The dangers of sentimental creativity

14 December 2009 by 4 Comments

David Taylor excerpts Jeremy Begbie — from the upcoming For the Beauty of the Church: Casting a Vision for the Arts — over on the Diary of an Arts Pastor blog. I’m excerpting the excerpt here:

    This should stand as a subversive warning against all sentimentality: when we misrepresent reality by evading or trivializing evil, usually for the sake of indulging pleasing emotions. Our refusal to face evil for what it is takes many forms, but is perhaps most pointed in Western society’s common denial of death. We grab at the things of this world because we cannot bear the thought that they will dissolve into dust like everything else.

    We dupe ourselves into thinking there will always be enough to meet our wants—enough fuel, enough energy, enough land—because we cannot imagine an end to all our acquiring, the possibility that there are limits, that things and people are not everlasting. Provocatively, theologian Stanley Hauerwas contends, “There’s a connection between the amount of money [we] spend on medicine and our reaction to 9/11. Both are attempts to deny that we’re not going to get out of life alive.”

    Many believe we have reached an “aesthetic moment” in our culture, when artistic media are quickly assuming massive importance in shaping the Western imagination. If there is truth in this, it is vital that Christian artists do not succumb to the sentimentality that so often accompanies surges of aesthetic enthusiasm. William James once wrote about a visit to a Christian resort in New York State. He tells us of “the atrocious harmlessness of all things” and how he longed for the outside world, with its “heights and depths, the precipices and steep ideals, the gleams of the awful and the infinite.”

    It is probably in our worship that this sentimental “flattening out” is most evident. We see it in our tendency to avoid any art in worship that will not instantly push the “feel-good” button, lest we lose members or repel newcomers. We see it when we insist God should grant everything in an instant, matched by music where every tension is immediately resolved, no dissonance “lived through.” We see it when we crave for direct, unmediated access to God, forgetting that God is always to some extent mediated through the finite materials of the created world. We see it in what Rowan Williams calls the “sentimental solipsism” of some recent songwriting, where the erotic metaphors of medieval and Counter-Reformation piety reappear but without the theological checks and balances of those older traditions. As a result, “Jesus as object of loving devotion can slip into Jesus as fantasy partner in a dream of emotional fulfillment.”

Begbie is a prominent advocate for the arts in the context of Christianity. You can pre-order For the Beauty of the Church on Amazon.com.

Filed under Aesthetics, Art and faith, Christianity

Why is art not considered “real” work?

4 September 2009 by 2 Comments

This may be something I’ve talked about (or at least alluded to) before on the blog, but I don’t remember for certain so I’m bringing it up again. Earlier in the week I asked this question in the Facebook forum: “Why are the arts and crafts not considered real work?” The responses went like this.

  • I don’t know. Maybe through some false, Puritanical idea that work should be cheerless drudgery? That if you’re enjoying it too much, it’s not really “work”?
  • I think it depends on whom you’re talking to. Great societies need art as well as industry and politics (Actually, do we really need politics?). I, for one, would love to quilt or knit, but I’ll apparently have to wait for Heaven to succeed at those arts.
  • Arts and Crafts aren’t considered “work” because people can do them as hobbies or in their spare time and don’t realize that (perhaps) there is a great amount of craftsmanship and skill in what you do than in (perhaps) what I do, when I’m not punching a clock. The correct answer is, “Paul, we’d all love to do what we love to do but have to punch a clock and it’s more fun to mock you than to say, ‘I’m jealous.’” I’m not jealous of your vocation but I wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to do what I loved either.
  • Probably for a similar reason that being a “homemaker & mother” is not considered “real work” — because it doesn’t bring in the bread.

Through the course of these responses, I began to wonder if part of this cultural sentiment might also result from the underlying and powerfully subconscious underpinnings of our mass producing consumerist culture. The value of handmade has, perhaps, been relegated to the status of hobby because such objects don’t make significant contributions to national statistics. They don’t pay homage to the god of the economy. They don’t create enough of the right kind of jobs.

The value of imagination, beauty, leisure, philosophy and so forth also fall short of the god of efficiency’s standards, all of which often tie into the arts. These things take time out of an otherwise productive life and are generally frowned upon by American society.

Those are the beginnings of my thoughts anyway, and I’d be interested in hearing more from readers.

Filed under Art, Beauty, Disposable culture, Handmade, Imagination, Mass production, Modern culture, Personal reflection

Our internal aesthetic editor

31 August 2009 by 3 Comments

What ought to be?

That is the International Arts Movement‘s way of asking a question that has partly driven my artistic philosophy for ten years now. I was never able to put it in such succinct terms, however. I usually talked about original creation, what the world looked and acted like before the Fall. IAM’s more concise phrase is a much better jumping off point.

