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Whither The Arts?
It isn’t often that stone steps inspire chills, but to walk where centuries of human feet have literally worn down the stone is to simultaneously become part of history and to realize one’s utter insignificance to it. Walking up the steps and into the magnificent structure, the eye is drawn inexorably from the stones below, upward, high beyond the massive columns, up further where the very walls seem to tilt toward each other and meet at dark, dizzying heights. It was 1989, and I was standing inside the massive cathedral in Cologne, Germany.
I had just finished reading a biography of German WWI ace Barron Manfred von Richthofen in which he described his very first airplane ride as a student pilot. As the plane rolled out for takeoff, the prop wash blew Richthofen’s leather helmet off, along with his goggles and scarf. As the plane rose, and his gloves were also lost to the blast of wind from the propellor, his attention turned to that of viewing the landscape from the air for the very first time. And he wrote of his astonishment at seeing the spires of the Cologne Cathedral from a great distance.
That Cathedral had been there over 600 years when The Red Barron’s canvass and wood plane did battle in the First World War. Those old stone steps were as old as the US Constitution by the time Christopher Columbus set sail for the New World. And yet there we stood in 1989, struck dumb it seemed, trying desperately to comprehend the sheer size and endless intricacies of this colossal structure which literally dwarfed everything around it. To view it from the outside is to feel rather like an ant contemplating a redwood. 
To venture inside and see The Shrine of the Three Holy Kings (purported to hold the crowned skulls of the Three Wise Men), or the Gero Cross which dates back to 976, or the legions of statues, is to become virtually intoxicated with the divine devotion that conceived and constructed such a solemn place.
Where is there anything in modernity to compare? Camille Paglia poses just such a question, asking (and answering) the question of why so much of our fine arts have devolved into a “wasteland.” “Painting was the prestige genre in the fine arts from the Renaissance on. But painting was dethroned by the brash multimedia revolution of the 1960s and ’70s,” writes Paglia, who then zeros in on a central point: “What do contemporary artists have to say, and to whom are they saying it? Unfortunately, too many artists have lost touch with the general audience and have retreated to an airless echo chamber.”
It’s a chamber where the avant-garde first yielded to iconoclasm, which in turn has yielded to unimaginative and vulgar conformity. One need look no further than the artist who submerses a crucifix in urine, and then congratulates himself for bravely giving the finger to orthodoxy, all while carefully avoiding a cartoon of Mohammed so as to avoid getting his head chopped off. So much for breaking new ground.
So where do we now turn for art? Snoop Dog? Our smartphones? I use my smartphone constantly. Thanks to technological wizardry, I can have a conversation with the thing (it even says, “Who’s there?” when I say, “Knock knock”), but art it isn’t. Among my personal effects is an old pocket watch that belonged to my great grandfather. A functional piece, it retains just enough ornate decoration to hearken back to another time and place. As long as that old watch is around, I feel grounded somehow, which is a feeling that so much of what passes for art fails to elicit. Now, am I channeling my inner fuddy-duddy, or is society losing something? Where art once celebrated eternal truths, what is its point today? To rail against the culture and system that enables it? Again from Paglia:
Capitalism has its weaknesses. But it is capitalism that ended the stranglehold of the hereditary aristocracies, raised the standard of living for most of the world and enabled the emancipation of women. The routine defamation of capitalism by the armchair leftists in academe and the mainstream media has cut young artists and thinkers off from the authentic cultural energies of our time.
“We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation, a Jewish nation, or Muslim nation,” said President Obama, adding, “We consider ourselves a nation of citizens.” This ideology that seeks to disconnect an entire people from their heritage and culture is the same ideology that teaches students to ridicule and scorn the very system that has afforded them a standard of living and a wealth of knowledge that previous generations could never have imagined. To defeat that ideology is to make possible the day when abiding truths are celebrated and the arts again, as in the past, lift the human spirit up, up toward the Author of all that is truly beautiful.
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My husband’s grandfather was a farmer. See the brick building in front of the castle? That’s his farmhouse. That’s where my mother-in-law grew up. Most of the building is stable and warehouse for tractors, etc. The house itself, where her parents raised 7 children was very small. My husband’s uncle still farms it. Cows and manure are part of his daily existence. So is a backdrop of beauty both natural and man-made that are beautiful almost beyond believing.
