“Bumped”, I suppose you could say. Because I was reminded of it.
This post was originally published April 19, 2008. The New Criterion link has expired, but you can still read it here. Take your time. Read the comments, too.
“When I was in the army, many years ago, I was an infantryman, and in the course of what I saw, and did, and came to understand, I was broken. Sometime after I had returned to the United States and my life had resumed, I rounded a corner in the Metropolitan Museum in New York and saw a painting I had known all my life but which I had not until that moment been able to understand. This was Winslow Homer’s masterfully restrained portrait of a veteran returning to his fields. The generation touched by fire in the Civil War understood the great import of this painting, they knew why the veteran had his back turned to the painter, why he was alone, why he worked in utter quiet, why the light was so clear, the scene so tranquil. After years of war and destruction, they understood, and after having passed this painting for the first time as a man, so did I.”
Thank you.
I now understand where I stand, in the “Voice Of Fire” debate.
“Quote from the article”
The new art … divides the public into the two classes of those who understand it and those who do not. … One group possesses an organ of comprehension denied to the other.… They are two different variations of the human species.… The new art addresses itself … to a specially gifted minority [and] … compels the average citizen to realize that he is just this … a creature incapable of receiving the sacrament of art, blind and deaf to pure beauty.… Like horses and mules that lack understanding … the masses kick and do not understand.
human content has grown so thin that it is negligible … we then have an art which can be comprehended only by people possessed by the peculiar gift of artistic sensibility—an art for artists and not for the masses, for “quality” and not for hoi polloi.
Next question? Am I in the minority or Majority?
Absolutely beautiful. Thank you. Art can be cathartic, but it more often has the power to open one’s eyes.
A wonderful moment for a Saturday morning. Thanks.
Here’s an excerpt to enrage the Leftards, fruitfly fascists and Algoreit sect of pagan earth worshipers:
Science is most certainly predictive, see e.g. physics.
Yes, there is indeed one truth and absolute that will never change:
“I am the Way the Truth and the Life.”
John 14:6
For the moonbats to ponder:
“Jesus answered….I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice. Pilate said unto him, What is truth?”
John 18:37-38
You have faith, and that’s good for you (I would assume).
Many others recognize that there is an objective truth about nature that science is trying to pursue.
However, when it comes to questions about god (and politics) there is no objective truth.
my favourite winslow story is as follows….a visitor to his studio asked “where do all these empty liquor bottles come from ?”…….homer answered, “i dunno…beats me…i only ever buy full ones.”
Meh.
I’m partial to The Old Masters.
“Yes, there is indeed one truth and absolute that will never change:
‘I am the Way the Truth and the Life.'”
Yeah….somehow I don’t think that’s what the author had in mind. But you’re welcome to cling to whatever comforts you.
“A wonderful moment for a Saturday morning. Thanks.”
I can only echo that sentiment.
And here again is why the web is so amazing:
The link to the Helprin article took me to:
The New Criterion Online which took me to:
A short item on William F. Buckley Jr. which included this quotation from the English philosopher Roger Scruton:
“Western civilization is composed of communities held together by a political process, and by the rights and duties of the citizen as defined by that process. Paradoxically, it is the existence of this political process that enables us to live without politics. Having consigned the business of government to defined offices, occupied successively by people who are the servants and not the masters of those who elected them, we can devote ourselves to what really matters — to the private interests, personal loves, and social customs in which we find our satisfaction. Politics, in other words, makes it possible to separate society from the state, so removing politics from our private lives.”
It’s a glorious morning in the Ottawa Valley. Spring at last! My old schnauzer and I are headed for Glengarry and Saint Andrews West this afternoon.
Have a great weekend everyone.
I read Helprin’s “Winter’s Tale” because of Kate’s reccomendation, great book, thank you!
I have just spoken an immense heresy in this age of relativism: that some things can be better than others, that ways exist to assess value, that in life there is somehow an absolute standard.
Amen brother, amen.
That was a beautiful essay. I believe it identified the misgivings I’ve always felt wrt modern art. Like the author, I like some modern art. But it has never grabbed me the way traditional, and I must say, native art has. Modern art has always seemed incomplete. It makes me think of a carpenter who works endlessly to make the perfect mortise and tenon joint, but doesn’t have the courage to build a fine table. Modern art lacks courage. In its nihilism it makes it easy to succeed, but impossible to triumph.
