- Oct 30, 2005 - Art 2
- Introduction
- Books in book room
- Doing Math as a paper, if I can
- Art and wartime lifestyle
- Understanding Art
- Form and Content
- We should aim to understand each
- Good form glorifies God
- "If every being is created by God, and God is its exemplar, efficient and final cause, then each being must bear a mark of its origin. God is infinite in his perfection, but the derived and limited perfection of every other being is an imitation of the perfection of God himself."
- Discernment builds bridges
- With inquiring children (DA Carson and movies)
- With unbelievers
- With artistically inclined believers
- Discernment is fun!
- We enjoy God's creation and providence more
- We learn to appreciate what is good
- Value
- Child's Drawing, intrinsic vs extrinsic value
- Art and Worldview
- Metaphysical
- Building blocks of art
- Man never creates like God creates
- Man always works with what he's given
- Imitating what God has created
- Epistemological
- Beauty is very bound up with Truth
- The naturalist has a hard time accounting for aesthetics, beauty
- Is there meaning for the empiricist?
- Can one measure beauty objectively?
- Can one sense meaning objectively?
- What about the rationalist?
- We saw in Scott's class that it is just as fallible, and maybe weirder than empiricism.
- And the subjectivist?
- Can one have a rational reason to say something is good?
- Why is one work of art better than another?
- Ethical
- Art and Law
- SOTA 207-211
- Art can have a very moral aspect to it
- It can challenge our morals by striking at our hearts.
- Art succeeds when it communicates to our hearts what our minds already know
- The Law that is known by all men can show itself unwittingly in the art of unbelievers
- Art and the Gospel
- Veith
- SOTA 211-214
- Art can communicate the Gospel very clearly
- e.g. Love Bade Me Welcome
- Tolkien
- Eucatastrophe
- A properly done fairy-tale will have a "happy ending."
- The Consolation of the Happy Ending.
- "It is the mark of a good fairy-story, of the higher or more complete kind, that however wild its events, however fantastic or terrible the adventures, it can give to child or man that hears it, when the "turn" comes, a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears, as keen as that given by any form of literary art, and having a peculiar quality." (TTR, 68-69)
- "The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man's history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy... There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was tru, and none which so many sceptical men have accepted as true on its own merits. For the Art of it has the supremely convincing tone of Primary Art, that is, of Creation. To reject it leads either to sadness or wrath."
- Fall and Gospel as a theme
- Tension and resolution in music
- Conflict and resolution in story
- Creation and Imitation
- Some other ideas of imitation
- Plato
- Art is best when it directly imitates ideas
- Nature and man are not ideas, therefore the fine arts are inferior to the crafts
- Aristotle
- Nature is perfection, the state one reaches when one has "actualized one's inclinations"
- Man is created imperfect, but full of inclinations to acquire skills
- Art both perfects and imitates nature
- Actualizes its inclinations
- Imitates it in the way it operates
- Plotinus
- Reality is hierarchical
- Art always imitates ideas because of the Intellect that flows through everything
- Problems with these
- Circular. None accounts for what exactly we are imitating
- Christianity is superior
- God created ex nihilo (and only God can)
- When we imitate creation, we imitate the original creative act of God
- Call to imitate God in perfection
- God's Art
- Creation
- The heavens declare the glory of God.
- Intricate detail and workings of a leaf, compared to the large-scale beauty of the tree.
- Quoting Annie Dillard, Vieth says, "Pretend, she says, that 'You are God. You want to make a forest, something to hold the soil, lock up solar energy, and give off oxygen. Wouldn't it be simpler just to rough in a slab of chemicals, a green acre of goo?'" (SOTA, 153)
- God's portfolio
- O LORD, how many are Your works! In wisdom You have made them all; The earth is full of Your possessions.
- Provides the images by which we can understand God's truth better. (as in Scott's lesson on epistemology)
- 'trees pleasing to the sight and good for food'
- Providence
- God orchestrates the happenings of His Creation like a magnificent symphony, beautiful in totality and awesome in its detail, every aspect working both to His own glory and to the good of "those who love God, to those who are called according to the His purpose." (Rom 8:28)
- All human Art imitates. It never creates a new reality.