Also, I’d like to make an observation about the Serrano work that people have gotten so upset about. His intention, as I understand it, was not to attack or belittle Christianity, but to criticize certain practitioners of Christianity who exploit and deceive fellow followers for personal gain. I’d point to as example the high profile scandals involving well-known televangelists in 1986. The photograph Piss Christ is dated 1987. Of those two, I find the former more offensive and corrosive, than than the latter, but that’s just me. I don’t like everything Serrano has done, and he enjoys and benefits from the shock-value of his work. But here’s what I would ask of people who find contemporary art offensive and unpalatable – give a work the benefit of the doubt before passing judgment. Don’t dismiss it without attempting to at least try to understand where the artist is coming from. If you have done that and still hate it, fine, but dismissing it outright because it doesn’t follow your aesthetic sensibilities is really unfair. There is so much beautiful and even reverential work out there to be discovered.
BUT, on the other hand, I do see lots of what John Paul II called “signs of the new spring”. I think a renewal is coming. ·1 hour ago
I pray you’re right. And I say that not just as a slogan or an expression, but I mean it. I pray to Him that you’re right. That would mean that we have some time left here and that it’s not yet that horrid twilight that’s been promised. I confess that I am… literally… tired of the world going to hell.
My husband’s father started out as a black smith, like his father and grandfather before him. He grew up in a tiny village in Holland. 600 people. All four of his grandparents were born and raised there. (Fifteen years ago yesterday, my son was born in the house there where my husband and his father were born.)
That tiny village houses this Franciscan convent, where my father-in-law went to elementary school.
On our evening walks around the village, when we lived there, we passed by it, and also by several farm houses and lots of piles of manure.
I am not an antimodernist. I don’t at all deny that there is beauty to be found in today’s world. But there’s a awful lot of ugliness in it too. Piles of manure can’t touch it. ·5 minutes ago
Piles of manure doesn’t touch on the ugly that was back then, either. Even just human fecal matter isn’t all of it, since things as simple as good health and enough to eat were not that common. Even if you can’t see your idealizing vs caricaturing, it’s there.
Also, you are misquoting. More artistic images. They’re on the front of every book, on half of the packages, rolled and piled shoulder high, framed and glassed in multiple isles, and if we’re going to go into the knick-nacks as “artistic images” it’s even more overwhelming. Even if we remove toys entirely from the accounting.
I am not an antimodernist. I don’t at all deny that there is beauty to be found in today’s world. But there’s a awful lot of ugliness in it too. Piles of manure can’t touch it. ·
Piles of manure doesn’t touch on the ugly that was back then, either. Even just human fecal matter isn’t all of it, since things as simple asgood health andenough to eat were not that common. Even if you can’t see your idealizing vs caricaturing, it’s there.
Foxifier, do you hear me denying that there was ugliness in the medieval world?
I wasn’t misquoting Carver. I was re-phrasing, according to what I took to be his general meaning.
If you watch that BBC presentation I think you’ll understand more what I’m getting at. None of it means I’m not grateful for modern medicine and daily hot showers and all that.
I think you’re under-estimating the problem of cultural ugliness in the modern world, and its effects on the person.
Why? Why do I owe an artist the benefit of anything?
When an artist is expressing himself, the burden is on him. If he wants to offer something for me to consider beautiful or meaningful, the burden is on him.
The problem with art forms like painting, photography, or sculpture is that they’re a one-way, one-shot statement. Normally, criticizing society starts a conversation in which the provocateur explains his criticism. But criticizing society through a one-shot artistic statement (that can’t be counter-criticized) lacks credibility. It’s no better than giving society the finger as you drive by.
A provocative artist can’t flip the bird to society, but then expect us to take the time to understand him.
Motivations. Art follows a different course when sponsored by a nobly born patron or devoted to the glory of God (a Heavenly king, rather than a non-judgmental buddy) than when it is produced for the consumption of teenage angst and melodrama or for artists’ own exclusive clubs.
Where the artist looks, so his or her art follows. The grander one’s focus, the grander one’s works.
Even artists with great talent too often focus on themselves. I share that fault.
This is the medieval castle in Liechtenstein my husband and I used to drive past daily on our way to class. On that road. (We rented a tiny little basement apartment higher up the mountain.)
This is Brugge, Belgium, where we spent part of our honeymoon. Almost every corner of it is as heart-wringinly lovely as this.
This isn’t Disneyworld. These are real towns, built and lived in by real people. Ordinary people. Crasftsmen and tradesmen of the Middle Ages.
It’s impossible to visit them and not sense that we have suffered a catastrophic spiritual decline, even as our material wellbeing has gone through the roof.
It’s good to think about it. Wonder about it. Ask ourselves why and whither, as Dave is doing in this post.
