.”

I don’t want to make any value judgements on the worth of the art at MAM; like I said more than once, I don’t know what to think of it. It’s undeniable, though, that the past fifty years have given artists an enormous amount of new visual stimuli, new imagery, as potent as that mentioned by Robert Hughes as inciting an art of the machine in the early decades of the twentieth century; and that it is a commendable thing for these artists to work towards making sense of that imagery.

​

Share

Subscribe now

​

The first time I remember arranging ideas in a triangular fashion was when I was in my early twenties reading Dostoevsky. I noticed that he rather frequently seemed to equate the ideas of love and hate, and as I pondered why, it occurred to me that the opposite of love is not hate—it is indifference. Or, more accurately: love has two opposites. How is that possible? Can an idea really have two opposites? When I drew a triangle with the words love, hate, and indifference at the vertices, it all suddenly made sense:

Since then I’ve used triangles to arrange my thoughts on the relationships between all sorts of ideas. The habit became more frequent as I started writing this blog. Here are a few others:

Eventually I began to use the triangles as a sort of three-dimensional cartesian graph. I can plot various items along three different axes when I use a triangle diagram. Perhaps this is, in fact, a real kind of diagram or graph already; if it is, I discovered it independently and I’ve been having great success using it for my own purposes. Here is an example: a triangular plot of several artistic genres along vectors of form / content, surface / depth, and meaning / meaninglessness:

Here is a triangle-shaped attempt to define a brainstorm I recently had about different kinds of electronic music.

The below triangle attempts to explain how some artists’ works relate to the Three Transcendentals—you know, the ones Christian commenters on the arts love to invoke. It is incomplete; I couldn’t think of an artist whose work would go into the upper-left corner of the triangle and serve as an example of work which was good but not beautiful and possibly true. The reference to a “blue fox giving cereal to the Trix rabbit” refers to a work of furry fan art which used to illustrate his magisterial essay on the “Willy’s Chocolate Experience” debacle.

Occasionally I’ll make other kinds of diagrams. This essay about surrealism and romanticism is organized around a diagram of a river which I drew on the aforementioned employer-owned whiteboard but which I did not include in the essay itself. It can be easily recreated, though, by reading the essay with pen and paper handy and drawing as you read.

Does this count as a diagram? It’s a text-heavy illustration from my review of Matt Reeves’ Batman movie from 2022:

Probably the most complicated diagram I’ve ever drawn is this sort of benzene-ring-shaped thing. It developed into this essay about clothes (one of my favorite essays to write, by the way—looks like I did sneak in some anniversary-grade personal recollections). Below the hand-drawn version is the final version which appeared in the blog post.

And I don’t know if this counts as a diagram, but it feels like one to me. It’s my fancy way of saying these four verbs—reiterative, repetitive, recursive, and redundant—are related somehow: I put it at the start of this essay about the concept of Canon, in literature mostly but applicable to the other arts as well.

That’s all I’ve got for anniversary reflections. As always, feel free to get in touch, via Substack or other channels, if you want to talk about any of these diagrams, or if you want to share your own “graphic thought organizers” of any kind.

​

Share

Subscribe now

​

Junk and the man I sing; let us now praise famous junk. I celebrate the junk, and sing of junk; and what I assume you shall assume. Let us go then, you and I, while the evening is spread out against the sky. And where are we going? Why, to the junk stores, of course!

There are two vital points to remember when going to the junk stores. The first is that everything you see for sale, no matter how amazing or incredibly awesome you think it is, was once considered, by someone, somewhere, to be junk. As in, the things for sale are all either donations, castoffs, or the leftovers of someone’s estate after they died and their heirs picked over their accumulated horde and kept what they wanted. Nothing at the junk stores found its way there as an item of value. This is the opposite of the philosophy behind pawn shops; at a pawn shop everything you see for sale is assumed to have value. If it hadn’t, the pawn shop wouldn’t have taken it into their inventory. This is an extremely important distinction and it is reflected in the kinds of merchandise you’ll see for sale. At a pawn shop you can find electronic equipment—laptops, televisions, stereo components. You can find electric guitars and band instruments. They have power tools and guns. 1921 Morgan silver dollars. Gold jewelry. It might be strange and interesting but it’s not JUNK.1 Junk, properly defined, consists of the worthless trash or superfluous unwanted articles of the past two centuries. I have seen piles of broken boards and bricks at a junk store. I’ve seen more vinyl records than I can imagine; and not the good ones snapped up by the hipsters—no, I mean the junk ones, albums like the Jane Fonda workout record or Whipped Cream and Other Delights; every junk store in Omaha seems to have at least one of those two albums in its holdings somewhere. I’ve seen old shaving brushes, broken typewriters, that kind of glassware that glows under blacklight and is literally radioactive—in other words: junk.2

But the second thing to remember about junk stores is that everything in them was made by some person and had, at one time, actual value. This is a truth about every item in a junk store: someone once said of it, “Yes, the world will be a better place if this object is allowed to exist in it.” Or: “I bet if I make this I’ll be able to get some money,” which is essentially the same thing if you believe the capitalist line that a person’s self-interest is to serve the market, and the market’s interest is that of the world at large.

Ponder with me, then, this junk. We see before us an assortment of strange items. Obviously they were made for commercial purposes but those purposes are lost or differently directed now. Who would buy this stuff today? Old toys and games and “collectibles” give us glimpses of different worlds, ones in which these things were, to at least a subset of the buying public, beautiful or fun or cool—and worth paying money for. Whatever they are now, they were, at one time, loved unironically. Somebody, somewhere, gave some of their money for them. Someone chose between saving for the future, and buying this stuff.

But often the items found at junk stores were not, in fact, made for commercial purposes. Many of them are private works of art. At times these pieces of junk can be quite confusing. Who made them, and why? What purpose was in the mind of whomever painted a picture of cute pink numchucks and tasers and brass knuckles and a knife dripping with blood? What is the story behind the carrom board decorated with hearts and some sort of saying done in the live laugh love font? Who glued a bunch of horns together into a meta-horn, and why did they do it?

Of the two kinds—commercial items and private art—I’m not sure which one I find more fascinating. From an anthropological standpoint, both kinds are valuable inventories of visual culture and both convey deeply significant narratives about life in the modern world.3 And from an aesthetic standpoint, both provide some of the most uncanny imagery to ever inhabit the mind. Wilde said all bad art is sincere. What was the sincere meaning meant to be expressed through this odd quadriptych of sad little girls in circus costumes?

Have you ever had the experience of poking around at a junk store only to be confronted with an item which sparks in you a sudden rush of memory; perhaps you had one of these things as you were growing up and perhaps you’ve forgotten it only to be flooded with recollections (as Proust was when he ate that cookie). It happened to me recently when I visited a junk store and saw the exact same edition of Mastermind that my parents had when I was younger. As a child I spent an inordinate amount of time staring at the cover image of Mastermind. It was full of unaccountable mysteries to me. The glass tabletop; the stern man’s hands, fingertips touching; the beautiful girl next to him, of ambiguous ethnicity—who were they? what were they doing? Why were they so condescendingly aloof? Of course I didn’t buy the Mastermind from the junk store; that would have robbed future customers of the chance to experience what I had felt. Buying an item from a junk store is almost a form of sacrilege. It would be like looking at a painting in a museum and asking the docent “how much?” The true meaning and purpose of junk stores—their highest calling, the role they play the best—is to be repositories of weirdness, a weirdness that is best observed and then left as it is, not dispersed by the winds of consumerist nostalgia-induced acquisitiveness, as if buying that old game would have brought back my childhood somehow.

With all that in mind, let’s shift the focus of this essay to surrealism. As originally conceived, surrealism was an art movement dedicated to poking around in the subconscious or unconscious workings of the mind to find new realities. The movement favored strange and uncomfortable sexualized imagery, as can be seen in many of the works of Salvador Dalí, Hans Bellmer,4 and Max Ernst; even seemingly innocuous works like Alberto Giacometti’s Suspended Ball were interpreted as drenched in sexual significance. This was undoubtedly due to the influence of Freud, whose theories were never more accepted than they were in the twenties and thirties when old-school surrealism was at its peak; yet there were always aspects of the movement which didn’t partake of the sexualized interpretive paradigm and which existed simply to mine the weirdness that dwells below the conscious level. The surrealists interested themselves in creative techniques which introduced randomness into the process of making art—Ernst would squish his canvas onto a previously-painted glass surface, peel it off, and enjoy the results. André Breton invented a game called “Exquisite Corpse” in which people draw a figure together but can’t see the parts the others have drawn until the end. Again, as with much of what the surrealists did, the results of these experiments in randomization were often interpreted through a sexualized lens; but they didn’t need to be. Much of the finest surrealist art merely revels in the potentials of odd juxtaposition; think of the famous image of the locomotive in the jungle that Breton loved. This sort of thing leads inevitably to the exquisitely intricate sculptures of Joseph Cornell.

Cornell brings us back to the ostensible subject of this essay, for it was in the junk stores of greater New York that Cornell found the material for his artworks. He was able to see the artistic potential in cast-off junk at flea markets and estate sales in a way surprisingly similar to how vaporwave musicians see potential in corny elevator music and forgotten pop B-sides. Cornell also shares with vaporwave the same aestheticization of decontextualized nostalgia borne of curiosity and wonder. For Cornell and for vaporwave the world is made of junk—but what beautiful and interesting junk!

This is the true power of what lies in junk stores. The contents therein are able to spark that frisson of uncanny evocation that the best surrealist artworks inspire. Any artist willing to explore the depths of reference and allusion to be found in the commingling of unrelated objects is encouraged to hurry themselves to the junk stores and prepare for the inspiration which is sure to strike. There is no better place for an exploration of the latent surrealist potentials of juxtaposition, memory, and nostalgia than the junk stores of today, replete as they are with the leftovers of more than a century of unrestrained consumerist overproduction.

Here, in the junk store, can be found a record of the styles, trends, fancies, habits, cultural byways, forgotten fads, and other refuse of late capitalism. Junk store cruising is to the urbanite what beachcombing or a walk in the forest is to the nature lover; with the added layer that, as was said before, all the finds in a junk store have a meaning which may be incomprehensible but which most certainly exists. A shell or a driftwood from the beach? There is no meaning in them. But hello, what is this weird thing—who made it—and why?

Junk stores—memorials of ruined memory. Junk stores—museums of weird juxtapositions. Junk stores—quasi-vaporwave conduits of warped nostalgia! All of these I sing!

​

Hail, then, and long may they remain!

​

Share

Subscribe now

​

I tried the same thing with prompts based on the titles of other works by Grant Wood (Daughters of Revolution and Parson Weems’ Fable, both considerably less well-known than American Gothic) . . . and the results were less than ideal.

I was using rather bare-bones prompts in this exercise and I felt sorry for the poor AI, so I tried to be more explicit in my prompt; still, though, I was disappointed in the result.

Yet the robot knew exactly what I wanted when I used a prompt referencing Grant Wood’s iconic and kitschy American Gothic. (Although if I had asked an actual human to make this image I am sure they would have gotten more of the details right: two cats instead of four, the cats would have been gendered correctly, and the house would have been white and not black).

I even scaled back the specificity and told the AI to make me a “Grant Wood painting” and this is what I got. In the training data for the robot image slaves, Grant Wood has, evidently, been reduced to a caricature of himself: his entire career, complex as it was, is reduced to only a few things—farmhouse with gothic window, farm person standing outside facing the viewer.

But American Gothic is a much more complicated painting than the AI art generators realize. To start, the expressions on the faces of the two models in Grant Wood’s original work are difficult to read—unlike the expression of the confident and self-assured woman the AI gave me in the image above. There is a note of tiredness in Wood’s farmer; a good deal of concern and uncertainty in his daughter. Or maybe they are preacher and daughter? The black jacket on Wood’s male model is interpreted by some art historians as a hint that the pitchfork-wielding old man is a country parson. What is that pitchfork supposed to mean, anyway? Are these people malevolent, brandishing their weaponry as they prevent us from coming near their house? Is it significant that the woman has a single lock of hair dangling down her neck? Why is the pitchfork’s shape reflected in the seams of the man’s overalls? Why are the curtains drawn shut in their house?1

There is no evidence Grant Wood was deliberately trying to mock or satirize the subjects of his image. In fact, he repeatedly made public declarations to the contrary. I am not convinced that Wood genuinely loved the people and landscape of Iowa, despite his settling there and even trying to spearhead an emerging regionalist art movement headquartered in Cedar Rapids; I think he wanted to love them, but an important part of his psyche still held them at a distance. All throughout his last decade, after painting American Gothic and thereby becoming instantly famous, he kept making images of the small-town people he encountered which have this slightly sour note to them, as if Wood were laughing at them in a not-fully-sympathetic way.

American Gothic, on the other hand, is ambiguous. Whatever satire it may or may not communicate can’t really be determined with certainty. Part of the reason it has become so famous is because it is undeniably more than just a portrait of a few Iowa people and a funny-looking house; but no one can be sure what that “more than” actually is, so they add their own “more than” and the picture becomes about anything. Parodies abound, as we’ve already mentioned. Wanda Corn, in her exhibition catalog Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision, devotes her last chapter to her collection of American Gothic parodies, ripoffs, sendups, and appropriations, all of which depend on American Gothic’s being understood as a painting of basic, average, normal American people. Since she wrote her book in 1983 the situation has not changed. American Gothic is a foundation on which any spoof or satire can be successfully erected.

It is possible to get custom versions of American Gothic with different people’s faces in place of the farmer and his daughter from the original painting. You can go to sites with names like PopArtYou or MyDaVinci, upload your own photos, and have yourself in the painting. You can get a version of American Gothic with aliens, or better yet, with the two main characters from Stranger Things. You can get the picture with genders reversed. And on and on. Whatever satirical message may have been present in American Gothic when it was first exhibited has been blunted in the present day. It has entered the realm of symbols and now it’s extremely hard for the majority of people to take it on whatever terms Grant Wood meant for it.

American Gothic was not created for the purpose of becoming a symbol in this manner. None of the excessively reproduced and thus kitschified works of highbrow art — Mona Lisa, The Scream, Starry Night, The Swing — ever were. But somehow it happened: they have become caked with such a thick crust of appropriation that I doubt it is possible to seriously discuss them anymore from an aesthetic point of view. It’s a strange inversion of James Elkins’ concept of monstrously ambiguous2 paintings: these paintings have become monstrously unambiguous. They have become resistant to any nuanced interpretation and have been thrown to the world of commerce to be torn up, like meat to wolves, and made into “Funny gift for birthday, Unique portrait print, Digital portrait.”

When Leonardo da Vinci spent some time in the autumn of 1503 painting a portrait of Lisa del Giocondo, it was highly unlikely he was hoping the result would be his painting’s becoming a universally understood symbol for western highbrow culture. I doubt the concept of “highbrow” even existed back in those times; if there were, though, I don’t think it crossed Leonardo’s mind that his image would assume the role of ambassador for such a broad swath of human effort. He simply painted it and then went on with whatever other projects he was working on at the time—pictures of battles, designs for contraptions like tanks and helicopters. There simply wasn’t a need, in the early renaissance, for the kind of symbolic picture Mona Lisa has become.

Today we live in a vastly more symbolic age than Leonardo did. Meaning is constantly mediated through images. Thumbnails, avatars, icons: they’re all around us. Corporate logos, instantly identifiable, promise us a repeatable consumer experience. Colors on sports paraphernalia, worn at the game, signify our allegiance to one combatant or another. Our choice of clothes signals the way we engage with the beliefs and philosophies of the rest of the world. The most private facts about our sexuality and gender identity can be broadcast to anyone who drives past our house via any of a wide variety of pride flags flown from the porch. There are symbols everywhere, conveying propositional content, emotions, vibes, and any other sorts of meaning you can think of.

For its first three hundred or so years of existence, you would have to actually travel to the physical location of Mona Lisa and be in its presence if you wanted to see it. When the market for art reproductions opened up in the nineteenth century you could buy a print of Mona Lisa, but even then you would hang it on your wall with a sense of reverence. Yet even here we can see Mona Lisa beginning to assume its role as symbol; hung up on the wall, divorced from its original context, it becomes a stand-in for an entire attitude towards the arts. Meanwhile its own power of aesthetic communication is thereby diminished; no one, looking at a Mona Lisa print on the wall, is likely to meditate on its composition or sense of space—and in a line engraving they most certainly won’t be thinking about its use of color: thus Leonardo’s display of artistry is diminished.