We have a great showing of FH Varley here in Kelowna
Not a staving dog to be seen:(
http://www.kelownaartgallery.com/
I see a man wantonly destroying defenseless living things, a warmer of the planet, an Everyman, a Destroyer of the Earth.
But, maybe I’m reading into it.
Cal – you beat me to the Ortega quote. That’s fuel for a really long discussion, but exams beckon…and they’re demonstrating most conclusively that the “organ of comprehension” is indeed atrophied.
For those of you in eastern Ontario, here’s a good, but little known, artist: http://www.roncowle.com/
Those possessing this magnificent organ of understanding will plunder the masses to build themselves Opera houses. They will steal a share of his crop, for no benefit to him.
There are no politics in this painting. There is just one man, apart, an individual, and his own productivity, and nothing else. This is freedom.
“There are no politics in this painting. There is just one man, apart, an individual, and his own productivity, and nothing else. This is freedom.
Posted by: shaken at April 19, 2008 12:38 PM ”
Which is Richard Ball-less doesn’t get it shaken. FREEDOM. The scourge of the leftards.
I would call that painting “art”. More so than some recent examples which come to mind.
A magnificent article! Many thanks, Kate.
This article, much more eloquently, mirrors my posts at the April 17th SDA thread, “May His Next Project Be A Self Portrait”.
Excerpts from this brilliant article—by Mark Helprin about the prescience of Ortega y Gasset—which expose our society’s playing with fire are:
“Briefly stated and without evangelical impulse, if God does not exist and neither does His order, then we are all free to do as we wish, to make our own order, and the one that prevails will simply be the one that can marshall the greatest power. This, the rule of force, is the legacy of nihilism, which is the gift of the belief that the universe is devoid of purpose. Modernism is rooted in these ideas, its developments are channeled and limited by them, and it is no coincidence that modernism has been and is yet the handmaiden of this century’s [20th] matchless forces of destruction and alienation . . .
“‘The new art … divides the public into the two classes of those who understand it and those who do not. … One group possesses an organ of comprehension denied to the other [Beverley McLachlin, Chief Justice of Canada’s Supreme Court, holds a similar belief] .… They are two different variations of the human species.… The new art addresses itself … to a specially gifted minority [Canada’s SCC judges, and] … compels the average citizen to realize that he is just this … a creature incapable of receiving the sacrament of art, blind and deaf to pure beauty.… Like horses and mules that lack understanding … the masses kick and do not understand . . . ’ [Besides being the new creed of Canada’s Supreme Court, this is the old Christian heresy, Gnosticism.]
“‘It is not an exaggeration,’ [Ortega y Gasset] says, ‘to assert that modern paintings and sculpture betray a real loathing of living forms or forms of living beings.… Dehumanization … is inspired by … an aversion against the traditional interpretation of realities . . . ’
“He [Ortega y Gasset] was not just aware, he was prescient. In the midst of this extraordinary volte face, he sees ahead with the same clarity, though not with the felicity, of the Henry James essay ‘Beyond the Rim.’ For he recognizes that ‘hatred of art is unlikely to develop as an isolated phenomenon; it goes hand in hand with hatred of science, hatred of State, hatred in sum, of civilization as a whole.’
“Modernism is the movement that arose in art to collaborate with the conqueror, and most of today’s artists and theorists, the thinking and unthinking acolytes of Ortega and his precursors, are the collaborators . . .
“Not long ago, art and civilization took a horribly wrong and mistaken turn. My proof of this is not merely the contrast between this and other ages of art but the unparalleled devastation of this [20th] century—by war, by mass bondage, by the neglect of what is humane. In arrogating to ourselves powers that we did not have or that we could not handle, we have been the cause of untold suffering and destruction.”
And, what modern practice most closely exemplifies this “untold suffering and destruction”, this nihilism? Abortion.
For, while we, as an, apparently, civilized people, still observe the niceties of appearing to have an aversion to, if not abhorrence of, war, genocide, cruelty to animals, poverty, homelessness, kids not being fed breakfast, etc., abortion—the deliberate dehumanizing and mass destruction of our own flesh and blood—gets a free moral pass.
What I’ve said, though it happens to be true, will be considered definitely “not nice”, even by SDA regulars, who seem willing to face down all manner of other “not nice” topics: by averting our eyes from abortion, we too are the “collaborators” to whom Helprin refers—in the death of not only millions of tiny human beings, but of our own consciences and souls: in short, our humanity.
Mark Helprin, above, “Briefly stated and without evangelical impulse, if God does not exist and neither does His order, then we are all free to do as we wish, to make our own order, and the one that prevails will simply be the one that can marshall the greatest power.”