Well said Dave. Sometime down the line, people will ask, why did the world change so much after the 1960’s? Why did the arts fall into such a narcissistic quagmire?
When an artist is expressing himself, the burden is on him. If he wants to offer something for me to consider beautiful or meaningful, the burden is on him.
You don’t owe the artist anything. You owe KC the chance to find magic. I have seen the art of hundreds of artists. Many of them are vapid airheads filled full of liberal ideology and creating future landfill. But usually I will find at least one work or one artist in a show that delights me, whether it is a Firebird decked out as a baroque boudoir or a sculpture of folded paper, and every once in a while, reading the description of a work will put it into a new context that makes me laugh out loud.
Now, it might be like searching through the blogs of truckdrivers to find a Dave Carter, but sometimes even contemporary art is worth a second look.
Steam punk. Another thought about contemporary art that is often interesting and whimsical is the whole steampunk movement. It incorporates the artisanship of the early industrial era with utility or perceived utility for a certain time period.
Here is another art exhibit that delighted me:
Yugos
Listening to O Magnum Mysterium as I write this reminded me of a comment by Leonard Bernstein: Music differs from the rest of the arts. It is the only thing known to man that can go straight to the heart, bypassing the brain. Yet much of today’s ‘classical’ music is written for other contemporary musicians – mostly academicians – not written from the heart. I’ve heard it said that each tries to outdo the others by moving further and further away from anything satisfying to the ear in its atonality. Much of art is the same. A group of self-appointed guardians of the contemporary scene define what the ‘great’ works will be – from a commercial standpoint. Where once great works of art, music, architecture represented that which was much larger than oneself – often the glory of God – today it’s all about oneself. How small and disappointing that thinking.
And yet, when a truly great operatic singer appears on, say, America’s Got Talent (or Britain’s Got Talent), the audience is moved and responds to the beauty of that moment. Perhaps not all is lost.
Art speaks to the individual, but only if it has something to say.
(I’ve always wondered…are there instructions, such as “this end up” on the reverse side of his canvases?)
Katievs, I did not say “beauty” I said “artistic images”. I meant that we are so surrounded by images created by artists that we don’t even think about them. Yes some of it is better and some worse but we judge by the standards of people who are not “hungry”. Andy Warhol, love him or hate him, tried to show people that detergent boxes and soup cans had the imprint of the artist on them. Think record collections, think book covers, think boxes containing anything from lasagna to a fishing pole. I agree that the gestalt of a Walmart is not a thing of beauty but that was not even close to my point. I was merely suggesting that much of what fades into the background for us is actually pretty amazing.
What would Brunelleschi have thought of HKS Architects or their stadium? Form follows functions and better design follows prosperity. Imagine your post card castles surrounded by muddy plots, huts and barns, the medieval equivalent of house trailers. Already gentrification moves out from city centers around the nation and blight is removed or remade into coolness and beauty.
What would Brunelleschi have thought of HKS Architects or their stadium?
Or these:
I love the great cathedrals and have visited many of them – Cologne, Westminster, Cantebury, Salisbury, King’s College – Cambridge, St. Patrick’s, St. Paul’s. But it should be noted that there is some truly amazing and transcendent works of architecture all around us that are more modern and that speaks to what man can achieve if inspired. Not everything modern in architecture was driven by the merely Stalinistic utilitarian or the lowest common denominator for the masses. ·1 hour ago
Edited 56 minutes ago
These are undoubtedly impressive technical structures, but personally I find them still more or less self-congratulory monuments to our own hubris. I will take Chartres, Notre Dame, and Cologne any day.
I’m with Cornelius in finding those modern buildings striking and remarkable, but not beautiful.
The Gaudi cathedral in Barcelona, on the other hand, I love. I visited it a year or two ago and was moved to tears of thanksgiving for its thoroughly convincing marriage of Tradition and modernity.
About Gaudi, I am thinking of what CJS wrote yesterday on the thread about his dad: “extravagant self-giving”.
As a moderately relevant sidenote, Ken Follet wrote an interesting novel centered on the building of a cathedral in medieval England called The Pillars of the Earth. It is pretty well researched on the topic of cathedral building. It is not quite as engrossing as Eco’s The Name of the Rose but it is worth the read (or listen). The main story lines are pretty good with periods of excellence, though a few parts of it I found a bit gratuitous. It is available on Audible too!
The Gaudi cathedral in Barcelona, on the other hand, I love. I visited it a year or two ago and was moved to tears of thanksgiving for its thoroughly convincing marriage of Tradition and modernity.
