Many are the voices suggesting there has been a failure of vision by the intellectual class, that there is currently a lack of vision to guide culture forward, out of this period of intellectual and cultural chaos.\u00a0 Towards what might one direct one\u2019s efforts in pursuit of a renewed embrace of the True and the Good?\u00a0 Neither theory, nor paradigms, nor assertions will alleviate, provide, or save us.\u00a0 We must direct our attention to Hope itself.<\/p>\n
Our greatest hope is in knowing that death isn\u2019t the end, that what awaits on the other side is love, goodness, the embrace of the Divine.\u00a0 But there is also hope for this life, right now.\u00a0 It is one that provides meaning, direction and purpose, and thus avoids chaos.\u00a0 And yet what could that meaning and direction be founded upon that makes sense?\u00a0 It is not too much to say that the past few centuries (some say since the eighteenth, others suggest the Renaissance) have been the attempt to ground hope in something other than the transcendent. All failed. Only a transcendent Ideal can be a lodestone, can provide ontological direction, can give grounding for Hope: the Unbroken Beauty.<\/p>\n
Beauty, tragically, was rejected at least two centuries ago; the story of that rejection has brought about a culture that looks chaotic.\u00a0 How bad is the chaos?\u00a0 Pick up any collection of essays by Theodore Dalrymple, an inner-city and prison psychiatrist.\u00a0 Dalrymple evidences again and again stories of horrific tragedy and vapid indifference.\u00a0 Perceptively, he seeks links between ideas and actions.\u00a0 Dalrymple repeats several themes: in cultures of choice, choice is king; Ignorance is evil and reduces the possibility of even being able to grasp alternative choices; foolish ideas promoted by the intelligentsia have tragic results.[i]<\/a> Dalrymple cites Havelock Ellis as an example of a “sexual pagan” who wrote, “I foresee the positive denial of all<\/em> positive morals, the removal of all<\/em> restrictions.\u00a0 I feel I do not know what license, as we should term it, may not belong to the perfect state of Man.”[ii]<\/a><\/p>\n What Dalrymple sees, in part, is a familiar story, a part of the Modern worldview.\u00a0 The past is rejected for the new with an implicit confidence that the new is better.\u00a0 When the tragedies of that rejection surface, few suggest retreat.\u00a0 Notably, he often writes on art and literature and finds, as one would imagine, the same trend.\u00a0 He examines the long-standing value among some artists to break taboos, to abandon restraint and standards; what Dalrymple brilliantly exposes is that when artists call for the breaking of taboos in art, it leads to the breaking of taboos by everyone.\u00a0 “A taboo exists only if it is a taboo for everyone and what is broken symbolically in art will soon enough be broken in reality.”[iii]<\/a><\/p>\n And indeed things are broken and chaotic.\u00a0 Many Christians would suggest that this brokenness has spilled over into the church.[iv]<\/a>\u00a0 From whence this tragic and chaotic outlook on life?\u00a0 Chaos is but the manifestation of a flawed understanding in regards to the source for the unbroken, for Hope, which is also the source of Truth and Beauty.\u00a0 A lack of ontological clarity leads to error; a lack of understanding that there is anything transcendent towards which one might aspire can only lead to chaos and hopelessness.\u00a0 The only way out is Unbroken Beauty; the only source of hope is Unbroken Beauty.\u00a0 Hope presumes something in which one may hope.\u00a0 What is the perfect thing to hope in: transcendent beauty and goodness.\u00a0 Plato suggested that love is the desire to possess beauty.\u00a0 Christians call this Beauty by name, Christ.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n What happens when any notion of perfection, this Ideal, the Logos, what Lewis referred to as the Tao, is corrupted, rejected, or ignored?\u00a0 That is the long story of the decline of the west and many are the voices that have cried out. Architectural historian Li Shiqiao, writing on seventeenth and eighteenth century English architecture, sets up the debate:<\/p>\n At the core of their intellectual disputes were standards of credible knowledge: whether they consisted in observable and measurable data which would lead to useful applications, or whether they were to be found in innate ideas of virtue and beauty perceptible in great literary and artistic works.[v]<\/a><\/p>\n Li goes on to suggest there are two camps, those empiricists who sought new forms that fulfilled practical function, and the humanists who desired to make a clear link between virtue and practice. And thus we have set up that dualistic bane of western culture from then till now: the classical versus the romantic, or the head versus the heart, or any other number of ways to divide.\u00a0 What they share is a denial of the transcendent.