The Glory of Kings: A Festschrift for James B. Jordan

Fyodor Dostoevsky
(Christian Encounters Series)

Athanasius
(Foundations of Theological Exegesis and Christian Spirituality)

The Four: A Survey of the Gospels

Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom

From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John

Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture

Jane Austen
(A Biography)

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary

The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons

Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature

Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen

The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism

A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel

Against Christianity

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper

A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature

Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays

Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life

The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church

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Art: What’s Wrong with Kitsch

Robert Solomon concludes an article that analyzes the reasons given for condemning kitsch with this defense of the emotions associated with kitschy art: “it seems to me that the real objection to kitsch and sentimentality is the rejection  (or fear) of  emotions and,  especially, certain kind of sentiments, variously designated as ‘tender’ or ‘sweet’ or ‘nostalgic. . . . But the  rejection extends as  well to the gloomier emotions, and Karsten Harries warns us: ‘how easy it is to wax lyrical over despair, to wallow in it, to enjoy it. This too is kitsch, sour kitsch.’  Mary Midgley points out that ‘thrillers’ have much in common with kitsch and sentimentality, for they too distort reality and manipulate emotion (though different emotions and to  a very different end).   So what emotions are legitimate,  ‘true’ and undistorted? Can art evoke any ordinary human emotions without being condemned as kitsch? Is there any room left in our jaded and sophisticated lives for the enjoyment of simple innocence and ‘sweet’ affection? The trumped-up charges against kitsch and sentimentality should disturb us and make us suspicious.  These attacks on  the  most  common human sentiments-our reactions to the laughter of a child, or to the death of an infant-go far beyond the rejection of the bad art that evokes them. It is true that such matters provide a facile vehicle for second or third rate painters, but if such incidents are guaranteed to evoke emotion it is because they are indeed a virtually universal  concern. The fact that we are thus ‘vulnerable’ may make for some very bad art but this should not provoke our embarrassment at experiencing these quite ‘natural’ sentiments ourselves, nor should it excuse the enormous amount of sophistry that is devoted to making fun of and undermining the legitimacy of such emotions.”

Art: Aging Art

In a fascinating discussion of Enrique Martinez Celaya’s painting Thing and Deception in his God in the Gallery: A Christian Embrace of Modern Art (Cultural Exegesis), Daniel Siedell quotes Martinez Celaya’s comments: “I chose a seemingly banal image, a chocolate bunny rabbit with all its reference to childhood, treat and wish.  It is magnified until it is larger than a human and then it is broken, with visible seams.  The rabbit by itself is both sentimental and resistant to sentimentality.  The red veil makes it both safe and threatening.  The veil is delicate but suggestive – maybe blood.  The veil reveals and hides and sets up a metaphor for the real.  It is from there that the title Thing and Deception comes from.  The rabbit and the veil exist in the whiteness of the canvas.  Shadows of buried images can be seen.  It is painted with a special mixture of paints to give it a powdery consistency.  Over the years it has developed cracks that I find wonderful, the fragility and ageing of the object directly interacts with the image and the suggestions of memory and mortality that are invoked by the covered rabbit.”

A bit later, Siedell quotes his discussion of his changing perceptions of the painting: “I have come to see it as a work about mortality.  I originally thought it was more related to sentimentality and memory but now I see it as a work of passage.  A work of premonition and finality.”

These observations are revealing in all sorts of ways: The fact that Martinez Celaya views his painting not as a fixed and finished object but almost as a living thing that acquires new features as it ages; the fact that, having produced the painting, he continues to interpret what he made and to change his opinion about his own art; the religious hints are provocative – chocolate bunny – perhaps an Easter bunny – broken to pieces and then reconstituted behind a blood-red veil, not to mention the Eucharistic overtones.

Art Theology - Liturgical: Eucharistic meditation

Exodus 20:4: You shall not make for yourself a carved image—any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them nor serve them.

Many read the Second Commandment as a prohibition of representational art.  It is not.  It is not even a prohibition of liturgical art.  Not long after He spoke this Word,   Yahweh commanded Israel to make golden cherubim as part of the cover of the ark of the covenant and to weave cherubim figures into the tabernacle curtains.  Centuries later, Solomon built two monumental cherubim for the temple, and carved pomegranates and palm trees into the cedar walls of the Lord’s house.  God commanded Israel to make images of things in heaven above and in the earth beneath.