As paintings lose their ability to sustain ambiguity, they become kitsch. By this I mean that the symbolic content supersedes in value any aesthetic content the image might have: no one who uses, for instance, American Gothic to convey ideas about the average American person cares at all about the aesthetic value of Grant Wood’s painting—they are using it for its symbolic value alone. The artistry is irrelevant. That is why American Gothic works as a black-and-white line drawing or a cartoony caricature, and why the people in it can be swapped for famous celebrities or animals, without the image losing its symbolic power. This is not the same with an image that is symbolic but not kitschy—Grant Wood’s other portraits, for instance Woman with Plants from one year prior to American Gothic: there’s nothing preventing this painting from becoming a symbol of old age, matronly care of the environment / farmstead, or any number of other things . . . except that it hasn’t yet. And therefore it hasn’t become kitschified.

In fact there is an inverse relationship between a painting’s ambiguity and its kitschiness. Some of the kitschiest paintings—Mona Lisa, Rosie the Riveter, the “I want you for U. S. Army” poster—live in this strange sort of world where the point of the picture is so obvious that it short-circuits our ability to think about the picture as an object of aesthetic contemplation; we are instead shuffled off to the next stage of appreciation—the apprehension of emotion—without having done any of the work of puzzling about the meaning. Is something missing in our understanding of the image? Have we skipped a step? Are we cheating?

Not really. There’s no reason why easel paintings must be approached primarily as communicators of aesthetic value. Why aren’t corporate logos, fashion designs, road signs, or advertising imagery scrutinized to the same aesthetic standards as Leonardo’s paintings? Surely Leonardo was trying for more when he made art than was the poor intern told to make the next viral ad campaign, but Leonardo is called kitschy when he’s plastered over subway cars and coffee mugs, and the ad campaign isn’t.

And to be honest, I don’t like it. It’s almost as if the logos, memes, and pride flags are being penalized for communicating clearly, distinctly, and unambiguously. The old highbrow way of thinking about pictures simply can’t handle this kind of easily apprehended meaning. It’s just not possible to sustain an extended aesthetic / critical commentary on, for instance, the Thin Blue Line flag or the Pepsi logo.3 I have a sneaky feeling, though, that there isn’t much difference between the monstrous unambiguity of Mona Lisa or American Gothic, which renders nuanced discussion difficult, and the Elkins-style monstrous ambiguity (leading to a lack of settled understanding) of a complicated painting like The Tempest. In both instances the enjoyable process of gradually coming to a settled understanding is broken down: one, because the meaning has become too obvious—the other, because the meaning has become too obscure. By the way—you had to go look up Giorgione’s The Tempest, didn’t you. You don’t have it in your mind’s eye. Go read a few books about it—you still won’t know what it means. No one knows what it means. But you know exactly what the Coca-Cola logo means. Or the Burger King logo. Yes, even you art historians know what those images mean.

​

Share

Subscribe now

​

​

Dead Can Dance’s Into the Labyrinth is a messy record. Sprawling all over and lacking focus, it displays unflatteringly the differences between the songwriting styles of Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry. Their best work was behind them when they made this record; and I say this despite knowing that Into the Labyrinth is by far their most commercially successful album. On it they basically invented the genre of neoclassical darkwave, which, if you aren’t familiar with it, can best be described as goth music that sounds like it’s from Shakespeare’s time. Lisa Gerrard sings all over this album in what sounds like either Eastern European funeral chanting or an off-brand version of the kind of meaning-free mumbo-jumbo that Liz Fraser invented for Cocteau Twins.

It’s a nice sound overall, but I miss the sense of gloom and drama, the foreboding, the creepy-cemetery vibe of albums like Spleen and Ideal or Within the Realm of a Dying Sun. Even after they moved past their roots and started exploring new musical territory they were still able to tie a set of songs together on The Serpent’s Egg, a much more vigorous and interesting album than Into the Labyrinth. After this record the duo would make only one more superlatively good song: Spiritchaser’s “Song of the Stars.” These days, Dead Can Dance is still trudging along somehow, surfacing every few years either to schedule a tour and then cancel it for health reasons or to release bajillions of live albums just like King Crimson does.

Yet there is a tendency, in the albums Dead Can dance released right around the beginning of the nineties, for the music to flow along nicely as a collection of pretty sounds and then for Brendan Perry to drop a song of such utter perfection that it cancels out all that had previously been stated, and the album, floundering, has to figure out its own purpose again. This occurs with “In the Kingdom of the Blind the One-Eyed are Kings” from The Serpent’s Egg and “Fortune Presents Gifts Not According to the Book” from Aion. On Into the Labyrinth, the effect is achieved with the song under consideration today: “The Carnival is Over,” a stunning jewel of a song, the best piece on the record and, maybe, the best single song of Brendan Perry’s career. It’s also terribly sad, as we shall see.

It begins with some minor-key strings of the type that are often used as a cue for gloomy feelings in the movies. A few moments later the sad strings are joined by a slowly-plucked medieval lute or guitar, and then a higher-pitched synth-woodwind figure, accompanied by sleigh bells, rounds out the song’s sonic environment. At 1:17 Perry starts singing. His voice seems strained a little, with just a bit of vocal fry here and there (he’s a good singer, but he often has trouble with long notes at soft dynamics). He sings something about flowers and a thunderstorm.

Outside the storm clouds gathering
Move silently along the dusty boulevard
Where flowers turning crane their fragile necks
So they can in turn reach up and kiss the sky

They’re driven by a strange desire
Unseen by the human eye
Someone’s calling

What’s this all about? Flowers bending towards the sun, a storm cloud passes a dusty street; it’s all very evocative of . . . something . . . and it sets the tone of sad reminiscence which characterizes all that follows. The woodwind / string accompaniment plays swirling arpeggios as Perry sings the next verse.

I remember when you held my hand
In the park we would play
When the circus came to town
Over here

This sounds like a memory of childhood, an idyllic time; and the song is part of a long tradition of rock songs which reference a playground from the narrator’s early years. Notable examples include Dan Rossen’s memory of his dead father in “In Ear Park” and John Lennon’s more overtly idealized recollections in “Strawberry Fields Forever.” Part of the appeal of these kinds of songs is that nearly everyone can relate to them. All adults were children once. When we think of the cares and troubles of adulthood we remember that when we were five years old there wasn’t anything bothering our happy play (except, perhaps, bedtime). In this instance, though, the musical accompaniment is telling us this is a sad memory. Why is it sad? The music seems to be working against itself with those cheerful, playful arpeggios atop those gloomy chords.

Perry does something interesting with this verse. The first line “I remember when you held my hand” is a concrete image and a timeless one: this could have happened to him many times in many contexts, it doesn’t matter. But then: “In the park we would play”—now the imagery is becoming less universal, more specific, more evocative of a particular set of moments in the speaker’s memory. At the same time the field of view is increasing. “When the circus came to town”—now we’re talking about one singular event. The speaker’s focus has telescoped, in these three lines, from a generic childhood to a precise instant, while also expanding from his one held hand via a city park to the entire town and even to the traveling circus which had to have come from somewhere out of town, therefore intimating to him the reality of a broader world—this song is about a dawning realization of the vastness of existence. The “you” addressed in the song’s lyrics could be a parent or other guardian but I like to think of it as a fellow child.

The high F in the word “here” is the highest pitch Perry sings. This two-word line is a masterstroke. It’s the poetic equivalent of what cinematographers call a whip pan: our vision is directed, in an instant, from the dusty present to the vivid yet distant past in which the speaker and his companion watched the circus pack up and leave. Notice that before “over here” the narration is in the past tense. In the next verse, it’s all in the present tense:

Outside the circus gathering
Move silently along the rain-swept boulevard
The procession moves on, the shouting is over
The fabulous freaks are leaving town

The synth melodies from earlier have become more lilting and ornamental at the end of every other line, further increasing the contradiction inherent in the music. I love the poetic intensification which happens in the second line of this verse. “Procession” is such a left-brain word; it names a particular thing and places our impression of it into an easily understood category. “Shouting” is the opposite: it fills the mind with senses and sensations without explaining them or tying them to a specific type of event. This line is an example of the kind of poetic parallelism found in the Hebrew poetry of the Bible. Together, these two words communicate the entire concept of a traveling circus: the parade, the carnival midway barkers, the sideshow, the people who have come to see the sights. But the next line’s image of “The fabulous freaks” is even more evocative, filled with deep wells of meaning.

For some reason I’m reminded of the cover image from Tom Waits’ album Swordfishtrombones. On it Tom Waits looks like the sort of person who would run away to join a circus and maybe already has; he’s in the company of a dwarf and a strong man, and he’s giving us a “these are my kind of people and we are so superior to you” sort of look. The life of a circus performer is not particularly great. It’s full of upheavals, difficulties, disasters, and the sort of desperate camaraderie that only exists among outcasts. Yet there is a romance about that life: adventure, unpredictability, an opportunity to see the world and to have lots of fun, to be the object of a sort of love or admiration simply by virtue of one’s existing in the world: a dwarf or bearded lady doesn’t even have to practice to do their job well. Still, the circus is a place of aching sadness.

They’re driven by a strange desire
Unseen by the human eye
Someone’s calling

This “strange desire” might be simply the promise of more crowds and ticket sales at the next town; but, when considered in light of the “strange desire” of the flowers in verse one which strain towards the light, I wonder if what is meant, here, is the universal desire to thrive and flourish. Circus people can’t do that if they stay in one place, though; unlike flowers, they are always pulling themselves up by their own roots and moving away. I think this is part of what makes circuses so fascinating, and also so sad. Think of Picasso’s Rose Period paintings of circus people (the largest and best of which is illustrated at the top of this essay): here are a bunch of misfits and outcasts, bound together by the trials of the road; theirs is a tough hard life and all they have to rely on is each other, and weak though that support maybe it is fiercely loyal. It’s hard to imagine such a life. Perhaps the closest most of us have to it is the military life, in which people are made to move around at the whim of the government and a distinct culture develops thereby. But at least the government gives out a good pension to retired soldiers. In the circus, what happens when an acrobat’s body wears out and they’re just too old to work anymore?

The music twists and whirls. Brendan Perry sings the song’s title and then the instruments drop out except for those string chords and a triplet figure on a flute.

We sat and watched
As the moon rose
For the very first time

He ends the song with these three spoken lines. And now I understand this song’s true interpretation: it is about a child’s first encounter with the fleetingness of beauty. On this day so long ago he remembers three things: the presence of his friend, the departing circus, and the rising moon; and they all work together in him to reveal to him something of the true beauty that exists underneath all the phenomena, but also of the tragedy that twines about all earthly beauty: it always fades.

I don’t remember the first time I ever noticed the beauty of the rising moon. But I do remember other times I first encountered some particular species of beauty: the sparkling on freshly-fallen snow; being able to recognize particular patterns in the stars; the sun, pale behind blowing fog. These things remain objectively beautiful every time I again see them but the subjective wonder I felt at seeing them for the first time has long passed.

And I remember being five or six years old and playing with a little girl under a bush with big bunches of white flowers on it, and becoming aware, there with her, of something true about beauty. I haven’t spoken to this girl in decades. What makes this song so sad, I suppose, is the same thing that gives me a melancholy feeling when I think of her: not only is the beauty in the world so often elusive, fleeting; but also the freshness of newly-discovered beauty fades away. We see something amazing for the first time and part of us knows that years from now we will be so familiar with it that we won’t see it as amazing anymore. The carnival always ends, eventually.

However—maybe it is good that this is so.

The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

So says C. S. Lewis in his sermon “The Weight of Glory.” Lewis is trying to explain that all the beautiful and good things of this temporal existence ought to point us to the ultimate beauty—the beauty of God; and to serve to whet our appetite for the things of God, which will prepare us for heaven. Brendan Perry sings of knowing that the earthly beauty will fail, knowing that there will only ever be one “first time” for the moon to rise and that the carnival will be over sooner than we wish. But there is a place prepared for us in which the beauty will not fade. Could it be that all the corpus of art and music and literature only has value in pointing us toward that place? Perhaps.

​

Share

Subscribe now

​

And now, ladies and gentlemen, and children of all ages! Prepare to be amazed, astounded, shocked, and stupefied by my next illusion—the Chinese Mystery Box! Never in your life will you have been so surprised as you will be upon seeing this amazing feat of legerdemain. I would ask that those who are of a sensitive disposition, who are easily frightened by inexplicable mysteries, and who are susceptible to fainting caused by overexcitation of the nervous system to please leave the room at this time; also, if you are in the company of small children who might become easily started or distressed, you are hereby advised to remove your children from the hall, as the events which are about to transpire before your eyes are of such an unexplainable and confusing nature that even those who are in possession of the most stalwart and skeptical of constitutions may begin to question their ideas of the basic fundaments of the universe upon seeing what will shortly transpire here upon this very stage. Indeed, this performance has been undertaken in the presence of some of the most enlightened and learned men of science, exemplars in their disciplines and with unimpeachable reputations for level-headed rationality in the face of the most confusing phenomena of the natural world; and even they have confessed to being baffled and flabbergasted by what they saw, and are at an utter loss for an explanation of its mysteries. What you are about to see is no mere parlor trick, no cheap sleight-of-hand suited for a children’s birthday party; no indeed, ladies and gentlemen! I wish as well to inform you all that what you are about to witness is a conjuration with an ancient and storied pedigree. An illusion of this kind was first recorded as having been performed for the legendary Emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang, two hundred years before the birth of Christ. The secret of its execution has since been passed down in an unbroken chain from one master magus to the next, throughout all the subsequent ages of history; and the true explanation of its secret has been jealously guarded during that entire time. It is said that murders have been committed for its sake, and that men have been driven to madness in an attempt to unlock the mysteries of its performance. I have been told on the highest authority that none other than the great Houdini was reputed to have offered the sum of five hundred thousand dollars for the privilege of being initiated into its secret; but he was refused. Before we begin, if I could have two volunteers to come up to the stage and examine this oaken box which I have set upon this table. You will note, gentlemen, that it is of a solid and sturdy construction. If you please, gentlemen, tap or knock the sides with your fist—note how solid they are! Now, if you will, please come around to this side and open the top of the box. Note that there is nothing on the inside. I will tip the box over onto its side and show the inside to the assembled audience. I believe you would agree that there is nothing at all in the box? And now, please, gentlemen, if you could assist me in lifting the box up and off from the table; notice that the base is of a comparably solid construction to the sides of the box. I wish now to direct your attention to the table upon which the box has been resting. If you will allow me, gentlemen, to place the box to the side, on the floor; we will give the table an appropriately thorough examination, merely for the purpose of allaying any suspicion. I will simply remove the cloth which covers the table. And now if I could ask a young lady or matron from the audience, one who is familiar with the domestic arts and a competent judge of fabrics, to come forward and closely inspect the quality of the linen cloth which covers the table. If you please, madam, run your fingers over the cloth and feel its quality. It is of fine workmanship, with no rips or tears or holes; it can be trusted to maintain its structural integrity under strain. Now if you could, please, gentlemen, pay very close attention to the construction of this table. Note how it, too, like the box, is made of fine solid workmanship; it does not come apart at all, and note also that there are no secret drawers or compartments anywhere on either the table itself, or on the legs upon which the tabletop is supported. I would ask you to very carefully note the thickness of the tabletop; be mindful that it is both sufficiently strong to hold the weight of the box, yet it is inconceivable that there is any possible space within the tabletop to conceal any sort of complicated machinery or apparatus. Just to be sure on that last point, gentlemen, I will ask that you allow me to drill a hole through the tabletop, to allay any suspicion that there might be something, some sort of mechanism, concealed therein . . . [Editor’s note: this sort of patter continued in the same style for a considerably long time; I left out of impatience before the trick was actually performed.]

​

2: FRAME-TO-ART RATIO

Have you ever seen a painting with a frame so flamboyant, so ornate, so excessive in its decoration that it detracts from the aesthetic experience of looking at the picture it encloses? These days it’s fashionable for frames be very narrow and unobtrusive, assuming they are present at all: much contemporary art dispenses with the frame altogether. But in earlier times it was common for the frame itself to be an object, if not of art, then at least of artistry—that of the woodcarver, whose skill at decorating frames is, in some instances, of more interest than the skill of the painter who made the art which the enveloping frame overshadows.

The above painting (found on this antiques chatroom) has one of the largest frame-to-canvas ratios of any work of art I’ve ever seen. By my calculations the total area of the frame itself is 27.89 square inches1 but of the painting alone, only 5.25 square inches, yielding a frame-to-art ratio of 5.31 to 1. Excessive, say you? What about this one: the frame area is 41.315 inches and the picture is only 5 inches; that’s a frame-to-art ratio of 8.26 to 1. I found it on this auction site. It sold for $10,000, which comes out to $1079.62 for the painting and $8920.38 for the frame.

The ultimate would be if there were no art at all, just a massive frame, the four sides of which would each take the form of right triangles touching at their 90-degree angles, with the painting the size of an infinitesimally small mathematical point directly in the center. What would be the frame-to-art ratio of something like that? Infinity to 1? 1 to zero?