\u00a0 Eighteenth century neoclassicism sought to emulate the styles and uphold the rules of classical world, if one may put it that way, but without the appeal to a transcendent Ideal.\u00a0 Romanticism sought something more meaningful than mere quantity but equally rejected the transcendent.\u00a0 We ended up here: “In the absence of that great philosophic tradition with its insistence upon an objective, rationally explicable Good, there is left a great gaping hole in any imaginable intellectual conception of the world, and objective grounds for any and all conduct, including intellectual endeavour, are completely ruled out.”[vi]<\/a><\/p>\n Where then, may artistic, and indeed intellectual, endeavour go?\u00a0 Many are the authors in recent years who have explored the effects of such thinking on, for example, \u00a0education.\u00a0 Thomas Molnar suggests that, fuelled by John Dewey’s theories, education is now about progress but one without direction.[vii]<\/a>\u00a0 Much like Harold Bloom, Anthony Kronman, sees the problems in the Academy, this lack of direction among them, as linked to the denigration of the classics, or Great Books.\u00a0 Kronman is particularly frustrated that the research model won out over the study of humane learning.\u00a0 His solution is where we can also see the problem; he aspires to return to secular humanism, something he recommends as, apparently, there is no going back to transcendent theology.\u00a0 But he desires his humanism be more substantial than mere existentialism:<\/p>\n Secular humanism neither reaffirmed the religious dogmas of the old order nor embraced the most radical doubts of the new one.\u00a0 It refused to endorse the idea that human life has meaning only in a world created by God and directed towards His ends.\u00a0 But it also rejected the notion that we are able to create for ourselves, as individuals, whatever structures of meaning our lives require in order to have purpose and value.\u00a0 Instead, it emphasized our dependence on structures of value larger and more lasting than those that any individual can create.[viii]<\/a><\/p>\n The empirical model doesn’t answer the questions that need to be asked.\u00a0 But where are those answers?\u00a0 Not with God but with our combined human experience?\u00a0 It does not require much thought to consider how well that worked out in the twentieth century.<\/p>\n Richard Weaver has this problem squarely in his sights.\u00a0 “The issue ultimately involved is whether or not there is a source of truth higher than, and independent of, man; and the answer to the question is decisive for one’s view of the nature and destiny of humankind.”[ix]<\/a>\u00a0 Weaver finds the problem a result of the shift to nominalism, the attempt to “banish the reality which is perceived by the intellect” and only accept that perceived by the senses.[x]<\/a>\u00a0 Note that this has a direct connection to the fine arts.\u00a0 This empirical shift leads to art no longer interested in the divine nor eternally perfect but in the lower regions where the sensuous reigns supreme.\u00a0 When the objective and the Good are removed what fills their places are the subjective and the aesthetic both in life and in art.<\/p>\n Examples of this trivialization in the art world are legion beginning with nineteenth century realism and culminating with, say, Mark Rothko. While the artists in this period vary wildly in form, medium and technique, they share a few things in common: a denial of the transcendent and an obsession with the self.\u00a0 The pedigree for this can be seen with comments like those of the architect Louis Sullivan, the father of Modern architecture and a transcendentalist:<\/p>\n It is of the essence of Democracy that the individual man is free in his body and free in his soul. It is the highest form of emancipation \u2013 of liberty physical, mental and spiritual, by virtue whereof man calls the gods to judgment, while he heeds the divinity of his own soul. \u2026the individual man should stand self-centered, self-governing \u2013 an individual sovereign, an individual god.[xi]<\/a><\/p>\n Jackson Pollock is right there, claiming “… painters do not have to go to a subject matter outside of themselves”[xii]<\/a>\u00a0 Art Historian Wilhelm Worringer suggested: \u201cAesthetic enjoyment is objectified self-enjoyment.\u201d[xiii]<\/a>\u00a0 Critics Roger Fry and Clive Bell: \u201cArt is a religion.\u00a0 It is an expression of and a means to states of mind as holy as any that men are capable of experiencing.\u00a0 It is towards art that modern minds turn, not only for the most perfect expression of transcendent emotion<\/em>, [sic] but for an inspiration by which to live.\u201d[xiv]<\/a><\/p>\n Artist and critic Barnett Newman wrote in 1948:<\/p>\n I believe that here in America, some of us, free from the weight of European culture, are finding the answer, by completely denying that art has any concern with the problem of beauty and where to find it…We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you, that have been the devices of Western European painting.