A few months ago I was thinking about photography, a media we all love as long as we’re the ones behind the lens, a technology that seems to capture every wrong moment in time if the lens is pointed towards us. Recently I’ve been working more and more with video. Interlaced in all of the footage lie a myriad of embarrassing gestures. Without this technology though, most of us never see the contorted nature of our countenance midstream. Before the advent of the camera, we were more in control of our image.

Is there something about our dislike of seeing ourselves, especially when we don’t look our best, that relates back to the way things ought to be? Do we possess some kind of internal aesthetic editor that is still faintly yet immutably calibrated to a world before the Fall?

Snapshot-baby-antics

Image by Derek Jensen from Wikipedia.

Filed under Aesthetics, Beauty

Modern furniture aesthetics and design (or lack thereof)

19 August 2009 by 2 Comments

I loathe shopping for furniture in a retail setting.

Just before we moved back to Nebraska I sold our couch. We liked it quite a bit (and it was a great buy), but every time I sat down in it my allergies flared up.

We planned to replace said sitting tool with something, or somethings, after we moved. In particular we hoped to find a click-clack (sometimes called a flip-flop) couch. Their styling is less garish than many others, and we like to be able to accommodate visiting friends. Apparently these glorified futons aren’t all that though, and we can’t find them in most retail stores anyway. We also thought of a recliner for the wife to read in.

Her neck has bothered her in a bad way since we’ve moved, and we were both hoping that a different sitting situation would rectify that. So we started looking around. Craigslist and the Facebook Marketplace are very slow here in central Nebraska (apparently auctions are the in thing), so we resorted to shopping retail style.

Buying new furniture is not something the wife and I are accustomed to. Most of what fills our dwelling we were given, I salvaged and fixed up or I built. Cushy chairs are a little more complicated than beds and dressers to fabricate though, especially when you don’t exactly have a wood shop at your disposal. That said neither of us were prepared for the garishness or the cost of the furniture retail store.

First off, the garishness. Of the, for example, 100 recliners in a furniture showroom only three seem to have any aesthetic sensibility. Most appear thrown together (i.e., not designed) and cheaply built. The upholstery is strange in most instances and also seems lacking any serious consideration.

We couldn’t imagine paying money for most of these products, especially at the prices plastered on such monstrosities. Why is it that so many new chairs costs as much as the used cars I’ve purchased?

Leather chair

One of the less offensive recliners we saw in our search, via cameraphone.

In the end I bought a used chair from a pawn shop. It’s quite clean, although it seems to have previously rested in the presence of a smoker. The offending smell isn’t too overpowering since the object is vinyl (a requirement buying used for people with allergies, if you can’t find leather). Hopefully it will buy us some time to save some money and find something we actually like.

I wasn’t shy about my dislike for the selection at the furniture mall. The salesperson responded more or less by saying “to each their own.” I have to wonder, though, if our aesthetic sensibilities as a culture haven’t more or less succumbed to the cheap and unconsidered sensibilities of overstuffed furniture factories. That’s what there is to be bought, and most people won’t question it. They’ll look around a little, find the ones they like best and be happy.

Not me. I have higher standards and, while I don’t aspire to snobbery, am proud of those standards.

Filed under Aesthetics, Central Nebraska, Furniture, Interior design, Mass production, Modern culture

Madeline L’Engle on beauty, mystery

12 July 2009 by 1 Comment

From Rebecca Horton’s Passionately Alive blog, a Madeline L’Engle quote on beauty and mystery for this Sunday morning:

    I do not want ever to be indifferent to the joys and beauties of this life. For through these, as through pain, we are enabled to see purpose in randomness, pattern in chaos. We do not have to understand in order to believe that behind the mystery and the fascination there is love.

    In the midst of what we are going through this summer I have to hold onto this, to return to the eternal questions without demanding an answer. The questions worth asking are not answerable. Could we be fascinated by a Maker who was completely explained and understood? The mystery is tremendous, and the fascination that keeps me returning to the questions affirms that they are worth asking, and that any God worth believing in is the God not only of the immensities of the galaxies I rejoice in at night when I walk the dogs, but also the God of love who cares about the sufferings of us human beings and is here, with us, for us, in our pain and in our joy.

From her book Two-part invention.

Filed under Beauty, Christianity

LinkLuv: On beauty and art

30 June 2009 by 4 Comments

I’m pretty caught up in the logistics of moving/selling the house and don’t have much time to be blogging right now, but a few things in an article titled Beauty and Desecration: We must rescue art from the modern intoxication with ugliness seemed to be worth excerpting.

    At any time between 1750 and 1930, if you had asked an educated person to describe the goal of poetry, art, or music, “beauty” would have been the answer. And if you had asked what the point of that was, you would have learned that beauty is a value, as important in its way as truth and goodness, and indeed hardly distinguishable from them. Philosophers of the Enlightenment saw beauty as a way in which lasting moral and spiritual values acquire sensuous form.

