Meaningless Art

November 9, 2011 By Marc 27 Comments

I have a new hero. He is a janitor at Dortmund’s Museum Ostwall, and he’s in big trouble for accidentally cleaning up a puddle that turned out to be an essential part of a 1.1 million dollar work of art. This piece…

…is now ruined.

And I’m roflin. I am instantly reminded of C.S. Lewis’ incredible essay, on Good Works and Good Work, in which he stated – with wonderful appropriateness to the current situation:

But [...] I doubt whether we have a duty to “appreciate” the ambitious. This attitude to art is fatal to good work. Many modern novels, poems, and pictures, which we are brow-beaten into “appreciating” are not good work because they are not work at all. They are mere puddles of spilled sensibility or reflection. When an artist is in the strict sense working, he of course takes into account the existing taste, interests, and capacity of his audience. These, no less than the language, the marble, or the paint, are part of his raw material; to be used, tamed, sublimated, not ignored or nor defied. Haughty indifference to them is not genius nor integrity; it is laziness and incompetence. You have not learned your job. Hence, real honest-to-God work, so far as the arts are concerned, now appears chiefly in low-brow art; in the film, the detective story, the children’s story. These are often sound structures; seasoned wood, accurately dovetailed, the stresses all calculated; skill and labor successfully used to do what is intended. Do not misunderstand. The high-brow productions may, of course, reveal a finer sensibility and profounder thought. But a puddle is not a work, whatever rich wines or oils or medicines have gone into it.

Speaking frankly, C.S. Lewis is the man. He is the man because he understands that art is not the mere conveyance of self for the mere enjoyment of self. It is a gift to mankind. It is a symbol. It is a part of a triadic relationship between artist, art and viewer, not a dyadic relationship between art and artist, that the viewer – with luck – is let in on. This is a truth we must, must, must bear in mind when considering the art of the Church, whether it be our architecture, Stations of the Cross, crucifixes, tabernacles, or monstrances. Is it good work? Is man lifted up by it? Or are our creations mere artistic riddles one may or may not solve?

Take this, for instance:

Now the Traddy might get up in arms that the thing is blasphemous, but he’d miss the point. The point is that the very existence of any argument over the piece’s meaning, beauty, and appropriateness means that it has failed as a piece of work, no matter what it has achieved as a piece of art. No matter how potentially awesome it is, for the simple fact that it does not take into account the “existing tastes, interests and capacity” of the faithful, the work has failed.

It all comes down to a certain humility in creation. I, writing this post, could begin to spin and weave in my favorite Renaissance poetry so as to create within my words some artistic flair. (Actually, I couldn’t, but you get my meaning.) I might wring out of this writing some semblance of art. But that is not the point. The point is to convey.

And it is in that simplicity and humility of art that beauty is found. For one of the three principle parts of beauty is claritas, clarity or conveyance. If your work is unbelievably gorgeous but does not convey, it has failed in art’s great end; to be beautiful. And don’t be afraid to see this same principle applied in areas that aren’t considered artistic creation. In our relationships, our prayer lives, our families and our jobs, always we should consider the question; “Are we doing good work? Or are we mere spilled puddles, ambitiously seeking some end other than goodness, truth and beauty?” It’s worth mulling over.

So let us continue converting the entire world by way of beauty.

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In Defense of Stupid Conversions (God Exists!)

October 23, 2011 By Marc 30 Comments

The New Atheist gets all grumpy about ‘stupid’ conversions to the faith. Francis Collins – a self-described ‘obnoxious atheist’ and incredible genetic scientist – revealed the end of his own journey to God…

“I turned the corner and saw in front of me this frozen waterfall, a couple of hundred feet high. Actually, a waterfall that had three parts to it — also the symbolic three in one. At that moment, I felt my resistance leave me. And it was a great sense of relief. The next morning, in the dewy grass in the shadow of the Cascades, I fell on my knees and accepted this truth — that God is God, that Christ is his son and that I am giving my life to that belief.”

His brother, Christopher Hitchens, is dying and could use your prayers.

…and was called weak-minded, a cop-out; someone who had clearly not thought out either of his positions, atheistic or theistic. Or Jennifer Fulwier, that beautiful woman who writes over at Conversion Diary. Her atheism ended the moment she looked at her new baby. Or Peter Hitchens, a believer after seeing a painting of heaven and hell. All of them have been snidely called out as subjective, emotional and illogical human beings.

In reality, the majority of conversions to the faith are of this nature – an experience with beauty. Granted, most of these experiences are preceded with some logical venture – Francis Collins was convinced of Darwinism’ inability to explain the Moral Law before his hiking trip. But this isn’t stupid at all. In fact, it’s one of the most logical reasons to admit the existence of God by admitting the existence of beauty; by experiencing beauty.

“A frozen waterfall? What intellectual failure! What pathetic sentimentality!” the atheist might argue. Not so. The atheistic position falls flat in the face of a frozen waterfall.