Or maybe the ultimate would be an assortment of frames displayed for their own aesthetic value, as described in Italo Calvino’s novel If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler:

In one corner of a wall there are a number of framed photographs, all hung close together. Photographs of whom? Of you at various ages, and of many other people, men and women, and also very old photographs as if taken from a family album; but together they seem to have a function, not so much of recalling specific people, as of forming a montage of the stratifications of existence. The frames are all different, nineteenth-century Art Nouveau floral forms, frames in silver, copper, enamel, tortoiseshell, leather, carved wood; they may reflect the notion of enhancing those fragments of real life, but they may also be a collection of frames, and the photographs may be there only to occupy them; in fact some frames are occupied by pictures clipped from newspapers, one encloses an illegible page of an old letter, another is empty.

​

3: FRAME AND NON-FRAME INVERTED

What little I’ve heard of K-pop gives me the impression that although there is probably a kernel of goodness in there somewhere—since I believe that there are very few genres of art which are irredeemably bad—I can’t, at this time, perceive what it might be. Like every other parent of preteen girls I was driven nearly to distraction by having to hear that one song from KPop Demon Hunters over and over and over a few months ago. Before that I don’t think I’d ever actually listened to any K-pop at all, yet I was well aware of it as a visual and cultural phenomenon. I had heard all the stories of obsessive fans, kids forced to get plastic surgery, terrible working conditions, corruption and scandal; and I had seen the K-pop racks at various retail establishments and been entranced by the multitudinous styles of packaging in which the albums came. No bland jewel cases here—not even those cardboard sleeves which enclose Keith Jarrett’s ECM albums or Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. No: these albums came with elaborate packages enclosing, at times, sets of stickers and postcards, collectible posters, books even. For a while I was seriously considering plunking down a few hundred dollars and buying a pile of K-pop albums just for the packaging. But while I was getting my mind melted with excessive replays of “Golden” I realized something: K-pop is all frame. There’s not much of value in the music and I’m not sure there is meant to be—but how it is packaged is fascinating. And I don’t mean just the CD cases. The bands themselves: the gorgeous boys with their perfect complexions; the fancy outfits; the elaborate stage shows. All of these things are what would have been considered incidental to the music in most other genres. Or maybe not; since the Beatles showed up on Ed Sullivan in 1964 pop music has been continuously packaged—framed—in ways designed for visual appeal, with only a tangential reference to the actual music.

Theodore Gracyk comments on the tendency of rock musicians to frame their activities in a way which doesn’t quite do justice to the musicians’ actual working lives. “Pick up an illustrated history of rock music,” he writes. “Again and again we see two sorts of images. First, the posed formal portrait of the musician holding a guitar or seated at the piano. Second, the performer on stage, usually in the throes of passion, in live performance. What we seldom see, in photographs or videos, is the reality of the creative process.”2 I’m appreciative of Pink Floyd’s documentary film Live at Pompeii because it does, in fact, contain large stretches of footage of the band members in the studio. There they are, working on overdubs. Twiddling knobs at the mixing desk. There’s Roger Waters with headphones on in a little glass room talking to the engineers via microphone. This is the reality of the rock’n’roll lifestyle—not the jumping around on stage, moody romanticism, bite-your-lip type of stuff.

It is more glamorous to show the rock musician being moody than it is to show them logging boring hours in the studio. But K-pop’s framing is something different. K-pop is selling the frame as the art. I have a suspicion that the reason K-pop music exists at all is to push the posters and booklets and online parasocial engagement and Korean soft cultural power—not the other way around. But I’ll have to do more research on that point to be sure.

​

4: EXCELLENCE VERSUS ITS APPEARANCE

Here’s a piercing offhand observation by , recounted in the context of a visit to her dry cleaner in Georgetown.

I only started coming here last year, after my former preferred establishment changed ownership, professionalized its storefront, and ruined my favorite pants. This place at minimum looks like a fire hazard, if not a candidate for Hoarders. The customer service is . . . not a priority. They do immaculate work. They’re forever running behind precisely because they’re so good at what they do, because they take pride in their art, and I appreciate that; revere it. Everything about the place—the attitude, the environment, the results—speaks to an ethos I admire intensely: of striving for excellence over its appearance, of doing so even to the point that the latter is almost necessarily sacrificed.

The appearance of excellence instead of the real thing: is that not also a kind of frame? A frame can indeed look pretty, though if it draws our full attention from the badness (or the goodness) in the art then all it’s doing is distracting us. And though a crisp clean social-media-post-worthy store interior looks professional, isn’t that also just a kind of frame? This reminds me of another discussion of the appearance of excellence contrasted with the real thing:

The first and roughest drawings I put in very smart gilt frames to show them off; but as the copy becomes more accurate and the drawing really good, I only give it a very plain dark frame; it needs no other ornament than itself, and it would be a pity if the frame distracted the attention which the picture itself deserves. Thus we each aspire to a plain frame, and when we desire to pour scorn on each other’s drawings, we condemn them to a gilded frame. Some day perhaps “the gilt frame” will become a proverb among us, and we shall be surprised to find how many people show what they are really made of by demanding a gilt frame.

This is from Emile; or, On Education (in the passage where he’s talking about teaching Emile how to draw) by Jean-Jacques Rousseau—and I’m of the opinion that the old fool might just be right this one time.

​

3': FRAME AND NON-FRAME INTERTWINED

All of the pictures in Rothko Chapel have no frames. Or: Rothko Chapel is the frame for all the pictures housed therein.

A church or chapel is supposed to be a place where one has a religious experience; that could, perhaps, explain why visitors to Rothko Chapel are so often moved to tears. “It is likely,” James Elkins writes, “that the majority of people who have wept over twentieth-century paintings have done so in front of Rothko’s paintings. And of all Rothko’s paintings, people have been moved most by the fourteen huge canvases he made for the chapel that now bears his name.” But when Elkins himself went to look inside Rothko Chapel he didn’t feel like crying: “I was tired from looking so long at so little.”3 The people who do come to Rothko’s Chapel and end up crying are, I suspect, dong so because of the framing of the chapel. This is a religious place. There are copies of the world religions’ holy texts in the front lobby. The pictures, associated as they are with the concept of religion, take on a religious meaning. If people don’t cry as much in front of the Rothkos found in museums around the world, it could be because the museum / gallery frame encourages a dispassionate, emotionally detached aestheticism. Would the Rothko Chapel paintings motivate viewers to tears if they were dispersed across a random assortment of museums? Would a different grouping of Rothko’s paintings be as capable of inducing tears if they were in the Chapel instead of the ones in there now? What if it were Pollock Chapel or Franz Kline Chapel: would there still be all the crying?

​

2': KINDS OF FRAMES

Mostly, frames serve two purposes. Sometimes they are meant to enhance our experience of the art. Sometimes they serve as a boundary between the artwork and everything that is not the artwork. In the former category I’d put the rock posturing we’ve examined, the magician’s stage patter, and the carven and gilded frames around old masterworks. This last category can easily bleed into kitsch. Some wag once said there is a difference between symbolizing beauty and representing it. The fancy wooden frames despised by Rousseau would fall into the category of symbolizing. Or maybe they act like highway signs, alerting us to the presence of the beautiful artwork which they enclose the way a no passing zone sign alerts us to the road conditions.

The second purpose of frames, that of boundary, is more interesting. I’d argue this is what is happening with the whole white cube ideal of the modern gallery or museum: the gallery / museum is presented as a set-apart space, a sacred space. This is the real reason why contemporary paintings rarely have frames. They don’t need to be separated from the sacred space. They are an integral part of it. Contemporary artworks don’t have frames for the same reason the Sistine Ceiling doesn’t have a frame.

​

ENTIRELY UNRELATED

My pastor was recently talking about chiasms. He said they had the same shape as cheeseburgers: A-B-C-B'-A' is the same as bun-condiments-burger-condiments-bun. I love chiasms and have stated my admiration of them more than once; inspired by his comments, I wrote this poem.

Bread alone is not enough
and hunger is the best sauce—
hunger for truth, not cheesy sentimentalism!
We need the good meat of the word!
Lettuce read our Bibles regularly, and
ketchup on our daily reading of
the bread that satisfies: the sacred scriptures.

​

​

Share

Subscribe now

​

​

1

In Mockingbird, discusses his visits to the Precious Moments Chapel. At first he was skeptical that the kitschy brand of teardrop-eyed children would make an appropriate visual metaphor for the deep matters of the faith. But after visiting the chapel several times and reflecting upon what he saw there, he’s come to different conclusions. On a superficial level he notes that the Precious Moments Chapel echoes many of the great religious artworks of the western tradition. But he notices, as well, how the chapel’s decorations resonate with several important Christian doctrines: how grace unlocks the door barred by the law, and most notably how believers are required to “become like little children” to experience the kingdom of heaven, as Matthew 18:3 says.

There is a fascinating discussion of the Precious Moments Chapel in Frank Burch Brown’s Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste, which is too complex for me to explicate here. Suffice to say that I am planning my own trip to Carthage, Missouri to view the chapel, with Milliner’s and Brown’s comments in mind: expect some sort of essay or article on the subject sometime this summer.

​

2

Arthur Aghajanian wrote, for Genealogies of Modernity, a pair of articles on the necessity, for Christians, of recovering a familiarity with the rich tradition of sacred imagery. Here are links to Part I and Part II. He approaches the question of sacred images from a within the Catholic tradition, and I expect many of my fellow Protestants will disagree with the way he frames his argument. But there is still much to learn from his remarks even for those whose convictions prevent them from using images in worship. In particular, evangelicals could take to heart what he says about the overuse of some standardized forms of imagery: “the same images are deployed more broadly across various Christian institutions. The result is a heterogeneous visual field shaped more by availability and convenience than by theological intention.”

What he is arguing against is, in effect, the kitschification of religious imagery— when truth is of less value than symbolism, evocativeness, and vibe. This is something hard to do in today’s world of image saturation. But it can be done.

​

3

Here is a fine set of aphorisms about poetry by . My favorite is this one: “There is more love of humanity in the sewage system than there is in The Oxford Book of English Verse.” Of course, if Makoto Fujimura’s ideas about artists as cultural caregivers were adopted by a greater number of artists, Fayne’s aphorism would probably no longer be true.

​

4

I’m very excited for the new book by : Look Like a Lady, coming out via Brazos Press in August. It’s an examination of how the history of western art privileges certain perspectives on how women are expected to behave and how they are viewed in the context of the broader culture. In contrast to these unwarranted stereotypes, Weichbrodt will offer some alternative ideas of womanhood that are also found in art but often get overlooked. This link will take you to her announcement which includes a preorder link.

​

5

What counts as art and what doesn’t? has recently published overviews of two categories of objects and experiences which we might not think of when we list the different genres of art: those which deal primarily with proprioception (the internal state of equilibrium, balance, and bodily position), and those in which the art object is merely “selected” by the artist, with no actual artistic creativity involved. Some of these works overlap with categories of modern and contemporary art, such as Duchamp’s readymades or Yayoi Kusama’s infinity rooms. Others—such as the terrifying-sounding “haunted swings” of the victorian era or such humble objects as manuports—are more exotic. To Kerwin’s list of “artworks of mere selection” I would add: the playlist. I’m not the only person who has spent a whole day tweaking the song order on a playlist (or mixtape) meant for that certain special someone.

​

6

(whose work I’ve discussed before on this blog) has recently started a newsletter in which he details his artistic process. It’s called Greening the White Cube. Currently he is describing the series of trompe-l’oeil paintings of peeling paint which he made about ten years ago.

​

7

In , published 12 Theses on Church Buildings. Some of these are quite on point, but some, I felt, were the sort of thing that it would be easy for practically every Christian to agree with because the details are too vague. For instance: “Thus, whatever architectural or aesthetic designs are made, they must never hinder or come at the expense of the audible and clear proclamation of the gospel.” That is all well and good, but schisms have erupted over differing definitions of “hinder.”

Whatever you feel about Sims’ theses, you’ll probably agree that they are excellent jumping-off points for sharpening one’s own thinking on the issue of church architecture. In a similar vein, here is making a good point about cultural styles in church buildings not being normative for the entire community of faith:

​

8

OK, now I’ve got you primed to appreciate Edward Ravnikar’s stunning Ferantov Garden Apartments in Ljubljana, Slovenia (a tip of the hat to who brought it to my attention via his project). For some reason unknown to me, my teenage children absolutely love brutalism. The Ferantov apartments aren’t brutalism in the strict sense (it appears they are made of brick, not concrete) but they share the style’s interest in large, blocky forms. Ravnikar’s building is an often-confusing amalgam of disparate elements; but to my eye they all flow together in some sort of higher cohesion. It reminds me of a wasp’s nest or those large structures made by weaverbirds. What do you suppose it feels like to live in this building?

​

9

Also in Mere Orthodoxy: Brian Pell discusses the relationship between musical taste and the search for the infinite beauty of God. He gives a convincing reason for why one’s own taste in music is always the best, and he gives helpful pointers against a legalistic view of music, which prohibits or restricts the pursuit of beauty to specific genres or styles. As a person who listens to and enjoys an enormous variety of music, I found Pell’s loving and ecumenical approach most satisfying. Some of his thoughts about the elusiveness of beauty in art echo a few of the things I’ve written about before (here and here) on the same subject.

​

10

In Art and Illusion, Ernst Gombrich shares this quote from a 2nd-century-B.C. Chinese painting instruction book.

Everyone is acquainted with dogs and horses since they are seen daily. To reproduce their likeness is very difficult. On the other hand, since demons and spiritual beings have no definite form and since no one has ever seen them they are easy to execute.

Maurice Sendak deployed this principle when illustrating Where the Wild Things Are. As told by John Cech in Angels and Wild Things: The Archetypal Poetics of Maurice Sendak,

Because he could not draw horses, he eventually changed the name of the book from the original Where the Wild Horses Are and settled on “things” since no one could challenge his ability to draw these creatures.

Sendak’s book received quite a lot of pushback when it was initially published from parents, librarians, and educators who thought Sendak’s “wild things” would be too scary for children to handle. Speaking for myself, I’ve been reading Where the Wild Things Are my whole life and I never remember, even as a child, being scared of the monsters depicted therein. Where the Wild Things Are was the only one of Sendak’s books I was familiar with until last week when I got on a big Sendak kick and checked out every book of his from the library; and here’s the strange thing—I am slightly terrified by the bakers in In the Night Kitchen. I think it’s because they all look exactly the same, or maybe because they are so absent-mindedly jolly. They aren’t even aware there is a whole person in their cake batter.

​

11

The early parts of Art and Illusion deal primarily with how even the most realistic painting is filtered through the artist’s perception and doesn’t really show us the truth about reality. Artists are not passive; they actively select what they want to depict, at times making the choice due to the limits of their chosen medium. Gombrich quotes this short lyric by Nietzsche:

“All Nature faithfully”—But by what feint
Can Nature be subdued to art’s constraint?
Her smallest fragment is still infinite!
And so he paints but what he likes in it.
What does he like? He likes, what he can paint!

​

12

In Plough, Sean Rubin recounts his mother’s conversion story. She was raised a Catholic but never felt a personal connection to the faith; throughout her early adulthood she drifted through various religious and philosophical movements until one time while she was looking at Georges la Tour’s Adoration of the Shepherds and focusing on the shadowy figure in the background of the painting. As Rubin tells it:

My mother told me this story often enough that I can still hear it in her voice. “I realized I was the peasant with the smirk! I never disrespected Jesus. Why would I? He had been a good moral teacher, and then he was killed. I finished reading the rest of the book, and when I closed the cover I yelled out, almost involuntarily, ‘Oh my God—Jesus is the Messiah!’”

It’s a fine account of how art can direct people towards the truth. The degree to which art is able to do this, on its own, without any textual mediation, is, of course, the great question up for debate—a debate which has continued from the early centuries of the church up to the present day, and which will likely not be resolved any time soon. Still, I am encouraged when I read Rubin’s account.

​

13

Aghajanian’s articles, mentioned above, on Christian visual literacy include a quick synopsis of the history of sacred art. However, his account stops at the 17th century, in the midst of the baroque period. It does indeed seem that the style and language of the baroque is, for better or for worse, the culmination of the visual style of sacred art: there is no sacred impressionism, no sacred cubism, no sacred fauvism, etc. It seems the public, official, institutionally-sanctioned art of the church still looks more often than not like Bernini or Caravaggio made it. Why is this? And does this quote from Germain Bazin’s Baroque and Rococo, on the religious art of Rembrandt, have any bearing on the question:

It may seem paradoxical that, in that century of faith, expressions of the Christian Faith that went deepest of all came, through his brush, from Protestant Holland with its rejection of the use of images in worship—at a time when all Catholic Europe was indulging in a regular orgy of images.