    At some time during the aftermath of modernism, beauty ceased to receive those tributes. Art increasingly aimed to disturb, subvert, or transgress moral certainties, and it was not beauty but originality—however achieved and at whatever moral cost—that won the prizes.

    In a seminal essay—“Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” published in Partisan Review in 1939—critic Clement Greenberg starkly contrasted the avant-garde of his day with the figurative painting that competed with it, dismissing the latter (not just Norman Rockwell, but greats like Edward Hopper) as derivative and without lasting significance. The avant-garde, for Greenberg, promoted the disturbing and the provocative over the soothing and the decorative, and that was why we should admire it.

This last quote is interesting to me mainly on account of many previous bloggy discussions with friend and artist Timothy Jones, who finds abstract (or, more specifically, non-objective or non-representational) art to be decorative. Read the article in it’s entirety via this link.

I haven’t finished the article, but printed it off in hopes of doing so later this week.

Filed under Abstract art, Beauty, Modern culture

Models as muse to a generation?

25 June 2009 by Leave a Comment

The current exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art examines the supposed ideal of the feminine physique from 1947-1997. Molly Young reviews the show for More Intelligent Life. The follow paragraphs caught my attention in particular:

    The Model as Muse: Embodying Fashion, an exhibition organized by the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (and sponsored by Marc Jacobs), features photographs and works of haute couture dating from 1947 to 1997. The aim is to demonstrate the way “a truly stellar model can sum up the attitude of her time–becoming not only a muse to designers or photographers, but a muse to a generation,” explains Harold Koda, the institute’s head curator.

    As the curatorial notes put it, models are those “whose elegant poses and gestures” evoke the attitudes of the day. The show makes clear that this is partly something a model can control and partly something she is simply, ineffably, born with. In a sense, all top models are naturals.

Are such models (the article goes on to note how models in the 80s and 90s essentially became their own brands) actually muses to entire generations? Or even most of a generation?

That claim is a bit hard for me to stomach, although — like I’ve said already on the blog — I’ve never been attracted to any of the models which supposedly represent the attitudes of my lifetime. Is this just a difference in personal aesthetic, or is the claim that a “top model” represents a generation just a stretch?

ModelsCatwalk

Image from Wikipedia.

Filed under Aesthetics, Beauty, Feminine aesthetics

What Men Want: Barbie doll or fertile goddess?

15 June 2009 by 5 Comments

Here’s a very interesting article, So do men REALLY prefer miss average, from the Daily Mail about a study of college males in Australia who are apparently more attracted to an average female figure than a stick-thin supermodel. “According to this week’s New Scientist, 100 men taking part in an Australian study were asked to rate the attractiveness of 200 drawings of female torsos of different sizes.” The results suggest a [British] size 14 — “5ft 4in tall, a size 14 with a waist that hovers around 30in, rounded hips and a 36DD bust” — is the most desirable.

The article also includes commentary from an assenting woman and dissenting man. From Anne Shooter: “The only people ever to have made unpleasant comments about my size are other women . . . Thin women are skinny for other women – not for men.” Tom Sykes counters by suggesting that while men might want to settle down with the average woman, the girls they fantasize about look more like Pamela Anderson.

It’s a good read. I won’t elaborate, except to reiterate what I’ve said in previous posts on the topic by saying that 1) “healthy” is the best figure and 2) I’ve never been attracted to supermodels.

beautiful

Image from Post Secret.

Adding: Another post on beauty and the female form recently past 5,000 views, the most of any among The Aesthetic Elevator’s repertoire: Beauty: Female aesthetics through the years

Filed under Beauty, Feminine aesthetics, Modern culture

Shoeboxes, spec homes creating ignorant Americans???

11 June 2009 by 6 Comments

The wife and I talked last night about real estate, newer homes versus older homes, realtors and so forth. And it got me wondering:

    Has the glut of poorly designed spec homes thrown up in the U.S. from, roughly, 1960 on created a cultural deficit in that Americans look for the wrong things when choosing a place to live?

Since we’ve started looking for houses, actually since our friends began buying [mortgages for] houses five-plus years back, it’s been interesting to observe their choices and listen to their reasoning for said choices. There are some who, like my wife and I, crave the character (details), craftsmanship and environs found in many older homes in established parts of a city, but many people seem to be exclusively interested in newer homes.

From what I’ve been able to deduce, this usually stems from a desire for a maintenance free home (which, by the way, does not exist). Buyers want newer appliances and utilities and roofs. What they often fail to realize is that you’ll end up in the same boat as if you’d bought an older place that’s been cared for after just a few years. Appliances and utilities aren’t built as well as they used to be and, unless you plan on living in a house for only five years (give or take) you will probably end up needing to repair and/or replace the heating element in an oven, install a new water heater or buy a new air conditioner. I finally replaced the shiny stainless steel fan/light/heater in our bathroom last year which was likely original to our 1955 bungalow; the new one will probably die in less than ten years and is hideous in comparison to its predecessor.