They're treats if you've ever seen one on the side of a highway.

Now the reason Beauty gets a bad rap – especially as a catalyst for conversion – is because the modern mind conceives it as subjective. How can Beauty lead you to God, if to the next man it may be regarded as ugliness? But as I have attempted to show, the modern mind is just plain stupid. Beauty is objective. Beauty is outside of us. If we close our eyes, our children are still beautiful. It is not defined by us, rather it is something we recognize.

But there is another quality to Beauty, or rather, a quality within a quality (Quality Inception!) that a reader-whom-I-hope-will-not-mind-me-quoting wrote on,

…beauty really hurts. It causes intense longing and a painful desire, sehnsucht. It makes us wonder. It’s both agony and ecstasy. We catch a tiny glimpse of the fulfillment of all desire, and it awakens an even fiercer desire for that object. That’s probably why the saddest things strike us as the most beautiful – because beauty hurts. It’s like fire, as Augustine makes clear: “Thou touched me!—I tasted thee, and now I burn to live within thy peace”…

This is a fact of life I believe everyone can attest to, that beauty makes us long, whether it be framed in our wives, the Shenandoah Valley, or the poetry of The Chronicles of Narnia. Though perhaps I am being presumptuous. Perhaps, by some strange miracle, you’ve never experienced The Longing. Sit then in the quiet with this, and I apologize for ruining your hitherto simple life with soul-tugging pangs of sweet-pain.

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This sudden and breath-taking feeling of ‘something greater’ cannot be discounted as mere sentimental emotion – as the New Atheist might wish – for it is a universal experience. No, this quality within the experience of Beauty is our innate acknowledgment of the infinity of Beauty. The experience of Beauty is often described as lifting our hearts, elevating us, pulling us to something higher, etc. etc.  - what are these phrases but attempts to explain that there is always more Beauty? If Beauty were finite, perhaps we could be simply satisfied with it; sit down with some Mozart and say, “Yep, this is dandy. I feel perfectly satisfied.” We could leave the Pieta, unmoved; walk in a New England Autumn woods and feel no inexplicable desires. But if it is infinite, it would make absolute sense that the experience of Beauty is accompanied with Longing – for an experience of Beauty could only ever speak of greater Beauty to be found. The experience of the infinite would send the heart and mind soaring upwards, for infinity is the always-more.

This innate knowledge of Beauty being infinite (which, by the way, is a fact taken as self-evident by the Ancient philosophers) fits perfectly with the fact that it is objective. If it is objective, that is to say, something that is, not simply something that exists upon the certain construction of nature, or upon ourselves viewing those constructions, then it is outside of nature. Outside of us. Supernatural. You might draw an exquisite piece of art, but you conformed that piece of art to a knowledge of beauty; the art does not bring the beauty into existence. Thus if art did not exist, beauty still would. If the world did not exist, beauty still would.

Beauty is infinite necessarily. Because to judge anything from not very beautiful at all:

to the famously, incredibly beautiful:

…is to admit the existence of a scale. But since there is always possibility of more beauty, as there is always the possibility of a greater number, the scale must be infinite. The most Beautiful Thing Ever would have to be infinitely beautiful. And saying something is infinitely beautiful is saying that something is Beauty itself. (If I am infinitely like a train, I am a train.)

So have the conclusion: If Beauty can indeed be maintained to be an Infinite, Supernatural Existence, then God is Beauty. For there cannot exist two independent infinities. An immovable object and an unstoppable force cannot meet. Another way of saying this is that God is infinitely beautiful, which as I showed in the train example, is the same as saying God is Beauty. This means that St. Francis, upon recieving the stigmata and crying to Our Lord ‘”You are beauty…You are beauty!” was not being poetical in the subjective sense of the term. He was being honest. He was being absolutely, ruthlessly logical.

So when Francis Collins falls to his knees before the sight of a gorgeous, frozen waterfall, it isn’t emotionalism. It isn’t weakness. For all practical purposes, it seems to be basic mathematics. The existence of Beauty declares the existence of God, for Beauty, in it’s infinity is God. Any experience of beauty, whether experienced by the hardcore atheist or the flabby-minded Christian, is an experience of God.

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Beauty Is Objective

October 21, 2011 By Marc 21 Comments

Is beauty subjective or objective? Is it a thing defined by us, or a thing that exists apart from us? I guess it all comes down to this: Is beauty truly in the eye of the beholder, or is that particular maxim a particularly boldfaced lie? For those of you thinking this is a boring excursion of a non-controversial nature, let me tantalize your intellect – if beauty is objective, there is a God. If it isn’t, there ain’t.

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Oh we’ll get there, you studly individuals, don’t you worry. Now then, when people say “beauty-is-what-we-make-it”, or “we-define-our-own-beauty” or what have you; they don’t actually mean it. They think they do, but they don’t. For instance, a man might say, “Darling, you are beautiful, by which I mean you are beautiful to me,” and simply be taken as a relativistic jerk, slapped, and left with massive child-support expenses. But if a man were to say, “Darling, you are beautiful, by which I mean panda,” he would be insane.