​

14

Two good paintings, both by Norman Rockwell: Lion and his Keeper (1954) and Jury Room (1959). Both of these pictures display Rockwell’s supremely adept handling of the picture plane; in both, the action is confined to a very narrow space with almost no delineation into the typical foreground / middleground / background. Also in both, he subtly directs the eye to a single point, balancing vast areas where almost nothing is happening (in the case of Jury Room, he fills the top of the canvas with literal smoke) with passages of intense detail. This detail is intense psychologically as well as pictorially. Rockwell’s genius lies in enabling the viewer to come to an understanding of his subjects’ mental state, doing so in a way that is imminently relatable and understandable. His paintings have little ambiguity in them and their value lies more in the solidity of the truth they reveal and not in their depth of interpretation. Rockwell doesn’t say “puzzle over my work and you’ll find a plethora of meanings in it;” rather, he says “here; I know you’ve felt exactly like this before.” I’m becoming more and more persuaded that Norman Rockwell is the best painter America has yet produced.

​

Share

Subscribe now

​

Busy, bustling, big—this energy is reflected, superbly and stunningly, in Mads Anderson: Spectral Dynamics, the new exhibit on view at Modern Arts Midtown, the commercial gallery run by Larry Roots and located right in the beating heart of Omaha at 37th and Dodge.

Nearly all of the art on display at the gallery’s opening reception was abstraction. The only exceptions were some Giacometti-esque filiform statues by Larry Roots himself, sneaking around in the corners of the gallery rooms. Here is another Larry Roots piece, an assemblage again influenced by Giacometti, specifically his Palace at 4 A.M; actually I don’t know, maybe that influence isn’t present, but the two works seem strongly allied to me.

Larry Roots’ works, both his sculptures and his drawings, exude an air of calm. Aside from his pieces everything on view corresponded to a general feeling of vigorous activity, fitting to the city’s mood. If this is the new art of Omaha, it is excellently apropos.

My favorite pieces were by Mykl Welch. They display a mesmerizing depth of detail and a panoply of colors, textures, and forms. These pictures evoke a bug’s-level view of the universe, with organic-seeming plantlike passages juxtaposed with grids that recede into the distance. The sense of scale is both microscopic and vast. Some of these paintings evoke the limitless vistas of prairie and sky, or maybe suburban sprawl; others layer colors and forms to claustrophobic densities, compelling the viewer to slow down and examine each square inch of the painting with close scrutiny.

Welch’s paintings were the most formally diverse of the exhibit; and although he is very ecumenical in his choice of imagery, form, and structure, it is evident that he is still working through specific problems of aesthetics in his paintings. The other artists in the show could also be said to be preoccupied with particular problems of their art; each artist represented had a signature mood, feeling, or visual trademark to their work (I hesitate to use the word “cliché” because it has such negative connotations; none of the works here were clichéd but the artists each had distinct, recognizable “brands”—I’ll leave it to other critics to determine if that sort of thing is good or bad for artists, and for art). Some other highlights: Mads Anderson, the headliner artist, showed large-scale paintings of dense complexity, juxtaposing textures and colors in what I’m considering is a metaphor for the density, complexity, and juxtapositions of the modern urban landscape. These paintings were the most “Omaha” of all that I saw in the show: loud and brash as road construction, big enough to serve as the focal point of any public space in town—or any private residence with a wall of sufficient size (I commented to one person at the show that I myself, living in a house with mostly windows in the front room, have no place to hang such large paintings).

Anderson’s artist statement indicates that he “seek[s] to address duality” through his art, and it’s fair to ask if that claim is supported in his work. I think it is; each painting of his seemed to be defined by a larger formal structure made of minuscule units. Take The Mist, shown above, for example: at first glance it is not much more than a large gray rectangle, but a closer looks reveals its texture of multitudes of tiny marks made by brush and palette knife. This tension between the overall effect of his canvases and their individual component parts—the tension between the One and the Many, that eternal bugaboo of western philosophy—gives Anderson’s paintings a conceptual depth which is quite pleasant to behold and experience.

The only works I was not fond of were the dot-patterned textiles by Julie Owens. Perhaps Damien Hirst has simply ruined the idea of polka dots for me—that’s my fault, not that of Owens. Her color palette was much more harmonious, much less ecumenical, than that of Mads Anderson or Mykl Welch; this, coupled with her more regulated and rhythmic spatial organization, felt like a scaling back of the furious energy present elsewhere in the show.

Other works of hers played with her characteristic rigid grid structures in fun and unpredictable ways. These next two reference the countryside surrounding Omaha; as such they are the only works in the show with an explicit tie to the local geography.

Picasso, Braque, and the other early analytic cubists have obviously captured the imagination of Jaqueline Kluver, whose canvases vibrate with the most jumped-up energy of anything in the gallery. I’m also a big fan of the analytic cubists; Kluver has wisely decided not to obsess over brushstrokes as they did (Braque and Picasso always seemed to make a point, with their brushstrokes, of alerting the viewer that their works were paintings above anything else—at least, until they discovered collage). I’m interested in how these kinds of paintings are planned and executed: in Kluver’s works I can detect some hint of underlying structure, which is evident or obscured as the case may be.

I already mentioned the Giacometti-ism found in the sculptures of Larry Roots. It is a fascinating aesthetic development that Giacometti’s conception of the human form, which Sartre declared to be about despair and existentialist uncertainty—an interpretation embraced by the Christian art critics, from Francis Shaeffer to Randall Reynoso—has now become simply another tool in the artist’s kit, another way to represent people’s bodies. No one thinks of these attenuated forms as expressive of angst, loneliness, or despair; nowadays the form is most often found, on Etsy especially, in statues of dancers, symphony conductors, or happy families.

But back to the exhibit. The reception itself was very well-attended. If I could venture a coarse generalization, I would say that most of the people there were in their fifties and up and looked rich. These are the people who will be buying this art; likely, these are the people who consider themselves at the forefront of Omaha culture, either in a direct way or more subtly: business owners, in-demand professionals such as surgeons or architects, community leaders, or established scions of wealth. I should have reserved some time to interview the gallery goers but I was in a hurry because I had another commitment that same night. However, I would not be surprised to learn that the people at Modern Arts Midtown were looking for art which expressed their own view of what the city of Omaha meant to them.

Where else have we seen this idea—this desire, on the part of art patrons, to own art which expressed their deep feelings about their own place in society? Why, in 17th-century Holland, of course—the land of Rembrandt and Vermeer!

Truly, there is not much difference between the worldview and outlook of the masters of the Dutch Golden Age and the abstract works on view at Modern Arts Midtown. Both cultures desire an art which is expressive of the art patron’s own outlook on life and their place in society. The Dutch bourgeoisie—newly independent of the Habsburg empire and suddenly living in one of the mightiest and wealthiest countries in the world, overseeing a trade empire stretch all the way to the spice islands, China, and South America—wanted an art which would communicate to themselves as well as to the world at large their own prosperity and ease. As a consequence we now have masterpieces such as Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, the landscapes and cityscapes of Jacob van Ruisdael and Peter de Hooch, all those happy, contented servants of Vermeer and Franz Hals, and Jan Asselijn’s The Enraged Swan. Clearly, the Dutch were having a wonderful time commissioning and producing art of the finest quality which stretched the skills of their artists while also reflecting their own worldview, concerns, interests, and self-image.

The works on display at Modern Arts Midtown are, in a similar fashion, reflective of the pace of life in Omaha, with their kaleidoscopic variety of surfaces, forms, organizational structures. These days the communicative power of paintings has become more allusive and ambiguous; abstraction still reigns as the dominant mode in painting—yet far from being examples of the “zombie formalism” censured by Jerry Saltz, the pictures here are full of individuality, life, and a relentless, positive energy. They match precisely the mood I get when I think of my city, growing and stretching and flexing its muscle. Will we see an “Omaha Golden Age” of painting which will eventually be written about in art books? Who knows! We can surely hope, though!

​

Share

Subscribe now

It’s an exciting time to be an evangelical Christian with an interest in the visual arts: the long slumber in which evangelicals either ignored the arts or viewed them with deep suspicion has finally ended, and there is a vast amount of quality writing, theorizing, and analysis coming from the Christian scene. Many of the people of prominence working in the field come from a Neo-Calvinist background; this book, a compilation of essays from that tradition, is a fine starting point for anyone who wants a fuller understanding of that philosophical system’s views on the arts.

This book’s whole title is The Artistic Sphere: the Arts in Neo-Calvinist Perspective. The back cover blurb says it “brings together history, philosophy, and theology to consider what this Neo-Calvinist tradition has to say about the arts.” I therefore expected it to be a comprehensive overview—a systematic discussion, heavy on general principles, of whatever the Neo-Calvinist position vis-à-vis the arts might be. I was disappointed; the book is, instead, a loose agglomeration of essays about aesthetics and visual art written by an assortment of thinkers who ally themselves with the Neo-Calvinist camp. Some of these thinkers explicitly tie their ideas to those of John Calvin or to such Neo-Calvinist philosophers as Herman Dooyeweerd; most of them do not. A more accurate title would have been Neo-Calvinist Thinkers Reflect on the Arts or The Artistic Sphere: a Neo-Calvinist Reader or something like that.

That being said, there were a few themes and tendencies I noticed in the essays and articles which make up this book. There is a strong emphasis on explaining the art in more than purely aesthetic terms; this tendency is acknowledged by some of the writers in this volume, and merely latent in others. The other theme I noticed was a poptimist one, or at least a willingness to not let the bounds of the “canon” define what these critics will think about. I’ll come back to these two themes throughout the course of this review.

I found much of value in the material offered here. Many of the chapters are excerpts from other books; at times it seemed to me that the reader would have been better served by just reading the books from which these excerpts are taken. However, the chapters in this book are excellent as aperitifs, whetting the appetite for extended forays into these thinkers’ works. Keep your Goodreads “to-read” tab pulled up because this book is a fine guide for further research.

It’s somewhat puzzling to think that the Neo-Calvinists have written so much good material about aesthetics and images when John Calvin himself was rather ambivalent toward the visual arts; he refused to allow images in the setting of corporate worship but other than that he left the field of visual art more or less alone. In Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin’s essay on Calvin’s intellectual legacy, the great reformer is quoted thusly on the subject of painting and sculpture: “If we neglect God’s gift freely offered in these arts, we ought to suffer just punishment for our sloths.” A few pages later he’s quoted as saying “those who seek in scholarship nothing more than an honored occupation with which to beguile the tedium of idleness I would compare to those who pass their lives looking at paintings.” Is this a contradiction? Not really, if we think of the visual arts as tools to an end or as one of the useful handicrafts such as blacksmithing, weaving, and the like. Calvin wanted the arts to be put to good use; he would have considered the modern practice of disinterested aesthetic contemplation to be a waste of time. This fundamental ambivalence, this lack of interest in Calvin’s part on the world of pure aesthetics, causes a sort of imbalance among the inheritors of Calvin’s intellectual tradition featured in this book, especially in reference to their practice of art criticism: I would venture so far as to say that for the typical Neo-Calvinist art critic, formal and stylistic concerns are of no interest at all. Even more troubling, though, is that, for the Neo-Calvinist critic, what the artist is trying to say is of less interest than what the critic finds in the art.

This attitude towards the arts is what John Walford, later in the book, calls the “presuppositional approach.” This approach is very common among Neo-Calvinist critics and historians of art, and can be generally understood as the belief that the doings of the artists will reflect their personal worldview and philosophy of life; and that it is a productive and worthwhile pursuit to go looking for evidences of the artists’ worldviews in their pictures. This approach is particularly evident in the chapter on Hans Rookmaaker, which is a conglomeration of the first chapter of his own book Modern Art and the Death of a Culture admixed with material from two other essays. In these writings, Rookmaaker promotes his theory that the course of mainstream art in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is expressive of a general cultural decay incited by the abandonment of religion in public life and the development an ego-driven existentialist self-realization on the part of the artists. Certainly I agree that there are some paintings which can be interpreted in this way; but I have the distinct feeling, when reading Rookmaaker, that I’m only being shown what he wants me to see, and that he is fitting his facts to the theory instead of his theory to the facts. This tendency has been noted by other readers of Rookmaaker; Jonathan Anderson and William Dryness wrote a whole book in opposition to Rookmaaker’s idea (called Modern Art and the Life of a Culture). James Romaine, in his section of The Artistic Sphere, has this to say about Rookmaaker:

The degree to which Rookmaaker’s conception of modern art was informed by his intensive study of Gauguin is a question that needs more examination. Gauguin was one of the most narcissistic persons ever to pick up a paintbrush. Rookmaaker’s description of the modern artist as self-anointed prophet and priest is accurate of Gauguin’s quest for messianic self-fulfillment in the dual pursuits of artistic egocentrism and Tahitian girls. We can only contemplate how Rookmaaker’s attitude might have been somewhat differently formed if his principal conceptual starting point for modern art had been Paul Cézanne’s pursuit of the “spectacle which the Omnipotent, Eternal Father God unfolds before our eyes” found in the structure of local nature or Vincent van Gogh’s use of color to depict “something of the eternal, of which the halo used to be the symbol” around the heads of humble laborers.

This is, of course, a meta-analysis which shows that the presuppositional approach can even be deployed towards the Neo-Calvinist critics themselves! But despite his flaws, I value Rookmaaker because he is a fundamentally humble critic, unwilling to succumb to any elitist impulses, ready to let any kind of art become a valid witness to his theories. Within the context of easel pictures the range of his pictorial examples is especially wide (and I found it amusing, in Modern Art and the Death of a Culture, how often he uses quotes from Dylan and Beatles songs in his chapter headings). This tendency to consider all kinds of art, even that outside the bounds of the “grand narrative” of artistic development begun in Italy and proceeding via Paris to London and New York, is a feature common to all the Neo-Calvinist art critiques I’ve encountered over the years. The Neo-Calvinists are much more willing to extend a critical acceptance to art which might not be considered cutting-edge or mainstream.

Nicholas Wolterstorff’s chapter “Rethinking Art” brings the book full circle, as it amplifies the message of Calvin that the arts find their highest calling when they are put to useful purposes. Wolterstorff provides a new philosophy of the meaning of art in our current society, rejecting the idea that art has marched inexorably onward along a grand trajectory of progress, with the avant-garde of every age setting the tone for all that is valuable in painting of any era, and with disinterested aesthetic contemplation being the only legitimate use for art. It is the best and most important chapter in the book. It cements for me the idea that within Neo-Calvinist philosophy lies the justification for all kinds of theorizing and opinionating on the full variety of images in our image-saturated culture; in my mind the Neo-Calvinists are truly potimists, since I’ve never found a Neo-calvinist critic claiming that only “high” or “elite” art is worthy of attention. many Catholic art critics will say that only certain styles of art are worthy of attention; many secular critics still believe in a canon (although this view seems the be centered more in the field of literary studies than in that of visual arts). But the principles and analytic methods of Neo-Calvinism can be applied to advertisements, graphic novels, music videos, children’s books, road signs, memes, any any other kind of visual artistry imaginable.

Victoria Emily Jones ends the book with a summary of developments within Christian scholarship in the past half-century since Rookmaaker wrote Modern Art and the Death of a Culture. This chapter is an excellent resource for anyone who wants to read more from the Neo-Calvinist camp; maybe, even, for those who want to jump into the deep end and start getting involved on their own. The only improvement I could suggest for future printings would be some sort of contact list—personally, I want to get in touch with all of these writers and organizations, and ask them what I can do to help the cause. And this leads me into my next point.

, the artsy auxiliary of Christianity Today, recently initiated an editorial series on the state of Christianity and the arts. The first editorial in this series has not yet been published; but when it is, I expect it will dwell on how much is being thought, said, and written about the arts from a perspective of rigorous and committed Christianity. The situation seems to be the exact opposite of what James Elkins described, in 2004, in his book On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art: Elkins, looking at the mainstream critical scene, could find no way for religion to be competently or adequately examined as a crucial factor in the doings of artists. In the intervening two decades, however, the situation has developed with a marked emphasis on religion in the arts, to the point where it’s hard to find a contemporary art critique which does not mention the role of faith, religion, or spirituality in the working lives of the artists.

Much of this thinking has been done by writers working from within the Neo-Calvinist tradition. And although this book feels at times to be arranged rather haphazardly, with a pronounced unevenness in the tone or rigor of the chapters, I like to think this book’s lack of focus means the editors saw a real and immediate need and did the best they could, however hurriedly, to meet that need. Having such a need is a good thing, and I’m happy to see my own tribe—the Neo-Calvinists—exercising their skills in the field of art criticism.