\u00a0 Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or ‘life,’ we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings.[xv]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n What about what we might hope are more thoughtful thinkers?\u00a0 Kronman says art matters as it distracts us from the distraction of technology so we can get in touch with our mortality.[xvi]<\/a> \u00a0Critic Donald Kuspit suggests much the same depressing theme: the humanities, and art in particular are good because they help us forget our mortality, the source of all our pain.[xvii]<\/a>\u00a0 Widely published critic Jed Perl says good art is about a work having “internal logic.”[xviii]<\/a>\u00a0 Would any thoughtful person wish to built art, or a life, on these grounds?<\/p>\n The problem is, if we look at art for the aesthetic, we can accept anything. However, if we look, for example, for an orderliness that is connected to the Divine, or wisdom, or hope, then suddenly a lot of art looks pathetic.\u00a0 Fred Ross, Chairman of the Art Renewal Center explored this in a public lecture he gave in ’01 at the MET.\u00a0 He skewered the cult of originality that can lead to whatever one wishes.\u00a0 Here is one of his suggestions for “brilliant” and “original” artwork:<\/p>\n I could imbed into the walls, ceiling and floors of a small room, pieces of neon lights, parts from broken machines and engines, and broken pieces of structural building materials like bricks, beams and cinder blocks. Then I could glue between everything millions of nails, nuts and bolts, and have clever writers and critics point out how this room (which could be installed at MOMA or the Guggenheim) is the quintessential statement of the effects of the industrial age on human psychology.[xix]<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n What has the Christian response to the art world, modern and postmodern been?\u00a0 Two responses follow, one from a rising critic\/historian and the other from an art historian who contributed to an idea that received some notice (in the Christian art world).\u00a0 Dan Siedell, author of, God in the Gallery: A Christian Embrace of Modern Art<\/span>, opens his book with a very odd understanding of St. Paul at Mars Hill:<\/p>\n [Paul] argued that what he knew and worshiped, they were already worshipping, although as “something unknown\u201d (Acts 17:23).\u00a0 Furthermore, St. Paul quotes their own poets in support of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, thereby baptizing pagan poetry in the Scriptures, enabling the Spirit to work through those very words (Acts 17:28).[xx]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n This leads him to conclude: “This book is the result of choosing the way of St. Paul: to take the cultural artifacts and to reveal and illuminate their insights into what they are only able to point to, not to name.\u00a0 But point they do, and they should be examined and celebrated as such.”[xxi]<\/a>\u00a0 What is it, exactly, that we are celebrating?\u00a0 What is it that Christians ought to celebrate and is it the same as what the artists held up for example celebrate. St. Paul advises us: “whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable–if anything is excellent or praiseworthy–think about such things.\u00a0 (Phil 4:8)<\/p>\n Let us see if there is anything noble, lovely, and praiseworthy about one of the modern artists discussed, Mark Rothko. Siedell quotes him:\u00a0 “Maybe you have noticed two characteristics in my paintings; either their surfaces are expansive and push outward in all directions, or their surfaces contract and rush inward in all directions.\u00a0 Between these two poles you can find everything I want to say.”[xxii]<\/a>\u00a0 Influenced by Nietzsche, Rothko certainly wants to say something, but what?\u00a0 This pushing and pulling is thought by some to figure the spiritual.\u00a0 Of the disturbingly named Rothko Chapel outside of Houston, and its massive black canvases, Siedell states that it demonstrates that abstraction has legitimacy.[xxiii]<\/a>\u00a0 Why? He quotes Kuspit who describes the room as, “\u2026hovering…the muscle of consciousness,” and Ryman, “His paintings deal with real light.”\u00a0 And then states: “As Christians we can name this “real light” even if, tragically, neither Rothko nor his paintings could.”[xxiv]<\/a>\u00a0 Siedell continues quoting other scholars: “The chapel paintings are a testament to Rothko’s faith in the power of art – ‘imageless’ art – to meet, create, and transform an audience one by one, to place each person in contact with a tragic idea made urgent by the contemplation of death.”[xxv]<\/a>\u00a0 Transform then to what?\u00a0 Connect them with what tragic idea?\u00a0 Christians do indeed contemplate death; we do so in order that we may live rightly.\u00a0 Rothko embraced tragic ideas and contemplated death and then engineered his own.[xxvi]<\/a><\/p>\n Siedell desires to make clear that many modern and contemporary artists were\/are struggling with trying to understand the world.