- Even abstract art uses colors, patterns, etc that were created by God
- As Christians, this is a glorious reality
- We can imitate Him whom we most love and admire.
- Tolkien's ideas
- Imagination
- The ability to form images that have the "inner consistency of reality"
- Subcreation
- Imagination, incarnated by Art
- Fantasy
- A type of subcreation, possessing a "quality of strangeness and wonder in the Expression, derived from the Image"
- Some examples
- Music
- Vorgefuhle, Arnold Schoenberg
- Douglas Jones
- Earlier periods in the history of music generally built upon many forms and practices of their predecessors, even while rejecting other parts. ... But the modernist period is better characterized as plainly parasitic. They wanted to reject almost everything resembling traditional tonality and melody, all the while amplifying brute instrument sounds or tone color. Modernism can only define itself in drab, rebellious contrast to everything beautiful before it. This isn't creativity; it is merely parasitism of the worse sort. Modernism has no soul of its own. It lives as the negation of its ancestors.
- Modernist defenders view [critiques of their work as unbeautiful] as just purist stubbornness, blind conservatism. And they sometimes take the gnostic, elitist route and suggest that their brutally fragmented melodies are too subtle for vernacular ears. We need to be reeducated in the way we listen to music. Schoenberg spoke of the "emancipation of dissonance," in which dissonant, unstable chords no longer had to be resolved by more stable, consonant chords. Other modernists went further and sought to resolve lower dissonances by higher dissonances. The result is quite grotesque; it sounds like someone left the preschoolers unattended at the piano.
- Fugue in C, JS Bach
- Emotional, reasonable, driving, serious, tension vs resolution
- Prelude to the Afternoon of a Fawn, Claude Debussy
- Emotional (vs reason), individualistic, reaction to Enlightenment classicism
- Both are emotional, but in different ways
- Poetry
- Anne Bradstreet
- If ever two were one, then surely we.
If ever man were lov'd by wife, then thee.
If ever wife was happy in a man,
Compare with me, ye women, if you can.
I prize thy love more than whole Mines of gold
Or all the riches that the East doth hold.
My love is such that Rivers cannot quench,
Nor ought but love from thee give recompense.
Thy love is such I can no way repay.
The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.
Then while we live, in love let's so persever
That when we live no more, we may live ever.
- Painting
- Some Problems with Contemporary Art
- Dehumanization
- Reduction of the human element
- A painting is nothing more than colors on a canvas
- Jackson Pollock and random non-creative process
- John Cage
- 4'33"
- Sitting at a piano not doing anything
- Must be explained by artist
- Randomly generated sounds
- Lacks content
- Existentialist view that art should challenge one's views about reality
- "Beauty is rejected on principle." (SOTA 91)
- Cult of the Artist
- Art has become what an artist does
- In order to become an artist, one must be accepted by the art world
- Elitism of the Art World
- The public's views are irrelevant
- Much like the 'inner circle' of CS Lewis's "That Hideous Strength"
- Like the Emperor's New Clothes
- Absurd notion that artists are somehow superior to common people
- Biblical Foundations for Art
- What to Do
- View our work as both calling and art
- Think in terms of craftsmanship and imitating God's creative work
- Understand our relationship to God in our calling
- 1 Cor 10:31
- Whether, then, you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.
- Ecc 9:10
- Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might;
- Col 3:23-24
- Whatever you do, do your work heartily, as for the Lord rather than for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the reward of the inheritance It is the Lord Christ whom you serve.
- Start a Christian school which would instruct children on a proper view of art
- Artistic creativity and talent can start very young
- Need a fundamental correct understanding of Art in God's world.