​

Share

Subscribe now

​

Dear [REDACTED],

“Water under the bridge” doesn’t really seem to do justice to our case. Think for a moment how long it had been: the last time, if I recall correctly, that we had seen each other was sometime in 2001. So much has happened since then. Are we even in the same world? Think of it—twenty-five years. The last time we saw each other was before there was any social media. It was before 9/11.

I’ll admit it was a shock to see you. I had completely written you out of my life; in all my calculations I had never admitted the possibility that I might see you again. But there you were. And you approached me: “Do you remember me?” you said. Of course I do. You were the first girl to whom I ever professed love; and guys don’t forget things like that.

I will fully admit it was all my fault that we had ended things on a bad note back then, back in good old two-thousand-one. I was a sixteen-year-old fool, and you knew that; and you did the most reasonable thing you could have done, damping my teenage ardor in the most tactful way you could. Of course I was disappointed; and I like to tell myself I was devastated. But people of that age don’t really know themselves yet; and I bounced back. But that story is for a different time.

About all of this water under the bridge. It’s unreasonable to think we are still the same people as we were back then; but I don’t feel any older—mentally, that is. My body is beginning to break down faster than it can repair itself. But my mind still considers the teenage problems to be the most important ones: art, culture, the world around us—the world of ideas; of human society and relationships. Sometimes it is hard to focus on those problems when the “adult” problems come creeping in. I’m like Wallace Shawn in My Dinner With Andre (have you seen that movie? Surely you have seen that movie): “When I was younger all I thought about was art and music. Now all I think about is money.” In my case there are times when I feel desperately trapped by having to think about money. But I’m tempted to assume that you, as well as me, still care about the same teenage things—really, they are the most important things—as I did.

If I could analyze your talk: you mentioned just a few things in the ten minutes we were vouchsafed after twenty-five years—where you live now, the weather—but one of them was your recalling to me an event of our friendship from before I’d soured it. I can only explain this to myself as your attempt to restore things to how they once were, to “picking up where we left off,” but without that nastiness I managed to stir up right there at the end. In mentioning that CD you gave me all those years ago—and tying it to me, and to you, and to who you are now—I have hope that you have not forgotten the most important thing of all those years ago: namely, music. And if we ever were to meet again, you know I would want to talk about only two things with you: your general broad-brush take on the twenty-first century so far; and music.

I have listened to so much good music in the past twenty-five years. And we always did like to listen to music together. More than recounting the big events of my life so far—my growing family, my job, my house (heaven forbid we have become so vulgar as to talk of our respective political opinions), I would, if you said “explain yourself to me so I might understand you,” share with you the music that is the best. The music that still sends tingles down my spine despite having heard it a thousand times, that got me through rough patches, that pulled the curtain back and showed me: “this, this is the possible goodness in music.” So here we go.

I started listening to Cocteau Twins a few years after you left town. It took me about ten years to get through their discography; and I must say, their EPs are better than their albums. With one exception: Victorialand remains their best effort. But “Kookaburra” from Aikea-Guinea is still one of the best verse-chorus songs I’ve ever heard. Listen to the piano in the second verse, as well as those upward glides Elizabeth Fraser does with her voice—but I’m not ready to talk about melodic shapes yet. Well get to that.

I also started listening to things like Flaming Lips and Wilco at this time: and you’ve simply got to hear the last track from Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots—it’s flawless. The Flaming Lips are a silly band, though. Wilco is serious. “Radio Cure” and some of the songs on A Ghost is Born taught me more about sound in relation to form than I would ever have learned from listening to all those symphonies, or the Yes and King Crimson records I kept urging onto you. “Spiders” is still one of the best long-form guitar excursions ever recorded. It’s so sparse, though. After listening to Yes’ Topographic Oceans would you ever have expected me to enjoy something like “Spiders”? Strangely, I do.

There’s one other Wilco song I want to mention, but not yet. It’s simply too different from the rest of their work; it’s on an altogether different level. But first, a few other things.

Of course, I listened to all of Radiohead. They were a rock to me in the first few years after you left. But the more contented I become with my life, the less I care for Radiohead. They are, fundamentally, about being in despair. Except for In Rainbows. I was sitting at a coffee shop and talking with a friend the first time I heard “All I Need” from In Rainbows; and I stopped listening to what he was saying, told him to stop talking even, and said to myself: they’re back. I’ve never before or since had the same feeling of gears-meshing, planets-lining-up, something-is-right-in-the-universe as I did that evening when I knew that Radiohead had a new record out and it was good.

I’ve got to let you know about all this Canadian music I listened to all the time: music by bands like Godspeed You Black Emperor, Do Make Say Think, Fly Pan Am, Silver Mt Zion. It taught me the same things that the symphonies and sonatas and concertos taught me, but in a more minimalist way. I will defend with everything in me the fundamental goodness of repetitive music. That is why, in all the past twenty-five years, I still keep coming back to the old favorites of Reich, Glass, Riley, et cetera. The best of all that music is undoubtedly Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians. I hope one day you get a chance to hear it all the way through, uninterrupted. And I would love to watch you listen to it. But the heirs to that tradition—Arvo Pärt, Górecki, The Necks—are just as good.

The last quarter-century has been a continuous story of musical discovery for me. Every year some new band or musician will come into my notice, and I will examine it to see if it has that spark of goodness. As I grew older and watched my kids come into the world I suppose I got wiser as well; and aesthetically, the biggest difference is that I listen to the shape of melodies now, where once I listened to the volume of the guitar chords.

Van Morrison sometimes destroys me in this regard—listen, if you have the chance, to the contours of his melodies on Veedon Fleece or Astral Weeks. Listen also to the melodic shapes in Stereolab’s works: simple, but powerfully effective, balanced, right, and of a gemlike perfection. Truly, good melodies pop up all over the place: The ornaments in songs like Fleetwood Mac’s “Gypsy” or Grimes’ “Genesis” have that same delectable quality as the best of any lieder or sonatas.

I haven’t talked about lyrical content yet. Musical lyrics are really just a kind of literature and don’t concern me very much. But when the lyrics and the music mesh together—for instance on Arcade Fire’s “Mountains Beyond Mountains” or Hüsker Dü’s Zen Arcade or Sam Amidon’s “Lily-O” or David Byrne’s “Strange Overtones”—well, that’s pure magic. And I ought to tell you of the lowest and bleakest time of my life, when I was morassed in frustration and despair; I drove aimlessly for a long hour, accompanied by Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation—and when I was done, I felt much better.

I told you there was one other Wilco song I wanted to mention. The thing about Wilco is they can be so boring sometimes—after A Ghost is Born they’ve made music which is mostly forgettable. But one has to keep paying attention to them because every ten years or so they plop down a track of absolute perfection. “One Sunday Morning” is such a track. It’s sung in the character of someone who has disappointed their father a long time ago, leaving the father’s religion after a bad shouting match. Now, ages past, the father is dead and the song’s speaker wonders what his relationship to the past still ought to be. He puzzles about his current state of philosophical unmoored-ness, and is honest enough to admit to himself that the strictures of religion are, in a way, comforting. He vacillates, and will continue to vacillate, forever. But the utterly amazing thing is that the music itself vacillates in the same way—it quavers between themes and moods at the very end, mirroring the narrator’s drifting. It’s perfect, and devastating. It reveals what music is capable of being; it justifies the art.

I write a little blog where I talk about art and aesthetics (actually, these days, I barely write on there at all). And I wrote about this Wilco song once—only a few paragraphs as part of a longer essay, in the standard mode of descriptive music criticism. But I deleted that post last year because it simply didn’t do justice to the goodness in the music. Honestly, for all their words, music critics aren’t a bit helpful at all. Their talky-talk is, at worst, mere posturing, and, at best, blank emptiness; the best way to discuss music is just to play it for a friend—

—as I hope you can again be; my best hope is that one day I can listen to some of this music with you, and we can hear it together in mute and silent joy, glad that we are in the same world as it, glad for its goodness.

​

Regards,

Your old friend,

[REDACTED]

​

​

Share

Subscribe now

​

Wilfred Owen’s Photographs
Ted Hughes

When Parnell’s Irish in the House
Pressed that the British Navy’s cat-
O-nine tails be abolished, what
Shut against them? It was
Neither Irish nor English nor that
Decade, but of the species.

Predictably, Parliament
Squared against the motion. As soon
Let the old school tie be rent
Off their necks, and give thanks, as see gone
No shame but a monument—
Trafalgar not better known.

‘To discontinue it were as much
As ship not powder and cannonballs
But brandy and women’ (Laughter). Hearing which
A witty profound Irishman calls
For a ‘cat’ into the House, and sits to watch
The gentry fingering its stained tails.

Whereupon . . .
       quietly, unopposed,
The motion was passed.

​

First off, I must confess I have no idea what Hughes’ title means. Wilfred Owen was, of course, the poet who wrote extensively of the horrors of trench warfare in World War I and who was killed in action only a week before the armistice which ended the war. I am not aware of any photographs taken by Wilfred Owen. Maybe Hughes meant photographs of Owen. I don’t know. With that admission of my own lack of understanding out of the way, let us turn to the poem.

When Parnell’s Irish in the House
Pressed that the British Navy’s cat-
O-nine tails be abolished,

This poem is dense with cultural allusions; and it is possible that some of them might be lost on readers unfamiliar with the episode Hughes is discussing. Charles Parnell was a nationalist Irish politician active in the last decades of the nineteenth century. I am not sure of the exact events to which Hughes is referring, but it can be inferred that some of Parnell’s supporters had moved that the use of the cat-o’-nine-tails — a truly horrifying and medieval implement of corporal punishment —be set aside in favor of more humane forms of naval discipline.

The first three lines of the poem introduce the setting, but the next clause of the sentence — “What shut against them?” — expands that setting: Hughes is describing an event but he is also discussing it. Notice that he doesn’t ease into the discussion with a transitional phrase. He doesn’t say “something shut against them” and then describe the objection of the conservative members of the House. He is being very economical with his words, and he moves us directly forward into an examination of the psychological state of the subjects of his poem.

Neither Irish nor English nor that
Decade, but of the species.

He expands the setting even more in these lines. We aren’t just talking about party politics; this particular debate has implications stretching across the entirety of human existence. By the end of the first stanza we’ve been introduced to a conflict, the characters in it, its setting, and its field of implications — quite a lot to pack into six lines of verse!

Predictably, Parliament
Squared against the motion. As soon
Let the old school tie be rent
Off their necks, and give thanks, as see gone
No shame but a monument—
Trafalgar not better known.

In this stanza Hughes swings the argument of the poem back, like a pendulum, from universal human concerns to this one particular parliamentary debate and introduces more cultural signifiers: the old school tie, the battle of Trafalgar.

Hughes is using the traditional structure of the sonnet to move us through the structure of his thought. In a traditional English sonnet, the first quatrain introduces an idea; the second one develops that idea further. This is what Hughes does when he first expands our perspective and then contracts it in his first two stanzas. The third quatrain of a traditional sonnet usually complicates the issue, introducing some element of unsettledness to what has been already expressed in the poem. The volta corresponds to the denouement in works of narrative: it ties all the unresolved threads together and relieves the tension that has been developed so far. Good examples of this kind of form are John Donne’s sonnet which begins “If poisonous minerals,” and Shakespeare’s sonnet 19. Not all sonnets adhere to this pattern but the best ones at least try to gesture in the direction of the ideal.

Back to Hughes. In what way was the motion to abolish the old cat resisted? “Of the species” Hughes says; in the poem’s second stanza we’re given examples of pride in tradition and heritage. That is what is at issue here: the idea that it is good to deliberately turn our back on the ways of the past. Why would we ever want to abandon our settled way of doings things? To the members of the House that’s evidently a purely rhetorical question. Notice the ironic contrast between the violence of flogging as a corporal punishment and the action of “rending” the symbol of beloved heritage:

Let the old school tie be rent
Off their necks, and give thanks, as see gone
No shame but a monument–

Even more despicable than getting rid of these fine old symbols, these respectable traditions, would be to give thanks for doing so. On the whole, people love familiarity, routines, traditions. To openly express pride at the rejection of tradition goes against deeply-ingrained ways of being human in the world; and the members of the House don’t want to do that. Another thing going against the anti-flogging contingent is that the cat has become a symbol of the British Navy and the power and prestige of the entire nation and race of the English. Understandably (or, to use Hughes’ word, “predictably”) the House would not be interested in rejecting that symbol.

As ship not powder and cannonballs
But brandy and women’ (Laughter).

Not only is the “cat” a symbol, it is also a useful and valuable tool. What is worse: depriving one’s self of a symbol (a psychologically difficult thing to do, but doing so does no damage to one’s daily work), or depriving one’s self of the tools necessary to perform that work? Notice how the absurdity, in the House’s eyes, of the situation causes them to start making witticisms against the ridiculous notion. They start laughing amongst themselves. And here is where Hughes deploys his master stroke.

[ . . . ] Hearing which
A witty profound Irishman calls
For a ‘cat’ into the House, and sits to watch
The gentry fingering its stained tails.

At this point in a traditional English sonnet the poet introduces something which unsettles the scene described in the poem’s first two quatrains. Hughes does so by bringing in “a witty and profound Irishman” into the scene, contrasting his wisdom with the House pro-flogging party, who are being witty with their laughter and feel themselves profound thereby. Hughes’ Irishman, though, is more witty and profound than them — and we know so, because the narrator tells us so. Do you remember those passages in the Bible where the certainty of an action’s being good or evil is assured due to the inspired narrator telling us so? This is similar. The omniscient narrator of Hughes’ poem is aware that, whatever the quality of the M.P.’s debate, it is not as perspicacious as the simple action of the Irish member who brings in one of the whips in question as material evidence.

I absolutely love the assonance between the words “stained” and “tails” in line 18. These two words bear enormous structural and psychological weight; they carry the entire poem. Hughes, with his characteristic verbal frugality, brings us directly into contact with the pure and undiluted horror of corporal punishment in the British Navy. For the past two centuries seamen had been flogged with this instrument of torture. It was deliberately designed to induce the greatest amount of pain possible. One single lash from the whip was enough to tear off bits of skin — but naval punishments started with twelve lashes for drunkenness and up to 300 lashes for desertion. Ships’ boys were punished with a smaller version of the whip that had “only” five strands of knotted cotton cord instead of nine. Hughes’ Irishman brings in one of these implements and watches as the members of the House look closely at the cords, tangled and caked with the blood of who knows how many sailors . . . and it works: they are repulsed. Hughes doesn’t say so directly but we see the outcome of their changed psychological state.

Whereupon . . .
       quietly, unopposed,
The motion was passed.

Instead of pride in their tradition they feel disgust and shame at the reality of the cruel horror they have been defending. Their “quietly, unopposed” assent to the abolishment of the cat is emblematic of the sharpest and most virtuous turn a society can take. Far more important than judicial tradition is the responsibility to treat our fellow human beings humanely — and the members of parliament have enough sense to realize that they ought not to be obstinate in the face of true progress, the kind which is equivalent to growth in maturity.

That is how Hughes ties together the structure of this masterful little poem: the last two lines, corresponding to the volta in an English sonnet, provide the form’s necessary denouement. Notice, as well, his rhyme scheme: he is pairing consonants, instead of vowels, at the ends of lines (this is something both he and his wife, Sylvia Plath, would often do). The result lends the poem a formal structure without being obtrusive or ostentatious. But the poem’s true beauty comes from his deft control of the shape of his argument as displayed through the shape of his poem: his use of contrasts and comparisons, carefully balanced and brought to a virtuosic finish. Well done, Mr. Hughes!

​

​

Share

Subscribe now

On Looking Up By Chance At The Constellations
Robert Frost

​

You’ll wait a long, long time for anything much
To happen in heaven beyond the floats of cloud
And the Northern Lights that run like tingling nerves.
The sun and moon get crossed, but they never touch,
Nor strike out fire from each other nor crash out loud.
The planets seem to interfere in their curves—
But nothing ever happens, no harm is done.
We may as well go patiently on with our life,
And look elsewhere than to stars and moon and sun
For the shocks and changes we need to keep us sane.
It is true the longest drought will end in rain,
The longest peace in China will end in strife.
Still it wouldn’t reward the watcher to stay awake
In hopes of seeing the calm of heaven break
On his particular time and personal sight.
That calm seems certainly safe to last to-night.

​

There comes a point when poetic structural analysis—the counting of meters and feet, the finding of rhymes—has to cease, and we must confront what the poet is actually saying. Currently I’m in the middle of reading Timothy Steele’s All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing, which is an excellent introduction to matters of formal verse; but which (so far at least) doesn’t address the freedom that poets can achieve when they break the rules they’ve learned by heart. Steele mentions Frost’s poem in a discussion of added syllables in iambic meter. Frost speckles his short poem above with numerous examples of what Steele calls “loose iambic pentameter,” the definition of which doesn’t matter in the context of this essay. What matters is that Frost wrote a poem about the constellations, and excellent as his poem is in terms of formal structure, it is surprisingly bad in terms of what ideas Frost is trying to communicate. Let me show you what I mean.