My point is that when a man says, “We define beauty”, he doesn’t actually mean that he has created an alternative definition for beauty that he alone abides by. “Ah yes, sir, I see that you believe that sunset to be beautiful. But for me, beauty is defined as the vague feeling of nausea before I throw up. This sunset – therefore – is not beautiful to me.” No. Beauty is not defined by us, because we all agree – by our very nature, it seems – on St. Thomas Aquinas’ definition: Beauty is that which when perceived; pleases. Even the dictionary agrees!

beau·ty/ˈbyo͞otē/

Noun:
  1. A combination of qualities, such as shape, color, or form, that pleases the aesthetic senses, esp. the sight.
  2. A combination of qualities that pleases the intellect or moral sense.

So ignoring insanity, we have clearly a recognition of an experience. This experience is universal. All men agree on the existence of this experience, and have given the cause of this experience a name – Beauty.

Also known as Grace Kelly.

The question that remains – and the point the aesthetic relativists are really making when they say “we define beauty” – is: What is beautiful? Everyone agrees on the definition of beauty, but surely not everyone agrees on the things the definition applies to? The axiom of proof for the relativist was first confirmed in high school. It went like this.

“Dude, she’s hot.”
“What? She has a overwhelmingly massive nose!”
“What are you talking about? Her nose is fine!”
“You’re an idiot.”

If the experience of beauty varies from man to man, beauty cannot be objective. A nail in the coffin, it would seem.

Just kidding, the coffin thing was a rhetorical device used to augment the wrong view with false strength, credibility and respect, making it all the more epic when IT IS CRUSHED BY EXISTENTIALISM MWHAHAHAHA -

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- wait, what were we talking about? Ah, yes:

The fact that men disagree over what is beautiful in no way denies the existence of objective beauty. After all, it seems that if two men are gazing at the sunset, and one mutters “awesome”, while the other scoffs “foul”, it could be equally true that one of them is simply wrong as it could that there is no such thing as beauty. And indeed this seems to be the case, especially when taking into account another of the three Transcendentals – Truth.

In case you were worried I only see beauty in pretty girls, this portrait strikes my heart.

If one man says, “3 + 4 = 18″, in all sincerity and belief,  while another man says “No, you moron, 3 + 4 = 7″, it would be a madman who concludes that there is no such thing as Truth. For if this disagreement amongst men negates the existence of Truth, than the statement that Truth is therefore ‘defined by us’ is irrelevant – it cannot held to be true.

So it is with Beauty. To deny objective beauty is to deny the existence of “that which when perceived; pleases.” But if you deny this existence, you have to account for the fact that indeed – men perceive and are pleased. This is the point where the relativist will say, “Ah, but it is all subjective.” But what is subjective? Beauty? You cannot apply the adjective ‘subjective’ to a noun you’ve claimed does not exist. It becomes entirely nonsensical: “That-which-when-perceived-pleases does not exist, and is defined by me.” This silliness is besides the fact that to deny the existence of Beauty by this logic – that because men disagree with it, it is subjective – is to deny Truth by the same logic. And then the question remains, “Are you truly saying that beauty is subjective, when there exists no beauty and no truth?”

Contradictions upon contradictions. But the real reason I believe Beauty is objective is an existentialist one. When a man experiences beauty, there are two components to his experience. There is the responsive side, which simply says, “This is beautiful.” Then there is ridiculous and seemingly irrational side, which asserts that all men should find it beautiful. Think about it. What sunrise is viewed with the confidence that the man next to you could be simultaneously finding it hideous? If we are gazing upon the Pieta….

…and a man behind us says, “that’s absolutely ugly,” our innate, immediate response is not to say, “Beauty in the eye of the beholder,” it is to say, “Are you stupid? Look at it!” (This is not to say that, with a couple years of relativistic philosophy you can’t suppress this response, turn to the man and say, “I value that opinion as much as my own.”) C.S, Lewis said, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”

I say, “If I find in myself the innate, natural desire to declare beauty as universal and objective, I can only conclude that there exists such a Beauty.” There is no rational reason why what is inherently real in me would be at odds with reality.

That, in gross oversimplification, is why I believe that Beauty is objective. Oh crap, I almost forgot that whole God thing. It’s like this. If Beauty is objective, then it is a Non-material Thing that exists outside of us, and outside of matter. If that is possible, than it is entirely possible that there exists the being we call God, a non-material being outside of matter. In fact, God would be beauty, and beauty God – but that’s another post.

I realize there are some noteworthy objections, but every time I came across one worth exploring – like if this is true, why are there differences in what people consider beautiful? – but each would require writing a separate post. I’ll make sure to.

I’ll leave with another form of beauty, because why not? It’ll make your day.

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