Miscellany 4: Summer '23
Links, short thoughts, and a database of Christian arts resources
1.
Some of you have noticed that things have been rather quiet around here lately. This was planned; I’m taking the summer off from writing to focus on home improvement projects. But I have some drafts and outlines in the works across a rather eclectic mix of subjects: on the artistic representation of the English provincial mind in literature, paintings, and music; on some examples of fights between literary critics and writers, and how the nature of those fights has changed in the internet era; and on aesthetic subcultures, from Punks and Goths to those Cottagecore and Dark Academia mood pages on Instagram. I would like to write about the aesthetics of card games and playing cards in general (I recently became aware of the Rider Tarot deck, and it’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen). Also, I hope to do a roundup of civic sculpture from my hometown of Omaha (some of my readers might find this last topic too self-indulgently local but that’s okay).
2.
Earlier this year, I read Herman Melville’s . . . okay, I don’t even need to finish that sentence because everyone already knows which Melville book I read without me telling them. Moby-Dick; or, The Whale can almost seem like a cliché of itself at times, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. It can be confusing, though—but not if you read this excellent analysis by
. She provides the most clear-headed and sensible explication of the book’s themes and significance that I have ever encountered. Now could she read Finnegans Wake for me?
3.
Substack recently rolled out a referral feature; now, readers who refer other readers to a publication are able to receive some sort of perk.
But seriously, I’ve been thinking of how such a program would work for RUINS. All of my posts are free anyway so it’s not like I could give out complimentary subscriptions if people send readers my way; but I have thought of publishing some of my best pieces in printed form via Lulu and giving them to readers. What do you think? Should I make a printed version of RUINS?
But even absent a referral program, I would hope that the readers of RUINS would want to share my writing with their associates. If you enjoy reading RUINS at all, please consider sharing it with a friend. It’s the most supportive thing you can do for me at this point, and I greatly appreciate it!
4.
As a special treat, I’ve compiled this database of organizations, publications, and writers who are active in the “Christians in the arts” space. You’ll find here a wide mix of people and groups, although I tried to stay away from groups which focus on one specific faith tradition1 or one geographical area. I know of several groups which operate in a solely local fashion; these are very good for local art scenes, but they aren’t what I wanted to emphasize here. Some of these are blogs which haven’t been active for a while but which still contain extensive archives, and some of them are writers who are now more prominent on Twitter or Substack. I hope that those of my readers with interests in this direction can find this list helpful—and of course, if you know of any other writers or organizations that you feel would be a good fit for the list, please let me know via email.
5.
Writing in Tablet,
makes a strong case for the necessity of constraining our idea of what it means for art to be political. She takes issue with some statements by Toni Morrison and Lin-Manuel Miranda that “all art is political,” and instead offers a much broader conception of the kinds of problems and issues that art can discuss—problems deeply personal to the artist, and problems of moral and ethical nature as well. If her narrow definition of politics as civic power is true (and I believe it is), then the problem with saying “all art is political” is that all problems then become problems which must be solved by the application of governmental authority. As she says, “Our aesthetic temperament exists autonomously, deeply, within us. We make art because we can, because the Muses insist, because we have the will to do so. To discern that the relation of art and politics is incidental, not inherent, is hardly to underestimate art’s power. Rather, claiming everything human is political is an underestimation of the human.” Certainly, attributing political meanings to artworks is entirely valid—Gribbin mentions Alice Neel’s paintings of pregnant women, which she made because the experience of pregnancy was very interesting to her, but which are often given political interpretations—but no good artwork has solely political meaning. Goya’s The Third of May, 1808 is still interesting as a composition even if it is one of the best anti-war paintings in existence.
6.
Anyone who is unsure of the power of art to influence and direct human behavior—anyone who does not yet agree with Shelley that artists are “the unacknowledged legislators of the world”—ought to carefully ponder this assertion by Daniel Hardy in Seeing Beyond the Word: Visual Arts and the Calvinist Tradition.