You’ll wait a long, long time for anything much
To happen in heaven beyond the floats of cloud
And the Northern Lights that run like tingling nerves.

Frost’s first three lines present his thesis: nothing of consequence happens in the vault of the sky. “Much” is, here, the key word, for Frost admits that some things do indeed happen up there: clouds, eclipses, aurorae, even planetary alignments and conjunctions—the stuff of astrology. Some events occur but they aren’t real events: they don’t matter, there’s no fire, no boom.

But nothing ever happens, no harm is done.
We may as well go patiently on with our life,

A “real” event, according to Frost’s parallelism in line 7, would be one where harm is done; a real event would, at the very least, have some sort of effect or some kind of lasting consequence, one which would shake up the old order of things. Frost expects us to want those kinds of events: his use of the word “patiently” in line 8 implies as much. He could have said “happily” or “cheerfully” or some other such word but he doesn’t. Why, though, if our lives are in fact comfortable or satisfying, would we want to be alarmed and unsettled by heavenly events? Here’s why:

For the shocks and changes we need to keep us sane.

That, Frost says, is why: to be kept sane. Here is where my objection to this poem’s philosophy rises to its peak. To say that one is “kept sane” by shocks and changes, by disruptive life events, is too much of a generalization. There is, I’ll admit, a kind of life which falls into complacency; a kind of life that would benefit from having an abrupt and sudden altering of its circumstances. But not all lives are like that. To say that a life of stability, routine, and predictability isn’t sane is, well, insane in its own way.

“To keep us sane” is just about as important for the poem’s argument as was “much” from earlier. The poem stands or falls on whether the reader agrees or disagrees with Frost’s conception of these ideas. Oftentimes poets will assume a shared worldview between themselves and their reader; in this case, though, Frost’s effort fails—for me at least. He tries to be broadly inclusive with his plural pronouns (“us,” “we”) but I can’t count myself among the number of people who either feel that sudden events give sanity to life, or that nothing of note happens in the heavens—I’ve lived at the same house, and lived with the same woman, all my adult life; and I look at the starry sky all the time; and find all three of them fascinating.

It is true the longest drought will end in rain,
The longest peace in China will end in strife.
Still it wouldn’t reward the watcher to stay awake

To those who would argue that we should, actually, look for those kind of events in the heavens, Frost presents these lines. Curiously, he seems at first to affirm the objection that all things must change, must pass, and the heavens will indeed offer us the “shocks and changes” that Frost wants. But then he shoots down the argument rather perfunctorily, without bothering to engage the hypothetical interlocutor who points to peace in China and then to the starry sky.

This would have been a great place for Frost to take advantage of the rhetorical structures available in the sonnet form, the fixed form which his poem most closely resembles. His first ten lines conform to a sonnet’s first two quatrains, which traditionally are used to develop a thesis or idea. The next quatrain in a sonnet usually complicates that idea and presents additional material in tension with that of the first two quatrains, which the poet then nicely resolves in the volta (a sonnet’s last two lines). But Frost doesn’t follow that model. I don’t see any reason, rhetorically, why he had to put in these two lines about drought and war, only to hand-wave them away in line 13.

In hopes of seeing the calm of heaven break

Again, we come to a crucial word choice which reveals Frost’s underlying world and life view. “Hopes”—not “fears” or even a neutral word—are what he assumes we will have when thinking about the breaking of the heavenly calm. Apparently he expects us to want this kind of heavenly breaking; this is really what he has been saying the whole poem through. His implication is this: “staring at the night sky is a tedious waste of time; a person would only do it if they were wanting some big change to happen in the stars up there.”

I’ll grant Frost’s point for a moment. The last time a really big change, a Frost-level cataclysmic event, happened in the heavens was in 1604. Johannes Kepler was working on calculating the orbit of the planet Mars and while doing so became perturbed by contradictory data that seemed to indicate Mars’ orbit was not a perfect circle as had been believed ever since the time of the ancients. In October of that year he saw a new star in the constellation Ophiuchus. In those days the idea that any change could happen among the stars was practically heretical; the astronomical establishment was steeped in the opinions of the ancient Greeks and would admit of no possibility of heavenly mutability. Kepler was not the only person who saw this new star: it was so bright that for three weeks it could be observed in full daylight, and for eighteen months it was visible at night to anyone who bothered to look for it (this was before the invention of the telescope, so people didn’t even need fancy equipment to observe the new star). Kepler was able to use this new star (today known by the rather boring name of “SN1604”) and his observations of Mars to finally refute the old Aristotelian conception of the solar system and the heavens. I highly recommend Arthur Koestler’s account of Kepler’s researches in his book The Sleepwalkers for anyone who wants to know more about the astronomical controversies of Kepler’s day; for our purposes we can be content with knowing that sudden and shocking events in the sky do indeed have the potential to shake things up here on earth, just like Robert Frost desires. But surely we don’t want such stellar prodigies to happen all the time? How often, Frost, must “shock and change” happen in the starry dome for you to be satisfied?

That calm seems certainly safe to last to-night.

Frost ends his poem on a note of irony: “safe,” here, is not the happy and secure state we expect it to be. Instead its a boring place that will drive us crazy. I can imagine Frost standing outside, looking up at the night sky in full glimmer, with a friend who is anxiously scanning the heavens for something—anything—to disrupt the unvaried placidity; Frost, finally, turning back to the house and delivering this line in a tone dripping with sarcasm, and, chuckling under his breath at the folly of stargazers, going back in to where it is warm and bright and doing whatever he did with his evenings while his friend keeps staring at the eternal stars. Perhaps such an event did happen in the poet’s life: I don’t know.

I was mildly surprised when I first read this poem. Frost doesn’t seem to me the kind of poet who would roundly dismiss the stars as he does here. But it really does fit his mood well: Frost is the preeminent poet of doing things with one’s hands and looking down—mending walls, gathering leaves, picking branches up off the flowers. So it makes sense that he is nonplussed by the stately and eternal heavens; but I think it’s a sad thing for him to esteem the constellations so lightly. Is it not their very eternality, their unchangingness, that is the most valuable thing about them? Imagine a sky full of stars zooming around and crashing into each other—what would such a sky be useful for? Our static and changeless celestial vault is a supremely good gift—it has allowed us to navigate the empty oceans, to find our location in even the most trackless wilderness, and to number our months and years. It has served as a memory palace, used by people the world over to encode their most precious legends and beliefs. Surely, as well, the psalmist was thinking of the unchanging heavens when he wrote that they declare the glory of God. What would a heavens in constant flux say about God’s glory?

I’ve written before about the need for an art of being instead of becoming: an art which celebrates the values of stability and certainty, settledness and calm. This poem is certainly not an example of such an art; in fact, Frost is arguing the opposite values. And as such I’m not impressed with Frost’s technical efforts. He puts his poetic skill, here, to poor use. Poetry, at times, and like all the other arts, can act a poisoned apple. It entices us with its beauty and skillful craft, its rhyme and rhythm, all the while subtly feeding lies to us. But it is of vital importance that poets, while exhibiting the heights of technical achievement, put a high value on telling the truth.

​

Share

Subscribe now

Imagine going to the theater on Thanksgiving afternoon 2013. You’ve had your giant feast of turkey, pie, and cranberry sauce shaped like a can; you’re so stuffed it almost hurts to move. You’re going to hit all the department stores at six o’clock tomorrow morning but right now you just want to do nothing, to sit around and take a nap while watching a movie. There’s a new Disney cartoon out . . . sure, let’s go watch that. At what point in the experience do you realize “whoa, this movie . . . is good.” For me it was the “Do you want to build a snowman” song, in the last verse, when Anna and Elsa are weeping together on either side of a closed door. That did it for me; at that moment I knew Frozen wasn’t going to be another lackluster effort in the same vein as Bolt, Brother Bear, or even The Princess and the Frog.

Looking at the previews, posters, and allied marketing for the two Frozen films gives me the impression that even the Disney executives didn’t really expect the first movie to be as overwhelmingly popular as it turned out to be. The previews—especially this one—have an air of charming silliness about them that is entirely absent from the promotional material for the second film. It’s as if the folks at Disney looked at how meaningful the film had become to so many people and thought, “we need to level up our game a little for this next one; these movies are important in a way we didn’t anticipate. This next film needs to have a good deal more gravitas about it.”

Et voila: if you were eight years old in 2013, watching Frozen for the first time, you probably identified more with Anna than with Elsa; maybe, even, more with Olaf than either. But in 2019 you aren’t eight anymore, you’re fourteen. And guess what: your cinema heroes have aged with you; now, instead of looking like this—

—they look like this:

—full of a confidence which comes with greater maturity mingled with a wonder and a seriousness that simply wasn’t present in the marketing for the first film. The film posters for Frozen II aren’t promising a reunion with our goofy, lovable friends; this time, those friends have got an important mission to attend to—and we get to watch them as they accomplish it. What are they looking at? What do they see? Will you get to see it with them?

The Frozen II posters bear a significant resemblance to Caspar David Friedrich’s The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, the iconic image of German romanticism. Paul Johnson, in The Birth of the Modern, mentions this painting in the context of the cultural changes sweeping through Europe at the opening of the nineteenth century, changes which Friedrich (along with such romantic poets as Wordsworth and Southey) was not fond of at all. Johnson sees in the wanderer “a symbol of humanity contemplating the new world taking shape. You cannot see what the man thinks of what he observes: he turns an enigmatic back to the viewer.” Perplexed he is, perhaps; the future, murky and immense, spreads out before him—and us—inexorably, and we are only partially able to guess at the form it will take. It’s difficult to say whether we should look on it with wonder, or with horror.

I find it significant that, in the posters above, Anna and Elsa and the rest of the Frozen crew are shown facing us. We see them but we don’t see what has evidently captured their attention. This is the reverse of the situation in Friedrich’s painting: we aren’t shown the wanderer’s reaction to what he sees, but we can at least see it with him. We can come to our own conclusions about the future state of civilization and society, conclusions which might be different from those of Friedrich; the painter is inviting us to ponder our world but is not telling us what conclusions to make from it. Such is not the case with Elsa and Anna. We are not told what they are contemplating; we must be satisfied with watching them, watching their reaction to whatever is in front of them. Their takeaway becomes our takeaway. Their understanding of their situation becomes more important than any understanding we might have of it. We are not invited to come to our own conclusions. We are being told what to think.

​

2

Friedrich once said “The artist should paint not only what he has in front of him, but also what he sees inside himself.” Wise words, Caspar! But I wonder if perhaps the principle has been taken too far. As with all aspects of Romanticism, this edict has been deployed to an excessive degree these days: oftentimes it seems that artists are unwilling or unable to depict anything that doesn’t spring from the depths of their souls—or at least, that doesn’t come from some deeply-held conviction. Their worldview colors their world and makes subjective interpretation more important than objective facts; and artists, steered towards the artivism1 espoused by art schools, galleries, and residency spaces, view reality in the same way that a laser-focused redditor or twitter junkie will push for their pet belief or project out of all proportion to its actual relevance in the world. In literature this tendency manifests itself as autofiction. Recently I read about Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle—a six-volume set of “novels” which are mostly a record of the artist’s own thoughts and feelings over the course of his own life. Reviewers have called it our generation’s version of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time; other reviewers have said it is overindulgent twaddle. I wouldn’t know, not having read either work. But I do wonder if the autofiction principle is some sort of perversion of Friedrich’s axiom, as well as of the old dictum that writers ought to “write what they know.” To do so would entail either writing about what you already know, or writing about what you learn through doing research. But if writers are reticent to do research (as Tom Wolfe claims in “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast”) or to becomes intimately familiar with the minds of other people (highly likely in today’s socially atomized age), “write what you know” becomes “write about yourself” . . . hence, autofiction. Perhaps Friedrich’s adage ought to be refreshed and contemporized, to read “Artists should depict not only what is inside themselves but also the world in front of them”?

​

3

The first of the aphorisms at the front of Kierkegaard’s Either / Or goes like this: “What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music. And people flock around the poet and say: ‘Sing again soon’ — that is, ‘May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful.” Here is one of the supreme ironies of artistic practice: the pain and anguish felt by another human being, when turned into art, becomes for us merely an item of aesthetic contemplation—and the opportunity to empathize is eliminated. There is always some sort of distance between the emotions of the artist and the final artistic product—sometimes that emotional gap is unbridgeable. I’m sure I’m not the only artist who has felt a grief that is much too near to make art about. To do so would almost seem like selling out to the muse, if such a thing is possible: can’t the artist have any private feelings—or must they all be transmuted into art?

In This Side of Paradise, Scott Fitzgerald has his hero, Amory Blaine, make a similar observation about the “Dark Lady” in Shakespeare’s sonnets 127 to 152. Amory considers “how little we remembered her as the great man would have wanted her remembered. For what Shakespeare must have desired, to have been able to write with such divine despair, was that the lady should live. And now we have no real interest in her.”2 This is another instance of the artist’s emotion being too strong to fit into the art; surely, the best thing to do, the most purely enjoyable thing to do with one’s lover is to spend more time with them, not to ignore them while making art about them. Doing so will only glorify the artist, not the object of their artistic infatuation, as Amory observed.

The reverse, though, is true sometimes in art called sentimental or kitsch. In Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste, Frank Burch Brown considers some of Caspar David Friedrich’s religious paintings, particularly Morning in the Riesengeberge from 1811. Brown notes that much Christian art about God strives for a sublimity that quickly turns kitschy. That is because such art, made by finite human beings with their limited abilities, will always appear inadequate compared to the infinite and perfect God of the universe which it seeks to describe. This reminds me of Oscar Wilde’s quip that all bad art is sincere. Of course that doesn’t mean that all good art is insincere; but what is an artist to do when the source of their inspiration—a grief, a love, their God—becomes of less importance in the public’s estimation than in that of the artist? In the case of religious kitsch, the answer is to engage in a doomed quest: to attempt to reflect the perfect and infinite goodness and beauty of God, knowing for certain that the end will be failure—but to try anyway all the same.

​

0

Here’s a little collection of music I’ve been listening to this fall. I overheard the first track while I was at H&M about a month ago; I snooped around on Spotify and found a handful of other songs which seemed to project a similar vibe. After listening to them for a while they all began to sound like that surf / jangle pop that was on the rise about ten years ago so I stuck two of those kind of songs onto the end of the playlist. Also I put on Water From Your Eyes’ “Life Signs” because it’s the most audaciously inventive new music I’ve heard this year; it reminds me of Starless and Bible Black-era King Crimson. And at the end, I added Byrne / Eno’s “Strange Overtones” because it is such a strikingly good song. The singer is ostensibly describing overhearing someone try to write a song but the words are full of double meanings and it evokes a feeling of the distance that can exist between two people who are at the cusp of getting to know each other better. The song is delightfully happy and sad at the same time, and the formal structure, with its shifting chords and irregular phrase lengths, continually confounds my expectations.

​

Share

Subscribe now

Content warning: disturbing images

Imagine a river. It flows from the highlands through a floodplain and into the sea. We’ll get back to those highlands in just a moment—they are vitally important—but for now let’s think of the river’s mouth, where it empties its water into the ocean. The river divides into two channels just before it finishes its course.

That river is romanticism. Romanticism, as a philosophical outlook and an art movement, is notoriously hard to define; it is also very much in the air right at this moment in history. Maybe it’s the fault of AI and the consequent scramble by the commentariat to discern what, exactly, is unique about human creativity. A few years ago I read an excellent three-part series of articles by the mononymous about that very issue;1 since then I have seen discussions of romanticism pop up all over the place, like fairy rings after a rain. There is even an online magazine, , dedicated to “a revival of romantic letters.” Romanticism is most certainly having some sort of moment. But what is romanticism, really?

To start, romanticism is not classicism or realism. That might sound obvious and boring but we have to pick our way through these sorts of definition-of-terms discussions quite carefully. Writing in Romanticon, defined romanticism as “pitting expansive imagination against all reductiveness,” realism as “committed to precision and mimesis even in the face of ugly fact,” and classicism as “concerned with orderly proportion and rational form.”2 Pistelli is not the first person to define romanticism in relation to classicism. None other than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once said this: “classicism is health, romanticism is disease.” So who is right? Pistelli’s “expansive imagination” sounds like a good thing; Goethe’s disease does not. Could it be that some “diseased” mental states actually give us a better understanding of the world? When the whole world is sick, the healthy ones appear diseased? Hard to say. But I’m going to try to convince you that romanticism, when compared to a different artistic movement which will not yet be named, looks the picture of perfect health. By the way—those highlands I mentioned earlier? They are full of trolls. Remember that.