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Art: Interpretation and meaning

In her essay “On Interpretation,” Susan Sontag argues that interpretation that seeks the “meaning” of a work of art is always destructive.  She says, “It is always the case that interpretation of this type indicates dissatisfaction (conscious or unconscious) with the work, a wish to replace it with something else. Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.”  Instead of “decoding” or “searching for meaning,” the critic should be attending to the formal features and the effect of a work of art.

If Sontag means that there is a necessary moment of receptivity in any response to a work of art, of course she’s right.  And she’s right too that responses to art can become so larded over with interpretations that the work gets lost.  But renouncing the search for meaning as such seems foolhardy and nearly impossible.  As soon as we talk about art, we’re providing an “interpretation” of some sort.

And we cannot help talking about art.

 

 

Art: Beauty

Jenson, again in the Song of Songs commentary, arrestingly described beauty as “realized eschatology.”

He begins, of all places, with Kant.  For Kant beauty is “the unlaborious coincidence of the actual and the ideal, the way in which some things show forth what they ought to be by what they serendipitously are, and insofar do not need to be improved by our moral efforts.”  Translated to theology, this means that beauty is “realized eschatology, the present glow of the sheer goodness that will be at the end.”

Natural beauty is, on this view, anticipation of fulfilled creation.  But what about art?  How can that be a “present glow of sheer goodness,” given that artists put a lot of labor to get things right?  Jenson answers: Works of art are products of labor, “but their beauty is not.  The artifacts have indeed been labored upon – or should have been – but those artists whose work is in fact beautiful all testify that the beauty of what they have made is a sort of extra gift from they know not where; by no accident, theorists in the Romantic movement called it ‘inspiration.’”  In fact, “the coincidence of a present thing with its end cannot be the direct object of our labor, since we have no vision of the end except what is granted precisely in that same labor.”  We don’t have a pre-existing vision of the ideal, to which we conform our objects; that vision is given in the labor over the object, precisely given, precisely a gift.

Art: Questioning Kitsch

“Kitsch” has become a key category in critical evaluations of the aesthetics of “mass society.”  Thomas Kincaid, Hummels, sentimental novels and manipulative Hallmark movies are all branded with the label.  I think it’s a useful label, but a student paper on the subject left me with some suspicious.

1) The student, David Dalbey, noted how paranoid people become when confronted with the question of kitsch: “Did I get something kitschy for my mother for Christmas last year?” they ask, anxiously.  That’s a revealing response, I think.  It indicates how much we take our aesthetic cues from others, and how much taste is a matter of liking the things that people who know what to like like.  And it also raises questions about the category of kitsch: How much of kitsch-criticism is just a power-play, cultural bullying by elites against their “lessers”?  To put it somewhat differently, is the rise of interest in kitsch directly linked with the rise of aestheticism?

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Art: Kantian aesthetics

Adorno neatly sums up the intention and result of Kant’s aesthetics in a cople of lines: “the significance of Kantian subjectivism as a whole lies in its objective intention, its attempt to salvage objectivity by means of an analysis of subjective moments.”

And, noting that Kant “posits something as form as aesthetic satisfaction as the defining characteristic of art,” concludes that Kant offers “a castrated hedonism . . . a theory of pleasure without pleasure.”

For all Kant’s formalism, though, he may be onto something.  He describes the aesthetic experience in terms of the play of faculties, of understanding and imagination.  That’s a pretty bloodless, bodiless way of describing our experience of beauty.  Still, we shouldn’t simply dismiss this: Aesthetic experience is not simply the free play of imagination (“romanticism”), nor the result of intellectual rigor (“modernism”?) or formal clarity (“classicism”).  Aesthetic experience is a response both to the import/content and form.  Insofar as Kant was reaching for that kind of synthesis, he got something basically right.

Art: Disinterestedness

Adorno sees disinterestedness as a necessary stage in the development of aesthetic experience, but says that it has to be transcended by a recognition of the “interest inherent in disinterestedness.”