This is exactly C.S. Lewis’s thesis in “The Abolition of Man”, a small gem of a book, well worth the read.
after reading through the story of how starving a dog becomes someones “art”, this is a welcome story…
JJM… and I too, followed through on the link to Mr. Buckley at The New Criterion
and I wish that Cal was in the majority.
Lovely posting, great comments, fine art. Any who want to some high calibre reading on art, meaning and truth, plus enjoy a heaping of scorn on Richard Dawkins and his fellow travellers, will thrill to this article by Theodore Dalrymple in City Journal.
http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_4_oh_to_be.html
Snow in Vancouver last night.
God bless.
Great post, Kate. Thank you.
It’s often helpful to think in terms of vectors. There is an origin, a direction, and a magnitude. The evolution of the photographic process was a major point of departure in the world of art. So consider that an origin. That vector has now passed through the starving dog. What does this tell us of the direction? If we project that vector forward, where does it take us? The progression of art has been to make a series of breakthroughs, smashing inhibitions and taboos. The starving dog “advances” art as it breaks through the barrier of, literally, taking life in the name of art. The reward cycle, the recognition system for art, is the questioning and crashing down of inhibitions, having replaced achievements in the expression of the sublime beauty of creation, and existence.
I should have preserved the link, I apologize for not – I saw recently at a UK website an article on a photographic exhibition depicting the faces of cancer victims, shortly before their deaths, and then after their deaths. Death, as art, again.
There are not many barriers left to be broken. Project this forward. Where does it take us?
We’re nearly there, aren’t we?
Based on this vector analogy, I will not be the least surprised when some possessed moonbat demands that we examine suicide bombing as performance art.
And Justthinkin doesn’t get sarcasm.
My thanks, Kate. I now have a better understanding.
You see, on Thursday morning, we decided that it was time for our poor puppy. He has been sick for a year (nothing we could do about it), slowly losing weight, limping , but was still a bouncy, happy Boxer, chasing rabbits and cats in the yard, guarding us against invading magpies. Until Wednesday, when he crashed. Then, next morning I saw the item about the dog starving for the sake of art.
These so-called artists are the Anti-Art, the Anti-Life; paint drooling onto canvas, garbage shoveled into a heap, sonic dissonance that grates on the instincts of the listener, “art”; forests of rotting rabbits, smashing mice on a street corner, starving a dog to death, excretory solids and fluids maliciously debasing long-held traditions, “innovative art”. They are monstrous children, uncivilized, unsupervised, dabbling in their own feces, raging at those who don’t approve of their scribblings, dragging along those without the self-confidence to say “I know what I like, and that ain’t it.”
My poor Dexter is a work of Art.
Tonight, he takes his final walk. That is Life.
“Jesus answered….I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice. Pilate said unto him, What is truth?”
John 18:37-38
Posted by: Doug
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?
Stumbled across A Winters Tale at Jerry’s Books in Steveston, wouldn’t have picked it up if not for Kate’s recommendation.
Unbelievable writing. The left must just hate him.
I guess Epicurus would prefer to be a robot prevented from doing his own will.
Leftists are like that, prefer to have decisions made for them.
This is not all what is stated here.
1) Yes, Epicurus, the age old questions. You leave out free will: without that, there is no love. (I don’t think you read the article.)
In a related article at the TCS (Technology-Commerce-Society) web site, Karl Reitz, an atheist, writes, in his article, “Hitchens Is Not Great: An Atheist’s Defense of Religion”:
“However, it is not clear at all why ‘secularized religions’ should not count. A world in which everyone stopped believing in God would likely provide fertile ground for such secular faiths. These secularized religions are what we would really have if we somehow got everyone to stop believing in God. Realistically, atheists (and we atheists take pride in only thinking realistically) may only have a choice between living in societies that are traditionally religious or ones that have adopted secularized religions.
“So, far from ‘not counting,’ secular religions must be taken very seriously, and their implications understood, before we preach the benefits of godless society.
“The obvious examples of secularized religions are communism, socialism, and fascism, each of which generally involves worshipping government by slightly different rituals or for slightly different reasons . . . ”
I’d say, be careful what you wish for.
2) Bernie, yes, apparently, once Helprin stopped being a lefty, he got dropped from nearly all the lefty A-lists. He seems to be quite relieved!
Epicurus (apropo handle, btw)…
A little weak on theology and logic, are we?