​

​

Classicism is the principle of categorization, of systematization; it is the concept of platonic forms. Realism is the principle of exact observation, of particulars. Both are attempts to understand reality with the intellect alone. Classicism lumps things together into bins. Realism splits things apart and notices the differences. Only romanticism accepts reality as it is without trying to understand it. Pistelli again: romanticism is “obsessed with the irrational depth of the inner life and with the way this inner life, the imagination, manifests itself outwardly, for better or for worse.”3 Romanticism is a humble and unobtrusive philosophy, in contrast to the hubris of classicism and the cynical detachment of realism. Realism is the anthropologist scribbling field notes. Classicism is a lecturing professor. Romanticism is the dutifully attentive student.

Romanticism is upstream of both classicism and realism. Societies have typically been born at the places where rivers meet bodies of water; classicism and realism had both been around for centuries before romanticism was ever conceived in the minds of a few late-eighteenth-century German poets. It was only in response to the pressures of the Enlightenment—when European thinkers began to dissect their metaphysics and systematically reject the spiritual aspects of reality in favor of the physical aspects—that romanticism was first articulated.

And if we go further up the river and into those highlands? The trolls up there are very, very ugly, but there are beautiful elves and fairies living there too. But let’s look again at the mouth of our river.

​

​

Both forks of the river of romanticism empty into the sea of modernism. For what other than modernism is the logical consequence of either the sorting and lumping impulse of classicism or the minute descriptiveness of realism? Both ideas have at their core a concept of “knowing” which prioritizes intellectual understanding; and modernism is the triumph of intellectualized reductiveness, the ultimate “we know” that has reverberated, with disastrous consequences for art and philosophy, throughout the twentieth century. It was modernism that gave us the atrocious “worker housing” of Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus—modernism which gave us the sterilized non-art of Pollock, Sol Lewitt, Bridget Riley. Modernism is eugenics, planned suburbs, social conditioning, the human anthill. Modernism gave us Francis Fukuyama’s absurd concept that late-twentieth-century humanity had reached “the end of history”—that all the problems had been solved, that we now knew the right way to go about building the perfect society. Sure is funny how reality has a way of checkmating the theorists! Who of the modernists would have guessed that our current day would embrace spiritualities of all imaginable types? The second quarter of the twenty-first century is set to demonstrate a full flowering of belief in the metaphysical, the religio-spiritual, the irrational, the emotional—beyond anything found in the environment which fostered the growth of the first iteration of romanticism.4

The flow of understanding always proceeds from blurriness to clarity, from darkness to light. This is simply the nature of knowledge as we travel downstream. But what if, instead of rushing towards the light, we stayed a while in the gloom? That is romanticism. It is a way of knowing which privileges the inexact, the not quite precise. Romanticism says “I don’t know something in its entirety but I do know a little bit about it . . . and that is enough.”

​

​

The river flows through the plains, meandering, twisting. One end of an oxbow can be seen from the other end, three miles downstream but only a hundred feet away in a straight line. This is the nature of romantic thought: leaps of logic, vague generalizations, theories built from unfounded hunches. This is how romanticism works and how artists have worked throughout history. Artists bring beauty into the world and always have; but beauty is a vague and irrational concept: it exists only in the eye of the beholder.

“But what about those highlands?” I hear an impatient reader say. Yes, yes; I promised we would get to them and now is the time. The highlands are the logical outcome of romanticist thinking. They are surrealism. Romanticism might seem wild and transgressive but that is only because it appears so when compared to its classicist antecedents. If romanticism is the ego straining to assert itself, classicism and realism are the superego putting limits on what can and can’t be done. But surrealism is the id. It is the absolutely and completely unfettered examination of irrationality which romanticism only pretends to be. Romanticism is health; Surrealism, disease.

​

​

Romanticism is the journey from irrationality and blurriness to rationality and clarity—but it is only the journey, not its starting and ending points. Romanticism is the evening twilight of conjecture. Classicism is the sunlight, and realism is going inside and turning the lights on. Romanticism is being awakened at night and wondering what woke you up. Surrealism is fantasizing that it was a monster. At night the thing hanging from your doorknob could be anything. Classicism says “it’s just a jacket.” realism says “it’s just your jacket,” and goes back to sleep. Romanticism puzzles about what the shape might be. Surrealism deliberately tries to get the shape into its nightmares.

​

​

Surrealism revels in odd juxtapositions. For romanticism, there are no odd juxtapositions at all; romanticism echoes the sentiment of André Breton that “the mind is wonderfully apt at grasping the most tenuous relation that can exist between two objects taken at random, and poets know that they can always, without fear of being mistaken, say of one thing that it is like another.” Surrealism, however, would rather move away from that sort of analysis. Surrealism says it is better when two things are presented next to each other without the romantic poet’s meaning-making simile. The original group of surrealist artists operating out of Paris in the 1920s were fascinated by a line from Isidore Ducassee’s The Songs of Maldoror about “the chance juxtaposition of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table.” Later they were enamored of a photo of a locomotive overcome with jungle vegetation, which they put into an issue of Minotaure, the surrealist magazine. These are the kinds of bizarre and unexplainable juxtapositions that surrealism prefers.

​

​

The vanguard of surrealist methodology today is in postmodern mashup culture. A Neil Cicierega mashup doesn’t offer any explanations for its existence; it just is. Other kinds of art dare to go even deeper into the mountains of surrealism, even further in pursuit of irrational extremes. Vaporwave, with its recontextualization of the sonic landscape of the late twentieth century into a fetishization of nostalgia, is just as irrational as the works of the original surrealists. Creepypasta, with its delving into the secret unknown springs of our deepest fears, is a direct linear descendant of the stranger works of Ernst, Bellmer, or Miro (but, notably, with the sexual element removed). Both exhibit the same cultivation of irrationality that characterized the high surrealism of the twenties and thirties. And we could go even further. Back of surrealism are artistic directions where human agency is dissolved into pure randomness and meaninglessness. AI art generators promise a quick way into the deep unconscious of our collective cultural image-memory, but they do so without communicating the thoughts of any human mind. Psychedelics also disengage the human mind from the artistic process: their use generates stunning and memorable imagery but who is really making the choices? Who is really in charge? That is the danger lurking among the snowy heights of the mountains beyond surrealism—they offer art without thought.

​

​

None of this matters, of course, except in the context of how art is used to communicate. In what ways will artists use the tools of romanticism, surrealism, classicism, realism, and modernism to get their point across?

​

​

mentions, in one of his books somewhere, a time when he visited an art student who had made numerous pictures of some sort of heart-like object which obviously had an intense and personal significance for him; the student’s art was incomprehensible to anyone—including himself—so he languished and ultimately failed in his artistic aims.5 That is the danger faced by all artists at all times: that their unique vision is liable to become the babblings of an idiot unless it is built on some sort of framework which positions it within the broader array of cultural signifiers. Without a common language no two people can ever communicate—and without a common set of symbols or a meaning-extractive critical-historical practice, no artist can reasonably expect their art to achieve whatever communicative goals the artist sets for it.

Classicism is the deep bedrock on which all these frameworks of communication are founded; but surrealism is where the artists actually get their visions. And romanticism is the means by which these visions are realized in art. After long and harrowing journeys among the mountains we have come back down to the plain; only romanticism connects the two extremes of hyperintellectualized modernism and ultra-esoteric bizarrerie at the fringes of surrealism. Romanticism is at once an embrace of the irrational and a critique of it.

Romanticist artists, paddling along the river, picking out a metaphor here, lazily imbibing an emotion there, will thereby will save the world—the world of art, at least in this observer’s imagination.

​

​

Share

Subscribe now

​

​

​

Throughout the course of the scene, a fat yellow moon slowly rises over the roofs and the treetops; the last of the summer crickets are chirping as well.

Bill: I just finished reading Dinesen’s Seven Gothic Tales.

Ed: Excellent! What did you think of it? A strange book, isn’t it?

Bill: Yes, it’s a very strange book, but a very good book too. It’s full of a sense of beauty, but it is a sort of old, faded, overripe beauty, like too many flowers or too much fruit. The way it’s set in the last fading light of romanticism, in the end of the nineteenth century somewhere, just before electricity and mass communication started to spread across the world, gives it a sort of special nostalgic tinge. It is nostalgic for the beautiful world of the crumbled nobility, people whose ancestors had been duchesses and kings and who now flutter around Europe chasing the last shreds of dignity given to them in a changing world which has no real place for them anymore.

Ed: I’m glad you got the chance to read it. The stories in Seven Gothic Tales are always coming back to a theme of the elusiveness of beauty and about people’s desire to create or possess some form of beauty. In “The Poet” there’s the nobleman who tries to fashion his nephew into a poet, only to have his schemes fall apart. In “The Old Chevalier” the Baron sleeps with a prostitute and thinks he has captured something of the pure form of beauty, but when she asks for payment his illusion is shattered.

Bill: Right. And in “The Dreamers” there are those three men who are constantly chasing the beautiful opera singer all around Europe and when they finally catch up with her, she dies.

Ed: Of course all of these attempts to capture beauty end in failure. It’s as if Dinesen is showing us that in this under-the-sun world, beauty—a purely spiritual thing—will always remain slightly out of our grasp.

Bill: No one ever succeeds in catching, capturing it.

Ed. True. The same sort of thing happens at the end of Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise. Remember when he meets Eleanor, that crazy free spirit girl? Through the whole book he’s been circling around this idea of beauty; it’s mostly expressed through a love of the finer things in life, but also through romantic scenes with girls. He has a crush on Myra . . . loves Isabelle and then breaks up with her . . . Rosalind and then breaks up with her. Then he meets Eleanor out in the country somewhere, and she seems to sum up everything he’s been looking for and failing to find so far: she’s pretty, intelligent, weary of the world yet wants more out of it, just like Amory does. But hers isn’t a Christian beauty, and Amory just isn’t willing to give up his faith just yet. Fitzgerald calls her a witch at one point. She is described as “pagan.” She’s an influence of paganism on Amory, and to the degree which she satisfies his longing for beauty, she distracts him from the true beauty which is found in God. She declares outright that God does not exist. And then when she tries to ride her horse off a cliff and kill herself to prove she doesn’t believe in God, that’s when Amory stops loving her. Fitzgerald has this great line: “Amory’s materialism, always a thin cloak, was torn to shreds by Eleanor’s blasphemy.” Amory is disgusted with Eleanor once he knows she will never satisfy that infinite longing in her soul. But she’s the closest he ever comes to having it satisfied.

Bill: Eleanor sounds like that old trope of the wild, free-spirited, manic pixie girl.

Ed: She is. She’s the same thing. And the manic pixie girl is a warped, corrupted form of that longing for beauty. Notice it’s always a young and pretty girl who fills the trope?

Bill: Except for in Harold and Maude . . .

Ed: (laughs) Yes, that’s true. The exception that proves the rule.

Bill: But that’s a good point; the pixie girl is tied to the idea of physical youthful beauty most of the time. Interesting. And now I’m wondering if this whole pursuit of beauty is a male-coded thing?

Ed: It might be. I read an essay about Man Ray recently, and the guy—it was a guy, so that fits in with what you said—said that there’s always this desire in male photographers to take pictures of women in order to become them . . . and I suppose that would be a kind of gendered trying to possess beauty, a way for a man to be a part of, or even an example of, what is considered beautiful but which is normally also considered out of reach for men. A beautiful woman is considered by men to “be” beauty in a way that men, even gorgeous men, are never considered to be. Going back to Fitzgerald, remember how in The Beautiful and Damned there’s that scene where “beauty” is personified and given an assignment to become Gloria Gilbert? That scene would never have worked if the gender roles had been reversed.

Bill: Huh. There’s something to that. (Reaches down, grabs a nearby stick and pushes it around in the fire; the embers sputter and throw sparks up into the air.)

Ed: You know, I would bet you there isn’t a single man who would be brave enough to ask a truly pretty girl what it is like to possess this beauty.

Bill: You mean, go up to a beautiful woman and say, “You’re obviously beautiful, what is it like?”

Ed: Yeah.

Bill: No you’re right. No one is that brave.

Ed: To do so would seem to violate this implicit oath of fealty which all men seem to have sworn; it would be like treating beauty as just a data point. It would be objectifying beauty in a twisted and inadmissible way—it wouldn’t be gallant, wouldn’t be chivalrous.

(A pause. Bill flicks the stub of his cigar into the ashes.)

Ed: It’s not always male-coded. Carol in Main Street—

Bill: Yes. She wanted to find beauty in that little town of Gopher Prairie. She wanted to make it beautiful.

Ed: Can men ever make anything beautiful? Or do they always have to find and possess the beauty of others? Of women?

Bill: That’s a good question.

Ed: (After a pause) What about aesthetic subcultures? You know—Dark Academia and stuff like that? Is that a kind of male beauty made entirely by men?

Bill: I thought Dark Academia was done by women as well as men.

Ed: Actually, you’re right.

Bill: What about Cottagecore? That seems a pursuit of an elusive beauty conducted solely by women.

Ed: True.

Bill: It’s a good example but there’s so much of nostalgia for lost ways in it too . . . that seems to corrupt the pursuit of beauty. Is it pure beauty that’s being sought, or is it an old-time, outmoded idea of what beauty is?

Ed: True. And if it is really beauty the cottagecore people are pursuing, it’s an idea of beauty distinct from what we were talking about, because it’s saying “beauty actually can be found in this world because it is capable of being performed.” And it starts to substitute other things—a rural lifestyle, the ways of a simpler time, the uncomplicatedness of being a woman without men—for the true otherworldly beauty; things which seem to be actually achievable on this earth. So you’re right that it’s still a substitute beauty.

Bill: It almost feels like arguing in a circle . . . beauty, real beauty, can’t be found on earth—so any pursuit of beauty on earth which seems to be reaching the goal is by definition not reaching the real beauty. But maybe that’s the reality about beauty—that it never, really, can be found in this world. Or at least, that it is not a part of this world. Beauty is always strange, always other.

Ed: That was Lewis’ point in The Weight of Glory, wasn’t it? That beauty is not enough for us? That it points us to something more? Something true and heavenly, that can only be fully realized in God?

Bill: Ah yes, I know that part. Doesn’t he say it’s a reflection of our longing for something spiritual? He uses an analogy of a student who is learning Greek and who will eventually begin to love Greek poetry, but until he does, he skips class to read Shelley and Swinburne. Shelley and Swinburne are both good, of course, just as much as the Greeks are; so the analogy breaks down, and he admits that. But the point is this: that the love of beauty is a good thing on its own, but it exists because our souls actually have a desire in them for closeness to God and to Christ, the real beauty.

Ed: Right. He also talks about how the beauty in art and books and music can become an idol if we trust in it; it will betray us, it will never provide solace for the longing that it stirs up in us. He has a great metaphor: “they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard.”

Bill: Yes. He says that the beauty in the world opens up to us a desire which nothing here on earth will satisfy.

Ed: But it haunts our world; and it will break out, and suddenly reveal itself.

(A pregnant pause) Have you ever had this experience happen to you: you see a glimpse of something—you watch your wife do some mundane action like putting down her coffee cup and then you suddenly realize that she is the most beautiful woman in the world.

Bill: Yes, that’s happened to me.

Ed: But then the moment goes away; and although you don’t think she’s any less beautiful you are aware that a veil has been drawn again, and you will have to wait for the next time it is pulled back, and you can’t do that pulling back on your own.

Bill: The sublimity of beauty, perhaps; beauty is overpowering when it is noticed.

Ed: Right. And the more we notice it, the more we want it. We’re reduced to a blubbering nothingness, to an incoherent longing that cannot be satisfied on the earth.

(At that moment an owl was heard screeching in the darkness; and thus the spell was broken. We won’t follow the conversation of our two men any longer. But it went something like this: they commented on the owl, then they joked about something, and then started talking about their children.

Maybe some time again they will discuss beauty; maybe sometime soon. But the raw and vulnerable talking that men find so elusive is unpredictable in its times, places, ways. Let us hope, though, that they continue to try; and let us also hope they are not maddened by the pursuit of a beauty unattainable in this world.)

​

​

Share

Subscribe now

Today I’d like to showcase three such artists. The works we will examine exist on trajectories, coming ever closer to solving one particular problem of art and eventually reaching a solution in the end. Look with me, then, at some paintings by Piet Mondrian, Richard Diebenkorn, and Louis Wain.

​​

MONDRIAN: NETWORKS OF LINES

Piet Mondrian is the archetypical modernist painter. His flat primary-colored grids are recognizable instantly as modern, even more so than Picasso’s cubism. Mondrian’s art did not begin that way; he began as a painter of landscapes, but even at the very start of his career his pictures would sometimes betray his preoccupation with traceries, grids, and networks of lines. This interest grew until it consumed his work and he became the foremost proponent of an abstract style made of rectangles and straight lines interrelating to each other. Curiously, while Mondrian was taking the decisive steps towards his mature style during the twenties, he also painted flowers in a highly naturalistic style to pay the bills, and wouldn’t show them to his friends in the avant-garde.