Some men don’t want anything to do with painting the outside of a house as the sun and snow take their tole on soffits and siding . . . which reminds me that I need to post this picture,

vinyl siding

a stunning example of why vinyl siding is not really better than wood. This was on the garage of one of the houses we looked at in Nebraska. It was shaded, as I recall, and on the East side of a house — not exposed to hot afternoon sun. I’ve also seen the stuff pop, warp, fade and crack and it’s just beyond me why it gets used so much. Painting every ten or fifteen years (assuming you use good paint, not the Walmart brand) is a lot easier than replacing siding every twenty-five years in my opinion. Further, slapping vinyl over existing finishes seems likely to encourage mold.

Does cultural wealth factor into this equation, where newer homes in the suburbs are representative of a certain affluence that some older neighborhoods don’t allow an owner to brag about? Perhaps young mothers are under the impression that the ‘burbs are safer for the kiddos. Maybe the entitlement some of us feel after growing up surrounded by such an affluent culture leads us to believe we deserve shiny new houses.

Regardless, I have to wonder if the suburban architecture perpetuated over the past five plus decades has resulted in a more ignorant culture. Is it possible that we don’t know what good design looks like anymore? We don’t realize what wasted space or good traffic flow is? And that we’re (somewhat intentionally) losing the ability to care for our own property under the guise of the “maintenance free?”

Older homes, by contrast, often excel in design and craftsmanship over new ones. Lumber used to build them was straighter and drier, and sometimes above and beyond what was required for the job. The 830 square foot house I was drawn to on our recent house-hunting trip employed 2 x 10s for floor joists. No wonder the place was so marvelously square after 75 years! Less space is wasted in homes of that age, generally, and built-in storage was more abundant. Sure, closets might be smaller, but are walk-in closets really all that great? Luxurious, yes, but they also encourage clutter in our consumerist culture.

Seasoned homes are normally, subjective as this may seem, more pleasing to the eye. It doesn’t take an inordinate number of complexities to make a house or community pleasing to the eye. Apparently a book titled A Pattern Language talks about how a house can be successful yet appear to be a fairly simple design (from the outside). I’ve been told many times by different people I need to read this book. It is on my Amazon wish list!

None of this is meant to imply that we should cease new home construction. Obviously, as populations increase and older homes that were not cared for (or weren’t built so well, or that highways or big-box stores are paving over etc etc) are torn down new dwellings will need to replace them. Why, though, should new homes perpetuate a bland, cheap, and unenduring suburban aesthetic? They shouldn’t, and they don’t have to. A friend of mine here in Siloam Springs hopes to found a residential construction company that will bring back the details and craftsmanship of the early 20th century. He started with his own home which includes such details as a breakfast nook and drawers built into the risers of the staircase.

Will my friend find enough of us who appreciate the details in a craftsman home to float his business? Americans seem to be dangerously content with lousy dwelling design. We’ve become afflicted as a culture with the Texas Syndrome, where as long as something is big or impressive it’s credible (Yes, I know that link isn’t precisely backing up my assertion, but it’s related and a good article.). We’d rather have a poorly designed 2,500 square foot house than a thought-through 1,200 square foot bungalow that functions just as well as it’s bigger brother. Shoeboxes with holes cut out for doors and windows litter new subdivisions and we eat them up. McMansions (and their smaller cousins in more modest subdivisions) flaunt ludicrously steep and wasteful rooflines, which wouldn’t be all that wasteful if the attic was actually used as living space. But it’s generally not.

My concern is that suburban design of the past fifty years has infiltrated our psyche, and that our aesthetic expectations have subsequently been wounded without our being aware of it. Some of this sentiment, thankfully, might be changing as Downtown, U.S.A., is revivified and younger generations move back into the heart of cities. But from where I sit, we have a long ways to go in many parts of the country, and a lot of people in the younger generations still aspire to a questionable suburban aesthetic.

Thoughts?

(As always, there are exceptions to the generalizations I’ve made in this post. Keep that in mind when commenting.)

Filed under Aesthetics, Affluenza, Architecture, Entitlement, Living incarnationally, Modern culture

Potter Eva Zeisel on TED: The playful search for beauty

21 April 2009 by Leave a Comment

Ninety-four year old potter Eva Zeisel talks about her life and work in the following TED talk titled The Playful Search for Beauty. This is so worth watching. Just to whet your appetite (it’s an 18 minute video), this quote:

Novelty is a concept of commerce, not an aesthetic concept.

Filed under Aesthetics, Art, Beauty, Ceramics, Craft

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