God is not just an engineer, but an artist. Art is a risky business. Never seems to please the critics. Who, of course, are incapable of art…or even addressing their objections in their own little lives.
FYI, He is both willing and able. Indeed, He took matters into His own hands (a little pun there), but you’re unwilling to accept that solution. For those a little impatient with matters, stir your own butts. He’s done the heavy lifting, time for a little fieldwork of your own. There’s a little parable in Matthew’s gosple (13th chaper) explaining why the magic wand isn’t going to make it all better immediately – it would do more harm then good.
I haven’t yet read Helprin, but he’s on my list. Another author that some may appreciate is James Stoddard (the British fantasist) – check out “The High House”
Atheists are boring. I skip them simply to prevent the onset of boredom.
There is a struggle between what Eliade called “the sacred and the profane” that is as important as a struggle between conservatives and liberals.
There is a sacred dimension to existence that has been forgotten and dismissed by postmodernism, scientism, and philosophical dualism engendered in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Postmodernism looks at the painting and explains to us, as did Andy Warhol, that in earlier times people would go on pilgrimages of hundreds of miles to see, reflect, and meditate on the numinous qualities of great art. Warhol would take something like the Mona Lisa, an image that previously could only be seen by an individual travelling to be in the presence of the work, and mass-produce it onto a million t-shirts.
By the time scientism finishes explaining to us the chemical composition of pigments, the physics of perception, and other mechanics of the art production process, the meaning of the work already begins to be lost behind the explanation.
Today, because of the success of science rather than its failures, we have been seduced into ascribing meaning to only one-half of life. The sacred dimension is a dimension of qualities and not quantities, as is explained by Rene Guenon in The Reign of Quantity and the Sign of the Times.
We of course understand that love, compassion, courage, and beauty cannot be quantified, measured, or detected by instrumentation. However, the success of empirically verifiable possibilites has given weight and direction to areas where it cannot act as an arbiter.
We understand that love can’t be measured and quantified, and yet we are instructed that God is love. Love is a quality that cannot be subjugated to arbitration of quantity.
Today we have almost assumed that the world of qualities is simply somehow derivative of the world of quantity. And as a consequence, the arbiter of reality always swings back to the temporal, the mundane, and the quantifiable.
But the sacred dimension of our existence that comes to us through art, religion, and the numinous experiences that can overtake anyone outside a formalized institution is just as real and enduring as anything that can be measured.
And so today we’re stuck in a struggle for the sacred dimension of existence to receive recognition and acknowledgement. Until or unless the sacred is once again fully recognized, we will be constrained to assign reality to only that which instrumentation can measure.
but Picasso said God must be a modern artist…one day He will try a zebra…the next day he may essay a giraffe….the day after that he will absentmindedly concoct a platypus….
i wouldn’t dare gainsay Pablo Ruiz’ understanding…for he was a rarity….FIRST a consumate draftsman then a mirror of his time….and there were others…many many others that don’t deserve the pejorative epithet of ‘modern artist.”
of course there IS putrid posing shite tho…LOTS and LOTS of it… and it was covered and exploded by tom wolfe.
“it’s got so i can’t SEE a work of art without an accompanying theory”.
“Jesus answered….I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice. Pilate said unto him, What is truth?”
John 18:37-38
Posted by: Doug at April 19, 2008 10:57 AM
From a moonbat;
“In Voltaire’s Bastard he places us in the final stages of an Age of Reason where rationality has (inevitably) degenerated at the hands of value-free technocratic elites into a brutal and inhuman global system of consumption and exploitation.
Voltaire’s Bastard said…
Is it comic justice that this degenerate creature has come to resemble what his philosophy serves? ”
And an old man says;
The comments are worthy, and not just a representation of a given moment in time.
Those who have tasted the bitterness of the words and the sword, are abandoned to, and often attempt to reconcile the demons in some form of simplicity or at a Bar. Thus the poignancy of the art offered.
Conviction is not the property of a political philosophy, it can be far more noble than that.
What is the truth?
Ask a Vietnam veteran. Ask a Mujadhin. Ask a Veteran of Iwo Jima, if you can find one.
Ask me. You possibly won’t like the answers, I listen to them all, and more, and I don’t follow anyones party line.
Truth is God, the way and the light and is oft a very uncomfortable bedfellow.
Hugger
“Tonight, he takes his final walk. That is Life.”
foobius.
I feel for you, it’s been one year since we had to take our boxer for his “last walk”. I still dream about him to this day.
An old saying….Man is cursed to outlive his dog.