Disinterestedness applies only to certain kinds of works, he says.  Try reading Kafka and remaining in disinterested contemplation: Kafka’s novels “call forth in us responses like real anxiety, a violent drawing back, an almost physical revulsion.  They seem to be the opposite of desire.  Yet these phenomena of psychic defence and rejection have more in common with desire than with the old Kantian disinterestednes.”  In short, “Kafka and the literature that followed his example have swept away the notion of disinterestedness.”

Art: Aesthetic enjoyment

Adorno writes that enjoyment is not the be-all of art.  Certainly it isn’t for the producers of art: “If you ask a musician if he enjoys playing his instrument, he will probably reply: ‘I hate it’ . . . People who have a genuine relation to art would rather immerse themselves in art than reduce art to an object.  They cannot live without art, but its individual manifestations are not so many sources of pleasure for them.”

Adorno sees a social dimension to this: “The bourgeois wants his art luxurious, his life ascetic.  It would make more sense if it were the other way around.”

Art: Christian art

Greek art, Hegel says, brings art to its summit.  This presents a difficulty: The greatest sensuous artistic form occurs within a polytheistic, inadequate religion.

In Jean-Marie Schaeffer’s summary, Hegel resolves this by pointing to the very brokenness of the bodily form of Christ in Christian art: “in Christian art, Christ is not represented with an ideal body, as the Greek gods are; his body is no longer the adequate expression of interiority but merely his mortal shell (it can thus be shown tortured by pain, just as it can be represented as a cadaver).  This does not mean that Christian theology must be identified with the abstract universalism characteristic of the hebrew God; on the contrary, Hegel accords a capital philosophical and historical importance to the fact that the Christian God was made flesh, and thus incarnated himself in a particular sensuous reality.  In fact, whereas the religions of the Orient fall short of the Greeks’ religion of Art, Christianity surpasses the latter, since it takes the sensuous incarnation of God to its dialectical resolution, to its truth, to its self-transcendence in the passion, death, and  resurrection of Christ.”

Thus, “Romantic” or Christian art “moves away from the point of perfect equilibrium” found in Greek art and in an art “characterized by the hegemony of the spiritual element over the sensuous element.”  Thus too Romantic art’s emphasis on painting, poetry and music rather than sculpture.

Art: Art and Idealism

A few selections from Hegel, “Oldest System Programme of German Idealism” (1796; name given by Franz Rosenzweig in 1913); from Simon Critchley, Very Short Introduction to Continental Philosophy (Oxford, 2001)

“I should like to give wings again to our physics which is progressing slowly and laboriously via experiments. Thus – if philosophy gives the Ideas and experience the data we can finally achieve the grand physics which I expect from later epochs. It does not appear that our present physics could satisfy a creative spirit which is like ours, or like ours should be.”

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Art: Anxiety of influence

RG Collingwood has a whale of a time excoriating individualistic conceptions of art.  He recognizes a theological motif behind the post-romantic notion of the isolated artistic genius: “Individualism conceives a man as if he were God, a self-contained and self-sufficient creative power whose only task is to be himself and exhibit his nature in whatever works are appropriate to it.”

He also notes that such an individualistic notion of art is profoundly ahistorical.  Many artists have borrowed quite directly from their predecessors:

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Art: Art and faith

Toward the end of “On Seeking God,” Nicholas of Cusa has this to say: “when an artists seeks the face of a king in a block of wood, the artists rejects everything else that is limited except the face itself.  For the artist sees in the wood, through the concept of faith, the face that the artist is seeking to observe as visibly present to the eye.  For the face is future to the eye but present by faith to the mind in an intellectual concept.”  I don’t think the last bit is phrased as well as it could be, but the notion that art is prospective, an act of faith, is arresting.

Art: Kantradictions

Jean-Marie Schaeffer (Art of the Modern Age: Philosophy of Art from Kant to Heidegger (New French Thought Series) has a blast pointing out the contradictions in Kant’s aesthetics.  Most of them arise from Kant’s insistence that the judgment of taste is founded on “the form of a finality” that excludes any specific end.  That is, aesthetic judgment responds to the sheer form of finality, not to any particular purpose of the object judged.  This is in a sense just a teleological way of stating the principle of “disinterestedness” that Kant inherited from earlier writers on aesthetics: If we judge a table for its usefulness as a platform for food and drink, we are not making an aesthetic judgment.  We have to evaluate without any notion of end.