In the Western view, the question is how the material may represent the spiritual, and how narrowly this possibility is construed. This is the major issue between the Reformers and “the rest”—including both Roman Catholics and Orthodox—and between the Reformers themselves.
This is huge if true. Are the divisions between Christian groups really to be attributed to different conceptions of the use of art? Much food for thought here.
7.
A reader sent me this video discussing the artistry at work in the backgrounds of old Warner Brothers cartoons. It’s amazing to note the depth of detail and craft—the artistry—which went into a rather incidental aspect of something as easily dismissed as Saturday morning entertainment for the jammies-and-sugary-cereal cohort. Thinking about the animators who worked on these backgrounds gives me a greater respect for all kinds of creative work—and makes me a little mad at the AI art engines which are being used to supplant the illustrator’s craft in some publications.
8.
I’m experimenting with Meta’s new Threads app. If you are on there, you can find me at https://www.threads.net/@william.of.omaha. And may I remind my readers about the RUINS Discord server, and about the RUINS Amazon book list (thanks, again, to the readers who have bought books off the list for me—your support is greatly appreciated!)
9.
of Medievalish discusses allegory—what it is for, why it exists, how it is useful. She quotes Gregory the Great: “For allegory supplies the soul separated far from God with a kind of mechanism by which it is raised to God . . . through means which are not alien to our way of understanding, that which is beyond our understanding can be known.” Jesus’ parables nicely fit this definition of allegory.Allegorical modes of representation seem to have gone out of favor in our current cultural moment. But we shouldn’t discount allegory so quickly; it was one of the most popular and versatile methods of artistic expression for hundreds of years, with a rich tradition of works that continue to be influential today. Perhaps the time for a renaissance of allegory is at hand? I can think of many didactic films and paintings which might have been artistically richer if they were more allegorical and less preachy.
But I wonder: perhaps some of the reason we don’t see much allegory anymore is that we feel we have outgrown it. Dr. Hamman says that some allegorical readings can be like riding a bicycle with training wheels. If that is so, perhaps the culture feels like allegory is unnecessary anymore. If you have mastered riding a bicycle unaided, why would you ever put the training wheels back on? Perhaps we feel that our ability to understand the deeper meanings of texts has progressed to the point where allegories are more cumbersome than they are useful?
Dr. Hamman is coming out with a new book soon—Jesus Through Medieval Eyes—and it’s one of my most-anticipated titles of the year.
10.
Here’s something interesting:
has combined Claude Monet’s series of paintings of the Palace of Westminster with Lisel Mueller’s poem “Monet Refuses the Operation.” Setting a poem to music is nothing new, but this is the first time I’ve ever seen a poem set to a series of images. The closest analogy I can think of are some of the works of Edward Gorey, but those are in the tradition of graphic novels. What other groups of pictures could be paired with poetry? Perhaps Picasso’s experiments in analytic cubism? Perhaps Yuri Yuan’s “Diver” series?
11.
And finally: Here is an intriguing painting by the French post-impressionist Paul Sérusier. I became aware of this painting through
’s excellent Art Every Day blog.2 The compressed field of view reminds me of Wayne Thiebaud’s paintings of San Francisco, but of course Sérusier wouldn’t have been able to foresee that development. However, the complete lack of aerial perspective connects this picture to the Japanese prints that were so popular among French artists at the turn of the century. I have a theory that as photography became more widespread during the course of the 1800s, painters increasingly began to cultivate approaches that were more illusory, artificial (in the neutral sense of the term), and stylized. Is it a coincidence that the late 19th / early 20th century produced some of the world’s finest illustrators—Aubrey Beardsley, Maxfield Parrish, N. C. Wyeth—not to mention such artistic movements as Cubism on one hand and Aestheticism on the other? Whatever the answers to these questions may be, this painting is a perfect little gem.
There are a few exceptions: Dappled Things is an explicitly Roman Catholic journal; Ad Fontes is “A Journal of Protestant Letters.”
George Bothamley consistently delivers very engaging and compelling analyses and interpretations of the artworks he selects; if you have room for another art-themed Substack in your newsletter diet, his ought to be the one.