- Art Society
- Promote Good Art in the community
- Provide an outlet for creativity
- Provide encouragement for development of talent
- Provide instruction on how to understand art
- Patronism
- Need to view the calling of "Artist" as a valid calling
- We need discernment to know how to spend the money
- Cultivate an ability to discern
- Start with food, wine, or music
- Anything that has a wide range of quality and some complexity
- Get a book on how to understand it
- Chew slowly and learn to say what you enjoy about something
- Keep it up and be conscious of it
- Exercise what skills God has given us even if we can't do it 'for real'
- Chuck Jones, creator of Bugs Bunny, "All of you here have one hundred thousand bad drawings in you. The sooner you get rid of them, the better it will be for everyone." - Jones, Chuck. "Chuck Amuck"
- Edith Schaeffer...
- ...play music
- ...with your family (THAoH, 38)
- For relaxation
- For fun and sharing
- For practice
- For worship
- For 'togetherness'
- ...with friends (THAoH, 40)
- For creativity
- For fellowship
- ...decorate, draw, sculpt, garden, be creative
- Don't be overwhelmed.. seek to integrate creativity into your daily life
- Resources
- State of the Arts, Gene Edward Veith
- Hidden Art, Edith Schaeffer
- On Fairy Stories, in The Tolkien Reader, JRR Tolkien
- (Jimmy has a copy of this if you'd like to borrow it)
- Music as Bad Poetry, Douglas Jones
- Metaphysics and Art - Mimesis or Creation? Professor Piotr Jaroszynski
- Supplemental Notes
- Mimesis/Creation
- Other ideas of Mimesis
- Mimesis and Platonic Idealism
- Overview
- Realm of the abstract, realm of the concrete
- Abstract is unchanging, concrete is always changing
- The concrete are shadows of the ideal form.
- Crafts better than what we would consider the fine arts
- Crafts imitate the ideal form.. something which has no reality in the sensible world.
- Fine art imitates nature (twice removed from the ideal), craftsmanship (thrice removed), or human culture (twice removed)
- Bowl good, painting and symphony OK
- Mimesis and Aristotelian Telos
- Nature is that which grows on its own.
- Nature can be vegetative, animate, and/or rational
- Nature is teleological, not in the sense that it has a goal in mind, but in the sense that it takes one path rather than another.
- Nature is perfection, the state one reaches when one has "actualized its inclinations"
- ergo, Man is "unfinished"
- Man does not initially possess skills, but he does possess inclinations to acquire those skills.
- What is art?
- Art is therefore a skill which man acquires and directs by reason.
- Art both perfects and imitates nature.
- " When art makes up for the defects of nature, it imitates nature with respect to the way nature operates: ars imitatur naturam in sua operatione, as St. Thomas says."
- Art must be pleasing
- Knowing is the highest act man is capable of
- ergo recognition of the object being imitated is pleasing
- Aristotle focused on arts which imitated man and his conduct
- Bowl and painting OK, symphony good.
- Mimesis and Plotinian Emanation
- Existence is hierarchical
- "At the summit is found the original One, which is neither material, nor spiritual, nor even a being. It is beyond being. From it emanates Spirit-Intellect, whose object is being."
- "Everything must be involve mimesis, because all things in their proper turn originate from something higher, and by the same token each thing must bear upon itself some mark of its origin."
- Pantheistic
- Art imitates ideas, because emanation happens as a result of contemplation by the Intellect, wherein all ideas exist.
- Plotinus has the most mimetic system
- Bowl, painting, and symphony good.
- Christian Creation is ex nihilo
- ergo God is the only Creator
- Mimesis is not simply copying
- Laux Aquinas, "God is infinite in his perfection," and "the derived and limited perfection of every other being [including plants and animals] is an imitation of the perfection of God Himself."
- Of the Western ideas, only Christianity provides the best ability to distinguish between Creation and Imitation
- Imitating God's creative act glorifies him
- When consciously done with God's creativity in mind
- When consciously interpreted with God's creativity in mind
- Mimesis is basically imitation
- Ideas
- "If you have two loaves of bread, sell one and buy a lily!" HAoH 97