Combined with this is Kant’s recognition that any artistic object is, inherently, purposive.  That is because the artist at least intended to evoke pleasure, satisfaction, or provocation from his viewers.  Natural beauty, by contrast, is not purposive, since, in Kant’s view, it is not an artistic product with a definite end.  As a result, Schaeffer writes, “artificial beauty is aesthetically less central than natural beauty it never elicits are pure aesthetic judgment,” that is, a judgment purified of interest and intent.

This has some disagreeable consequences.

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Art: Gnostikant

Evidence that Hamann had Kant right: In explaining taste as a common sense, he notes that this common sense of beauty can be arrived at by a process of stripping off whatever belongs to our perception and prejudice.  That is, we put “ourselves in the position of every one else, as a result of a mere abstraction from the limitations which contingently affect our own estimate.”  How can we abstract our judgment from our own limitations?  This is “effected by so far as possible letting go of the element of matter, i.e., sensation, in our general state of representative activity, and confining attention to the formal peculiarities of our representation or general state of representative activity.”  When contemplating nature, we contemplate “the beautiful forms of nature” and have “to put to one side the charms which she is wont so lavishly to combine with them.”

Art: Mechanical arts

Steven A. Walton provides an illuminating summary of the scholastic incorporation of mechanical arts into philosophy and theology.

John the Scot first used the term artes mechanicae in the ninth century, and monasteries preserved and improved upon ancient technologies, but  ”they did not warrant inclusion in the philosophical canon.”   Most Christian thinkers retained the ancient denigration of material arts: “Archimedes repudiated engineering because of its ‘mere utility and profit,’ and Aristotle treats mechanics as a branch of mathematics, but only in a theoretical sense, not the practical sense which is the essence of the medieval concept.”  Augustine, Boethius, and Isidore followed suit.

Only with the twelfth-century “Renaissance” are the mechanical arts fully recognized as forms of knowledge that are worth the time of philosophers.  Hugh of St Victor is a key figure:

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Art: What Rough Beast?

Milbank notes that “science and art have always first mimed the horrors to come.”  Darwinian evolution and avant-garde prepared the way, for foreshadowed, twentieth-century horrors.  He asks, “what may the far more shocking interventions of 1990s art and science . . . betoken for the present century?’

Art: Art and love

Kenneth Clark: “Facts become art through love, which unifies them and lifts them to a higher plane of reality.”

Almost right, that.

Right on the link between artifice (poetry, courtesy, ornamentation) and love.  Right too on the unifying metaphoricity of art.  Right too on the link of fact and art.

Not quite right, it seems, on two points.  First, on the (perhaps) implied positivism of the use of “facts,” for we never encounter bare facts (facts barren of love and artifice) , facts are themselves God’s poesis, and art itself is supremely factual (factum, made).  Second, on the “elevation” to a “higher plane.”  That’s too allegorical, whereas I’d want to say art is typological.

Art: Clash of Gods

Thomas Mathews (The Clash of Gods: A Reinterpretation of Early Christian Art (Princeton Paperbacks)) claims that since the work of Kantorowicz, Andreas Alfoldi, and Andre Grabar, interpretations of early Christian art have been dominated by the “emperor mystique.”  As summarized by Grabar, the theory is that the history of Christian art is divided by the conversion of Constantine.  Prior to Constantine, “Christian images consisted of one or two figures referring to some biblical event.”  After, in Grabar’s terms, “All the ‘vocabulary’ of a triumphal or Imperial iconographical language was poured into the ‘dictionary’ which served Christian iconography.”

Mathews just doesn’t see it, and he thinks that each of these scholars is influenced by his own nostalgia for empire.

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Art: Modern Art

A few quick takes from Daniel Siedell’s excellent God in the Gallery: A Christian Embrace of Modern Art (Cultural Exegesis):

After pointing out that Eastern Christians prefer the flatness of icons to the realistic perspective of Western art, Siedell concludes that this should “remind us that flatness [in Eastern Christian or modern art] is not by itself nihilistic, atheistic, or otherwise anti-Christian. . . . Modernist art is often dismissed by Christian commentators because it looks like it is doing violence to traditional figurative art and thus by (dubious) extension doing violence to traditional (Christian) concepts of humanity and divnity.”

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