\u00a0 Quite so.\u00a0 All art reflects the values and hopes of its makers.\u00a0 The question is, are they correct in their view of the world or not?\u00a0 Siedell aspires for us to, as he puts it, walk around like St. Paul and \u201clook carefully at these objects of worship.\u201d[xxvii]<\/a>\u00a0 What<\/em> is presented as worship in Rothko’s work, or any work?\u00a0 The “spiritual”?<\/p>\n Siedell continues: Both [Christians and non-Christians] have faith; both require belief.\u00a0 The difference is in the nature and kind of belief.\u00a0 [Graham] Ward argues for a new “politics of believing” as a means to develop a “softer Christian ontology.”\u00a0 “Rather than talk about what is more truthful, talk about what is more believable, what is more compelling for belief.”[xxviii]<\/a>\u00a0 And we have arrived at a denigration of God as Being, as the Logos, of an ontological hope.<\/p>\n A second example follows from this slipping, or slouching.\u00a0 It is found in something referred to as Broken Beauty. Some of the ideas for Broken Beauty are argued by art historian John Walford in an essay in which he explores an alternative to Platonic idealism’s focus on ideal form, and the Aristotelian focus on order.<\/p>\n He asks:<\/p>\n “We may ask which serves as a more fitting vessel to turn our thoughts toward the Creator? \u00a0Does ideal beauty really serve as a Christianized Neo-Platonism supposes? \u00a0Even if to some measure, it does, shouldn’t our theology of art more fittingly grow out of a gospel of redemption? \u00a0And aren’t artists better placed to represent the human condition and the world around us, then imagine that they can manipulate an idealized beauty to conjure truth?”[xxix]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n His questions raise more questions not the least of which is how artists are better placed for anything, however, more to the point: from what does our gospel of redemption grow?\u00a0 It springs from the Perfect coming down into imperfection, and making real the possibility for us imperfect beings to capture glimpses of the timeless, the perfect, and the divine.<\/p>\n In a telling comment, Walford writes, “It is hardly surprising that with the Christianization of the Roman Empire, such Greek notions of beauty, truth and goodness were recast into terms that appeared to fit well with Christian faith and practice.”[xxx]<\/a>\u00a0 This comment rather begs the reply that, “it is hardly surprising given the secularization of the west that an attempt was made to make subjectivity and romanticism fit with Christian faith and practice.”\u00a0 Not asked is if the platonic model makes more sense.[xxxi]<\/a><\/p>\n Is it a coincidence that at the same time the contemporary world is embracing shattering skepticism towards, well, everything, that some in the Church suggest we ought to play down the Ideal? \u00a0And yet, surely this is what the world hungers for most. \u00a0In an anchorless, directionless, hopeless world, is not the Rock what is most needed? \u00a0Paul writes, \u00a0“Since we consider and look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen; for the things that are visible are temporal (brief and fleeting), but the things that are invisible are deathless and everlasting.”\u00a0 (2 Cor. 4:18) \u00a0We do recognize our fallen nature and the goodness of redemption, but towards what?\u00a0 Paul, and all Christians, place hope in what is beyond the brokenness.\u00a0 We look to Hope as a source of, the source of, perfection and Beauty, and thus the source of our hope. \u00a0To weaken this Beauty is to call in question God as Being.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Perhaps the fear is that we should retreat towards some Hellenic thinking, that by focusing upon the perfect Forms, or Ideals, we may think we can reach perfection, a la Aristotle’s Magnanimous Man.[xxxii]<\/a> But then we need merely recall what our Ideal is, who our Ideal is, and that we can never reach it but also that someday, that towards which we aspire will ripen completely in us. We see our Logos, yes through a glass darkly, but we get to enjoy it, in small doses, this side of eternity.\u00a0 We revel not in our failings, our corruption, our sin; we rejoice in the tastes of perfection occasionally given but always sought after.\u00a0 To let slip on this is to court disaster.\u00a0 To give an inch on the Ideal is to reduce God as Being.\u00a0 To reduce God as Being is to replace Him with the only other option, God as becoming.\u00a0 Once God is removed as Being, reduced to becoming, the inevitable outcome is an immanent theology and self-deification.\u00a0 That is the tragic story of the West.\u00a0 We must engage our part in its redemption.<\/p>\n Notes<\/p>\n <\/p>\n [i]<\/a> One of the more disturbing trends Dalrymple notes is the inability of his patients, and indeed intellectuals, to even grasp there are alternatives.