​​

DIEBENKORN: THE PICTURE PLANE

Richard Diebenkorn started his career as a painter of colorful and blotchy abstract expressionist paintings. At some point he became unsatisfied with this, even though he was accruing a degree of success; he returned to figurative painting in 1955 and continued in that mode for twelve years. Yet his figures and landscapes disclose a preoccupation with the forms of the picture plane and not with a naturalistic reproduction of three-dimensional space. After seeing Matisse’s French Window at Collioure in 1966 he had an epiphany, and it became possible for him to create figurative paintings which were almost entirely abstract; the requirement to be faithful to the source disappeared, and Diebenkorn was able, once again, to focus on the surface effects of color, shape, and line. After settling into this paradigm, he never looked back.

​

WAIN: CATS AS PURE ENERGY

Early-twentieth-century England was, like our own time, besotted with cute animals doing funny things. The paintings and drawings of Louis Wain (mostly depictions of anthropomorphized cats acting like humans) were immensely popular in Edwardian England. Wain himself was not a shrewd businessman; he failed to secure the copyright on most of his works and therefore remained in poverty throughout his life. He also suffered many nervous breakdowns and was eventually committed to a mental hospital. He continued making works of art while at the hospital; in 1939, the psychologist Walter Maclay found several of his images of cats in a junk shop and proclaimed they evidenced Wain’s deteriorating grasp on reality as he descended into madness. Since it is impossible to sequence the images with certainty (Wain didn’t date or title any of the works he made during his latter years), Maclay’s theory remains conjectural; but perhaps instead of evidence of increasing mental debility, Wain’s pictures could be seen as a record of the artist’s sharpening focus? Wain’s cats were always full of verve and spunk—his work could be read as a progressive refinement of his technique as he drew cats that were more and more electrified until, in the end, they become creatures of pure energy. During the day cats are notoriously slothful, spending much time lolling about in sunbeams; but at night their energies are released and they run around the house with wild abandon. How to describe this in paint? Wain’s pictures do so remarkably well.

​​

Share

Subscribe now

​​

​​

On a steamy midsummer morning in North Carolina, I turn into the circular drive of Triangle Grace Church and park. The church building wins me over immediately—wildflowers exploding in their beds, round windows, arched brick doorways, the curve of a columbarium set back a ways in the trees. Someone here cares about beauty.

​​

I have arrived for the church’s two-day Triangle Conference on Theology and Culture: iPhones, Idols, and Icons. Triangle Grace Church holds free conferences a few times a year as a means of creatively engaging with culture while practicing hospitality towards the greater Research Triangle community.

This weekend, the conference features Dr. Matthew Milliner. Dr. Milliner teaches art history at Wheaton College, is a six-time appointee to the Curatorial Advisory Board of the United States Senate, and writes the monthly “Material Mysticism” column for Comment magazine. He has written extensively about images and their place in the world; his two books are The Everlasting People: G.K. Chesterton and the First Nations and Mother of the Lamb: The Story of a Global Icon.1 The topics for the weekend center around the issue of image saturation. Life within a digital culture means we are awash in visual content, often to the point of valuing the image over text in communication. The internet affords us constant, instant access to perfect images: is this image saturation a bad thing?

Dr. Milliner recaps his first talk from the previous evening with a selection of book recommendations, most featuring some combination of the words: “anxious,” “digital,” “generation,” and “toxic.” In particular, he refers to an essay by Ross Douthat titled “An Age of Extinction is Coming. Here’s How to Survive.” Afterwards, I scroll the article, itself spattered with advertisements for an AI assistant offering to do my writing for me. The article explains that the reductionism of digital content is pressing us towards a cultural bottleneck in which “languages will disappear, churches will perish, political ideas will evanesce, art forms will vanish, the capacity to read and write and figure mathematically will wither, and the reproduction of the species will fail—except among people who are deliberate and self-conscious and a little bit fanatical about ensuring that the things they love are carried forward.”2

Bleak.

Subtler and perhaps more troubling, the digital world confronts us with a false sense of the infinite, and this is where Dr. Milliner is heading today. The image saturation of the internet lures us towards a pseudo-world of images so perfect and easy they have been stripped of any humanity, where none of the fragility or mystery of human life can unsettle us or call us towards heaven.

This morning we’ll be looking at the particular vices of an image-saturated culture through the lens of art history. Dr. Milliner displays the Ladder of Divine Ascent Icon for us, which portrays monks clambering towards heaven while being assailed by various demons, each of whom represent one of the Eight Deadly Thoughts. These thoughts are a precursor of the Seven Deadly Sins introduced by Cappadocian monk Evagrius Ponticus, to whom we’ll return in a moment. Dr. Milliner walks through each of the Deadlies, defining them and explaining their role in the digital world.

​​

Gluttony—a vice which ranges from eating ravenously and excessively to consuming fastidiously. Our phones aggrandize this temptation, inundating us with opportunities to fixate over food beyond a means of pleasurable nourishment.

Lust—a perversion of sexual desire. As Milliner explains, we hardly need to expound on the ways the internet invites us to objectify ourselves and others, from social media to the pornography industry.

Greed—an intense selfish desire. The online world makes it impossibly easy to see something you like and make it yours with only a few clicks. It will even learn what you like and find more pictures of those things to show you, without you even having to seek it out.

Anger—while anger is not inherently wrong in the Christian tradition, it so very easily slips towards wrath. Dr. Milliner explains that posts, videos, and images that arouse anger or controversy—rage bait—have better engagement online. We congregate around outrage.

Envy—That which originates with a comparative notion of self, says Dr. Milliner. Social media in particular overwhelms us with images of those around us, stoking us towards envy over admiration.

Vainglory—excessive pride or vanity in one’s accomplishments. The digital world provides us with constant opportunities to craft narratives of only our successes, to risk the “humble brag” in hopes of tempting others’ envy.

Listlessness—sometimes labeled as sloth, but Dr. Milliner prefers this term, which captures the dejection, restless escapism, and busyness included in the original idea. Quick, constant digital images lure us towards doomscrolling, a mindless, restless numbing of our true selves.

Pride—he likes this definition: “a perverse desire for preeminence over others.” The internet encourages a superiority complex. It is so easy to feel as though you know everything from a momentary search, or to assert your remarkable insights to others.

There’s no need to marinate in catastrophe; no one is laboring under the misconception that a boundary-less embrace of the digital world edifies us. But each of these Deadly Thoughts are a doorway into that age-old temptation to make gods of ourselves. Here is an apple, a tower of Babel, where with very little effort and flawless visuals, perhaps even false ones generated from the stolen art of human creators, you can craft your own eternity. This pseudo-world lures us away from true humanity, away from life abundant towards an oversaturated atrophying pixilation. Come in, and confuse glory with gratification.

Image revolutions are not a new concept. Dr. Milliner points to the shift between medieval and renaissance art; Christian limited-perspective iconography giving way to immersive scenes of humanism, individualism, and secular life. Just as with the dawn of the internet and its image-based culture of immediacy, people grew nervous that the new frontiers of art would cultivate new sin.

Dr. Milliner’s use of the Eight Deadly Thoughts is not to conjure undue panic over the internet, but to point out that sin, like energy, is neither gained nor lost over time, only converted. Those vices which plagued the monks of the patristic era have only reinvented themselves; we have neither morally progressed nor deteriorated.

Throughout his presentation, Dr. Milliner narrates the story of Evagrius Ponticus, the man who coined these Eight Deadly Thoughts. Raised among the Cappadocians, Evagrius journeyed into Constantinople to rally against the Arian heresies, only to find himself tangled in some vague romantic indiscretion. From there, he fled to Jerusalem to shelter under the leadership of Macrina the Younger and her monastic orders, before she sent him into the Egyptian desert to the African monks there.

Dr. Milliner pauses to show us some photographs of extant art in the Cappadocian cave churches and the African cells where Evagrius lived. He twirls a laser pointer around some ceiling murals of the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist as they point towards Christ, noting the damage to the art caused by time.

“Isn’t it wonderful?” He says. “The only images you can trust are those that are broken, because they lead us to grace.” We follow his gaze towards Christ in the middle, his undamaged figure revealing the marks on his hands and feet.

In one such Cappadocian church, a now lost inscription once read, “The image itself is insignificant (which you have before your eyes.) But mighty is He who carries upon Himself the image of the Infinite. Worship the prototype (of which you have here only an image.)”3 In these spaces, images functioned not only as a means of beauty, but as a window into transcendence.

In dim, prayer-filled cells, nourished by the desert monastic tradition, Evagrius grew into a wise and well-respected scholar. Students and penitents flocked to the wilderness to learn from this ascetic, requesting his insight and prayer. The desert mothers and fathers were renowned scholars and healers, trusted to diagnose the demons assaulting a given individual and able to offer them antidotes in scriptures, prayer, and images. Visuals of grace were assigned to cut through the weight of sins.

Dr. Milliner shows us such paintings, one of which portrays a deer ensnared by serpents opposite the same animal freed by grace. Images of the Seven Deadly Sins or Evagrius’ Eight Deadly Thoughts also arise from this period and continue throughout art history. In many visual representations of these vices, the images include the eyes of Jesus. One implication of his gaze is that God sees all, that final judgment will lay bare and make right every wrongdoing. But in another sense, this image follows the desert monastic tradition and reveals the antidote to these vices: to be beheld by grace.

​​

Our sins are timeless, merely formatted anew in pixels; but their antidote is equally enduring. Although the conference has leaned into the dangers of image saturation and a digital life, it has also offered a few examples of visual art’s power for attuning us to truth, beauty, and goodness. Images themselves are neither good nor bad, but they may either lead us towards idolatry, or towards the Image of the Invisible God, our wounded icon of divine love. The digital world is not inherently evil, but it can distract us from the gaze of Christ by making our own eyes our gods.

“Images, at their best, are wounded,” says Dr. Milliner. The best visuals do not seek to erase all limitations, but to communicate perspective and message through them. I leave the conference reflecting on his message, one that is frank yet tempered by a potent hope of grace. Saturating ourselves with perfect, instant images tempts us to conjure a false sense of the infinite in our own beholding. Rather, we need to measure our engagement with the digital world by its ability to summon us to the true infinite, the eyes of Jesus, beholding us with grace.

​​

Share

Subscribe now

​​

Related reading from the RUINS archive

​

​

I. BRUCE BEASLEY’S GORGEOUS SACRED OBJECTS

The first artwork encountered at the Kaneko gallery was a massive yet strangely ethereal stainless steel sculpture made of intersecting square tubes twisted into a knot. Situated as it was in a small anteroom, which it almost filled, this sculpture projected a sense of imposing majesty, as if it were a holy relic of some kind. It sat on the level floor but it towered above the viewer, sprawling around the room in frozen motion. The sculpture’s entire surface was exquisitely patterned in identical brushstrokes reminiscent of the scales like a reptile. It suggested all sorts of movement in space and time; the effect I got was of a kind of serene joy—a wildness mixed with peace and silence. It rested gently on the floor as if it were a dancer who had just taken a twirl around the room. But in the next room of the gallery, the twirling and dancing were still underway.

This space is filled with more of the same kind of works, although these are smaller and have a perfectly smooth and even surface. The staging of these sculptures is stunningly perfect. They are distributed around a large, cavernous, dimly-lit room; the same atmosphere of sacredness present in the antechamber is here as well but on a much vaster scale. The effect is of being ushered into a holy place full of sacred mysteries. All around, Beasley’s sculptures curve and cantilever in a high-spirited mockery of gravity.

The lighting casts all sorts of complicated shadows which were almost as interesting as the sculptures themselves. The whole exhibit feels like a reveling in the possibilities of line and gesture, a metaphor for movement. Sculpture like this is more allied with dance than with the plastic arts; and it could be that Beasley is entering into a dialogue with the dance, as if saying “yes, movement is fun and interesting; let’s talk about how much it is so.” Throughout his career Beasley has been making sculptures like this—works which play with notions of movement, sweeping grandeur, and exhilarating flight. Even when he works with old scrap iron, the same weightless qualities are evident. It’s a fun and fascinating dialogue between stolid rigidity of sculpture and the graceful movements of the dance.

​

II: KANEKO’S COLLECTION

The second exhibit at the gallery is called, simply, Big Clay. It’s an assortment of ceramic sculptures from the personal collection of Jun Kaneko. It’s probably appropriate to mention something about Kaneko at this point: he is a Japanese artist who has lived and worked in Omaha since the early 1990s, and he is most well-known for his large ceramics which often take the form of monumental rounded lozenge shapes (this shape is called “Dango” in Japan). Quite a lot of Kaneko’s work is covered in layers of very colorful glazes set in repetitive patterns. His work is commonly encountered in outdoor spaces, and I like to think of coming across one of his pieces as coming across an interesting pebble on the ground—except the pebble is gargantuan, ten feet tall or more.

As a prominent ceramicist with a long and illustrious career, Kaneko has made many friends in the art world; a number of the works in Big Clay are collaborations between Kaneko and another artist. They all showcase the same sorts of features which Kaneko himself deploys in his own works—most of them are large, even imposing; most of them reveal an interest in surface qualities such as texture, color, and pattern.

​

My favorite works in this part of the gallery are Viola Frey’s two Fire Suit Men. They are immediately and viscerally understandable; their enormous size and fierce body language give me a feeling of being judged and condemned (by the patriarchy? By late capitalism? Who knows!) They are a little scary, to be honest! When a work of art produces a strong emotion, that’s a definite sign the artist is on to something good.

Thinking about Goro Suzuki’s chairs plunges me into a reverie on the Platonic chair: is it not part of the meaning of “chair” that an object thus named must be able to be sat upon? In what sense, then, are Suzuki’s chairs still chairs? They “look like” chairs, but then so do tree roots, mountains, and even clouds sometimes; are these things also chairs? Suzuki’s chairs exist as chair-like objects in the world; it is really our own minds which class them as chairs—we could easily say they aren’t chairs because they can’t be sat upon, but we don’t.

​

III: BEYOND THE FINISHING POINT

The last room in the Kaneko gallery is hung with large pieces of paper, all the same size, covered in multicolored scribbles. They aren’t preparatory sketches for anything; they aren’t practice for the kinds of color combinations that Kaneko is known to deploy in his sculptures. They are nothing more nor less than the record of an artist having fun! A block of text at the entrance to the room explains:

While teaching at the Cranbrook Academy of Art as Head of the Ceramics department, Jun Kaneko was pondering a crucial determination that all artists must consider: completion. More specifically, he wondered: how does one know when a work or a design is finished? Kaneko relies on his intuition, yet he contemplated what would happen if he relinquished control over when to stop and when to continue.

This query resulted in an unlikely collaboration with the young daughter of a colleague at Cranbrook. The little girl, aged three, was named Ana, and Kaneko gave Ana the power to decide when their jointly created compositions were complete.

Ana came to Jun’s studio every weekend, and together they created drawings. Their collaboration eventually resulted in 82 drawings. He recalls, “I made a rule. When she said ‘new paper,’ no matter what, I had to stop and change the paper. We did that for two-and-a-half years, every Saturday. At one point a drawing might look really good to me, so I would try to trick her into saying ‘new paper,’ but she wouldn’t say it. She kept on working on it, and I started seeing how it was changing. Then it became much better than at the point when I thought we should be finished.”

I’m not claiming that this silly compositional exercise resulted in any spectacular or amazing works of art. Some of them are pleasant and interesting in the way a Kandinsky canvas can be; others are rather haphazard. It was tempting to try and guess which marks were made by Ana and which by Jun; most of the time, though, I had no idea. A few drawings have the artists’ names written on them in big blocky capital letters; in one drawing, Jun only managed to write his J before Ana presumably said “new paper!”

​

But as a record of an artist doing things in the world, they are faultless. Teddy Roosevelt once said that no one ever had as much fun while President as he had. I can imagine no artist ever had as much fun making art as Jun Kaneko; and that fun spreads out as he promotes the work of other artists. A sense of fun pervades every aspect of his gallery—in the swirling shapes of Bruce Beasley, in the wild and whimsical ceramics of his personal collection, and in the record of good times he spent drawing with a child.

This sense of fun is one of the foundational aspects of all human creativity. Beyond all the theorizing and philosophical justifications for art—beyond the searching for transcendence, for enchantment—beyond all talk of the Good and the True and the Beautiful—beyond all that, there is the human impulse to have fun, to enjoy one’s self, and to have a good time making things.

Do you doubt this is true? Ask a child. They know.

​

Share

Subscribe now

​