RNK
“I now understand where I stand, in the “Voice Of Fire” debate….”
Cal
cal2 I’ve heard your thoughts on the Voice Of Fire, is this your post and you forgot the “2”?
Sir Kenneth Clark was very perceptive when he wrote in, Civilization: A Personal View, (paraphrasing from memory) “ the only thing that get can get for sure from looking at a piece of art is some insight into the artist that created it”
He died in 1983 but he would recognize the current threat to our civilization: “It is lack of confidence, more than anything else that kills a civilisation. We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs.”
foobius?
I’m very sorry to hear that. They give you so much, and ask for so little in return.
Paintings like this will be around a long time. It takes real talent . Something faux artists it seems bypass with exhibitions of political passion passing as art. buttressed by” instant art” like starving dogs.
The only quick art is, Navaho sand paintings. There erased for spiritual reasons as are the paintings. If you ever get a chance to see a real one not a tourist souvenir enameled . Do so. You won’t regret it. Of course it will be one of a kind, than gone.
Epicurus, have you considered that maybe preventing evil is YOUR job?
I think the reaper and scythe metaphor is pretty interesting as well.
“Science is not predictive, it is descriptive: of nature. It has yet to supply a single answer to a single eschatological question, and has never been pressed to do so except in the hands of those who do not understand it.”
Cue the KlimateKarbonks
It’s in the interests of the untalented to dismiss what is truly of value. How else can they charge exorbitant fees for gluing a toilet to the wall?
i know a guy that broke into Dali’s home in Cadaques..in the 70’s)..just sayin’….it was because he was so taken with the idea of the man’s art.
a german guy…he’s in the feelm(ART!)business in LA now…
i dunno rabbit…i think objet trouve have a legitimate place in art…many many more metaphors available today than a hundred years ago…all i ask is that art not be banal or intentionally stupidly offensive.
piss christ as an eg was anti affirming ….but picasso’s bicycle seat and handlebar horned toro was clever and reflective.
An eighty year old stuttering nomad, born a slave, condemned to die an infant, once a prince, once a murderer once a fugative had an encounter that explained all art, all emotion, all thought, all existence, all being.
Standing barefoot before a flaming bush he heard ultimate TRUTH.
I AM that I AM.
From Theodore Dalrymple at the New Criterion:
A few years back, the National Gallery held an exhibition of Spanish still-life paintings. One of these paintings had a physical effect on the people who sauntered in, stopping them in their tracks; some even gasped. I have never seen an image have such an impact on people. The painting, by Juan Sánchez Cotán, now hangs in the San Diego Museum of Art. It showed four fruits and vegetables, two suspended by string, forming a parabola in a gray stone window.
Even if you did not know that Sánchez Cotán was a seventeenth-century Spanish priest, you could know that the painter was religious: for this picture is a visual testimony of gratitude for the beauty of those things that sustain us. Once you have seen it, and concentrated your attention on it, you will never take the existence of the humble cabbage—or of anything else—quite so much for granted, but will see its beauty and be thankful for it. The painting is a permanent call to contemplation of the meaning of human life, and as such it arrested people who ordinarily were not, I suspect, much given to quiet contemplation.
The same holds true with the work of the great Dutch still-life painters. On the neo-atheist view, the religious connection between Catholic Spain and Protestant Holland is one of conflict, war, and massacre only: and certainly one cannot deny this history. And yet something more exists. As with Sánchez Cotán, only a deep reverence, an ability not to take existence for granted, could turn a representation of a herring on a pewter plate into an object of transcendent beauty, worthy of serious reflection.
sorry joe…the quote from Ya..weh is “i am who am”…..
trust me on this…i’m a defrocked priest….but still a perfectly respectable member of the congregation…or so they lead me to believe.
Beautiful picture. Cal mentioned the “Voice of Fire” — I went with a friend to see Voice of Fire a number of years ago. There were these cube shaped boxes in front of the painting and my fried sat down on these to study the “Voice” — a guard quickly rushed over and asked her to remove herself from the art. We were quite taken aback, since the cubes did look like modern seating devices. She apologized and I think she or I commented that we thought she was lending a bit of meaning to the pieces. A similar anecdote — there is an actual chapel in the National Gallery (beautiful) — preserved for artistic purposes, presumably, but another friend of mine had the audacity to kneel on a kneeler in this chapel to say a private prayer and he too was accosted by a guard. somehwere in these anecdotes I think there is an observation about what happens to the meaning of art when it is taken over by a bureaucracy.