\u00a0 Bloom notices this too and with similar urgency: \u201c\u2026the crisis of liberal education is a reflection of a crisis at the peaks of learning, an incoherence and incompatibility among the first principles with which we interpret the world, an intellectual crisis of the greatest magnitude, which constitutes the crisis of our civilization.\u00a0 But perhaps it would be true to say that the crisis consists not so much in this incoherence but in our incapacity to discuss or even recognize it.\u201d\u00a0 Allan Bloom.\u00a0 The Closing of the American Mind<\/span>\u00a0 (New York: Touchstone, 1987) 346.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n [ii]<\/a> Theodore Dalrymple.\u00a0 Our Culture, What’s Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses<\/span>\u00a0 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2005) 243.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n [iii]<\/a> Dalrymple 147.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n [iv]<\/a> An example of this, besides wretched contemporary architecture, and as we will see below with some art criticism, is the thinking of something called the Emergent Church.\u00a0 See D. A. Carson, Becoming Conversant with the Emergent Church<\/span>\u00a0 (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005) for a critique of the movement.\u00a0 Although one can never be quite sure what he is saying, Rob Bell seems to be adding to the problem when he writes about the Bible: “[The statements in New Testament letters] aren’t first and foremost timeless truths.”\u00a0 See, Rob Bell, Velvet Elvis<\/span>\u00a0 (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2001) 62.\u00a0 John Sanders, one of the voices in the Open Theism movement, when asked if God is Absolute Being replied, “no.”\u00a0 Personal conversation with John Sanders, September 2009.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n [v]<\/a> Li Shiqiao.\u00a0 Power and Virtue: Architecture and Intellectual Change in England 1660-1730<\/span> \u00a0(London: Routledge, 2007)\u00a0 9.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n [vi]<\/a> Michael Aeschliman.\u00a0 The Restitution of Man: CS Lewis and the Case against Scientism<\/span>\u00a0 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983) 74.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n [vii]<\/a> Thomas Molnar.\u00a0 The Future of Education.<\/span>\u00a0 (New York: Fleet Publishing, 1961) 86.\u00a0 Of course, the problem is much worse as Molnar notes: “It is often claimed today in the name of “science” and “scientific objectivity” that education should remain neutral in regard to philosophic and moral issues.\u00a0 But if such a condition is permitted to exist, then the young men and women who do not live in a vacuum will not elaborate<\/em> their own philosophy of life but absorb<\/em> a crude and simplified concoction derived from the prevailing mood around them.\u00a0 In other words, if the schools (and the parents) do not assume this responsibility, other social forces will.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n [viii]<\/a> Anthony Kronman.\u00a0 Education’s End: Why our colleges and universities have given up on the meaning of life<\/span> \u00a0(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007)\u00a0 81.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n [ix]<\/a> Richard M. Weaver.\u00a0 Ideas Have Consequences<\/span> \u00a0(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948) 3.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n [x]<\/a> Weaver, 3.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n [xi]<\/a> Hugh Morrison.\u00a0 Early American Architecture: From the First Colonial Settlements to the National Period<\/span> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952) 256. Quoted from The Young Man in Architecture<\/em>, 1900.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n [xii]<\/a> Jackson Pollock.\u00a0 “Interview with William Wright.” Art in Theory: 1900-1990<\/span>.\u00a0 Harrison and Wood, eds. (Oxford: Blackwells, 1998)\u00a0 575.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n [xiii]<\/a>[xiii] Wilhelm Worringer.\u00a0 \u201cAbstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style.\u201d\u00a0 Blackwell Anthologies in Art History: Post-Impressionism to World War II. <\/span>\u00a0Debbie Lewer, ed.\u00a0 (Oxford: Blackwells, 2006) 79. “Modern aesthetics, which has taken the decisive step from aesthetic objectivism to aesthetic subjectivism, i.e. which no longer takes the aesthetic as the starting point of its investigations, but proceeds from the behavior of the contemplating subject, culminates in a doctrine that may be characterized by the broad general name of the theory of empathy.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n [xiv]<\/a> Gertrude Himmelfarb.\u00a0 Marriage and Morals Among the Victorians<\/span>.\u00a0 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986) 31.\u00a0 Himmelfarb is quoting from J. K. Johnstone, The Bloomsbury Group<\/span>, 1954.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n [xv]<\/a> Barnett Newman.