Posted in Culture Cues, Sacred Art, Things to Read on Dec 25th, 2011
ShareEACH CHRISTMAS MORNING I wake up relieved that the struggle against “Happy Holidays” is over for another year. Holidays are holy days, after all. When Hanukkah and Christmas arrive so close together as they do this year, I wonder if it would be possible to announce “Happy Holy Days!” into the secular void. The wondering [...]
Posted in Art, Art History, Art Writing, Sacred Art, Things to Read on Nov 30th, 2011
ShareART HISTORIANS ARE NOT NECESSARILY the best commentators on art. They are primarily researchers: archival sleuths, inquirers, unearthers of fact. Gumshoes, the best of them. Some can write, many cannot. The discipline draws bookish sorts who are more at home in a library carrel, reading up on the words of some other member of the [...]
Posted in Art, Art History, Art Writing, Sacred Art, Things to Read on Nov 20th, 2011
ShareHASAN NIYAZI, impressario of Three Pipe Problem, had included a list of readings that informed his essay in the previous post, Navigating the Cognitive Philosophy of Michael Fried. I omitted the roster simply to conform more closely to the format of Studio Matters. The audience for this blog are, in the main, other working artists, [...]
Posted in Art, Art History, Art Writing, Sacred Art, Things to Read on Oct 25th, 2011
ShareONE PROBLEM WITH ART HISTORIANS-TURNED-JOURNALISTS lies in the requirements of journalism. The art pundit must be interesting; no matter if accuracy suffers. Diversion is the name of the game. Elegant and high-minded, to be sure, but diverting nonetheless. And there really is not time, given the copy deadlines of daily or even weekly publications, to [...]
Posted in Art, Art History, Sacred Art on Aug 20th, 2011
ShareMY APOLOGIES TO READERS who emailed to scold me about the slow pace of postings. (“A blog is supposed to keep going.”) I should have admitted this a full week ago, but I have gone fishing for a few weeks.
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Though not necessarily in the ordinary way. The ancient story Tobias and the Angel comes a [...]
Posted in Art, Sacred Art on Jul 31st, 2011
ShareSOMETIMES I JUST DO NOT KNOW what to think. This is one of them.
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A comic book, Habemus Papam, featuring Benedict XVI as a manga-style superhero will be handed out to all the ardent juveniles who show up in Madrid for World Youth Day. It runs about a week, from August 16 to 21. You might [...]
Posted in Art History, Culture Cues, Sacred Art, Things to Read on Jul 27th, 2011
ShareONCE RADICAL EVIL SHRINKS TO PSYCHOLOGICAL PROPORTIONS, society’s ability to inflict hardship—including the psychological pain of deep remorse—diminishes. Restitution and rehabilitation become one and the same thing. That pulls the rug out from under an artist’s capacity to conceive anything close to the grand hellscapes, sublime in their gravity, that came freely to Hieronymous Bosch. [...]
Posted in Art, Art History, Culture Cues, Sacred Art, Things to Read on Jul 26th, 2011
ShareEARLIER AGES WERE BETTER AT PICTORIAL DEPICTIONS OF EVIL because they believed in its existence. Our own therapeutic society prefers to think of evil as an outmoded concept that gives way to material and psychological explanations. A strain of received wisdom has it that the concept of sin is as outmoded as phrenology. Wickedness, properly [...]
Posted in Art, Art History, Art Writing, Sacred Art, Things to Read on May 9th, 2011
ShareREADER SAM’S REFERENCE, in a comment on the previous post, to the biblical story of Adam naming the animals lends thrust to Tallis’ argument on—for lack of a better term—the metaphysics of pointing.
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The Genesis narrative distills into a simple, vivid anecdote the substanceN of Raymond Tallis’ thesis in Michelangelo’s Finger. The mythical Adam could hardly [...]
Posted in Art, Artistic Identity, Artistic Pretension, Sacred Art, Things to Read on May 4th, 2011
ShareTHE FLATTERING NOTION—fallacy, really—that artists see more than other, unpoetic, people comes to us from the Romantics. The German brand (Hegel, Schelling, Hölderlin, Schiller, Fichte and no small bit of Goethe) has been particularly virulent. Up to a point, of course, that bit about seeing has some merit. Down the centuries, artists were better than [...]