About Gaudi, I am thinking of what CJS wrote yesterday on the thread about his dad: “extravagant self-giving”. ·3 minutes ago
Edited 2 minutes ago
I’ve never been the the Gaudi Holy Family(or any other cathedral in europe) but the Gaudi definitely still feels like it has a very organic connectedness (which upon writing I feel very pretensious in saying). I don’t particularly care for the style , vice the gothic structures, but it still feels like it is striving to connect humanity to the sublime.
Cornelius, before I went I would have said exactly what you say. Not my taste, but still…
Once I stepped inside (having waited a long time on line for the privilege), I was completely blown away. The upwelling love was all unexpected…
Here’s a shot of the interior, which doesn’t capture the rare combination of immensity and tenderness (also joy) expressed in a structure:
Cornelius – I suppose we may have to differ. Many cathedrals on the outside, for all their majesty and dominance of a landscape, seem to be slight derivations of one another. Salisbury Cathedral’s spire seems and may be too big for its supporting structure and in fact they are having a time from preventing its tilt and eventual collapse. Please keep in mind I’m speaking only of their design and repeated exterior motifs and not to any of the more etheral aspects of the interiors. Some of the more stunning examples of modern architecture at least shows what the human imagination can do if unleashed from convention making new materials stretch, twist and bend and seemingly defy gravity or extend ever higher over the landscape than what architecture was capable in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Do they speak to the egos of the architects? Perhaps. But I would argue no less so than the egos of the Renaissance architects. On that more ethereal and spiritual level, I think the interior of St. Mary’s in San Francisco certainly is as breathtaking and as moving as some more traditional cathedral interiors but that’s just me:
My family had the pleasure of visiting Cathedral and the town of Santiago de Compostela on several occasions. We lived in Italy for several years and had some amazing travel opportunities in Europe and beyond. But one of the most remarkable memories I have is a visit to the Cathedral and the town of Santiago de Compostela during “Semana Santa” (Holy Week) over 30 years ago.
Normally we would visit historic areas carefully avoiding major holidays or heavy travel months. I am so thankful we broke from tradition that year and had the crowded, busy, unforgettable week in Galicia. TY Mike for returning me to that beautiful time and those wonderful neglected memories.
TY Dave. You wrote another uplifting, thoughtful post.
Thank you, sincerely, for this link katievs. I hadn’t seen this before and it is precisely what I needed at this moment in time.
collaborating with internationally known architects Pier Luigi Nervi and Pietro Belluschi — at the time, the Dean of the School of Architecture at MIT. Its saddle roof is composed of segments of hyperbolic paraboloids in a manner reminiscent of St. Mary’s Cathedral in Tokyo, which was built earlier in the decade. Due to its resemblance to a large washing machine agitator, the cathedral has beennicknamed “Our Lady of Maytag” or “McGucken’s Maytag”.
Thank you, sincerely, for this link katievs. I hadn’t seen this before and it is preciselywhat I needed at this moment in time. ·8 minutes ago
Me too. I’m glad this post drove me to re-watch it. Thank you, Dave!
I’ve met people who’ve been moved to conversion via an experience at a traditional cathedral. I’ve yet to hear of one in a modernist cathedral. The admirers all seem to be on the outside looking in.
Looking for some decent views of the new portion of Reagan National Airport. There are a couple of decent pictures on Flickr, but whoever took the official photographs should be shot for lack of vision. They mostly have views of the larger hall, and few really show the view looking directly up through the windows that appear as lights in some of these photos.
It’s too bad I was always in Washington for consulting, not as a tourist. I could have had my camera.
I’ve been busy driving the last many hours, but gee, folks! I feel like a proud papa here, reading all the wonderful insights that sprung from some modest observations above. I’m learning a lot from you all, and thank you!
I was particularly struck by the exchange in which Wal Mart was compared with the beautiful countryside castles and its churches, castles, etc. On the one hand, life hundreds of years ago was, in many respects, brutish and short. Which, come to think of it, may have explained the heightened interest in spirituality as expressed in the artwork of the time.
Those people would think themselves transported to another universe were they to see the conveniences and goods at our disposal today. For that matter, a person crossing the Sahara Desert would prefer a pitcher of water over the Mona Lisa, but that doesn’t make the pitcher of water a work of art, does it?
I’ll go back and read through this thread again, though. The photos, the stories, the history and perspectives are fantastic, underscoring yet again the unique value of Ricochet.