\u00a0 \u201cThe Sublime is Now.\u201d\u00a0 Art in Theory: 1900-1990<\/span>.\u00a0 Harrison and Wood, eds. (Oxford: Blackwells, 1998) 573.\u00a0 He continues: \u201cThe impulse of modern art was this desire to destroy beauty.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n [xvi]<\/a> See the conclusion in Kronman, Educations End<\/span> (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n [xvii]<\/a> See the conclusion in Kuspit, The End of Art<\/span> (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) 2005.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n [xviii]<\/a> See Jed Perl.\u00a0 Eyewittness: Reports from an Art World in Crisis (<\/span>New York: Basic Books, 2000) 4.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n [xix]<\/a> Fred Ross.\u00a0 \u201cPulling Back the Curtain.\u201d Address to the American Society of Portrait Artists at the MET, 2001. http:\/\/www.artrenewal.org\/articles\/Philosophy\/PullingBacktheCurtain\/pullingbackthecurtain.php<\/p>\n<\/div>\n [xx]<\/a> Daniel Siedell.\u00a0 God in the Gallery: A Christian Embrace of Modern Art<\/span> (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008)\u00a0 11.\u00a0 Paul writes in Acts 17: “For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said.”\u00a0 It seems reasonable to assume that God worked through these words.\u00a0 It is odd to think that because Paul quoted them that somehow baptized this pagan poetry, as Siedell claims.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n [xxi]<\/a> Siedell 11.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n [xxii]<\/a> Siedell 47.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n [xxiii]<\/a> The building itself was designed by Philip Johnson, one of the first promoters of Modern architecture in America, and situated in front of the chapel is an abstract sculpture, Broken Obelisk, by Barnett Newman. Originally conceived as the chapel of a Catholic university the connection with the university was dropped soon after opening.\u00a0 It \u201cwas dedicated in 1971 as an intimate sanctuary available to people of every belief.\u201d\u00a0 www.rothkochapel.org<\/a>. Perhaps one struggles in referring to this structure as a chapel, but it is a religious building indeed, one dedicated to the worship of anything but a transcendent God.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n [xxiv]<\/a> Siedell 49.\u00a0 Donald Kuspit is a widely published critic and Robert Ryman is an artist and writer on art.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n [xxv]<\/a> Siedell 48.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n [xxvi]<\/a> Siedell 48.\u00a0 There is, of course, much more to be said in regards to Rothko.\u00a0 “Now, it is to bring about this uncertainty, as well as to preserve it from, or to prevent it from degenerating into, a mere oscillation of perception, which could, if I am right, be highly inimical to Rothko’s expressive purpose, that he uses the surface as he does.\u00a0 For the use of the surface, or the way it manifests itself to us, simultaneously suggests forms within the painting and imposes unity across the painting.\u00a0 It suggests light falling upon objects and light shinning through a translucent plane.\u00a0 Wherever a definitive reading begins to form itself, the assertion of surface calls this in doubt.”\u00a0 How can we value an unintelligible work of art?\u00a0 If there is no definitive reading then what is left other than aesthetic response and our own reading.\u00a0 For the Christian this is troubling.\u00a0 Quote from, Richard Wollheim, “The Work of Art as Object.”\u00a0 1970.\u00a0 Republished in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood.\u00a0 Art in Theory, 1900-1990<\/span> (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992)\u00a0 793.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n [xxvii]<\/a> Siedell 106.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n [xxviii]<\/a> Siedell 46.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n [xxix]<\/a> E. John Walford. “The Case for a Broken Beauty: An Art Historical Viewpoint.”\u00a0 The Beauty of God: Theology and the Arts.<\/span>\u00a0 Daniel J. Treier, Mark Husbands, and Roger Lundin, eds.\u00a0 (InterVarsity Press: Downers Grove, Il, 2007)\u00a0 100.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n [xxx]<\/a> Treier, Husbands, and Lundin 87.\u00a0 Sometimes Walford and I seem to be in agreement: “Given the traumatic nature of modern experience and the widespread rejection both of Christian and humanistic thought, perhaps it is a little more surprising that a Christianized version of these Greek concepts has endured to the present…” What follows in his essay is not an explicit rejection of platonic (or aristotelian) thinking but his alternative model for broken beauty.\u00a0 My argument is that an embrace of broken beauty is a rejection of ideal beauty.\u00a0 You can’t have it both ways.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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