A few essays I find thought-provoking.
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Finding Kitsch's Inner Beauty by Robert Fulton
A review of Beauty by Roger Scranton Excerpt: A book about beauty naturally must deal with its opposite, kitsch. This is not "just a matter of taste," which much of the world dismisses as ethically neutral. It's a moral issue, as Scruton goes some distance toward proving....We miss the point if we think that beauty in art or literature or music has finished its job when it provides pleasure. Scruton argues, reasonably, that beauty also makes ethical demands on us. Its existence challenges us to "renounce our narcissism and look with reverence on the world." |
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Apocalyptic and the Beauty of God, a sermon series by NT Wright
Excerpt: When art tries to speak of the new world, the final world, in terms only of the present world, it collapses into sentimentality; when it speaks of the present world only in terms of its shame and horror, it collapses into brutalism. The vocation of the artist is to speak of the present as beautiful in itself but as pointing beyond itself, to enable us to see both the glory that already fills the earth and the glory that shall flood it to overflowing; to speak, within that, of the shame without ignoring the promise, and to speak of the promise without forgetting the shame. |
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Gregory Wolfe on Thomas Kinkade by PC Nielson Excerpt: Perhaps, at its best, sentimentality strives for something approximating the theological virtues of hope and love. But in refusing to see the world as it is, sentimentality reduces hope to nostalgia. And in seeking to escape ambiguity and the consequences of the Fall, it denies the heart of love, which is compassion. The Senitmentality Trap by Benjamin Meyers Excerpt: Sentimentality is emotional satisfaction without emotional connection, an agreement between the artist and the audience to skip straight to the gratification, which, due to the skipping, is not so gratifying after all. Mastery or Spark by Robert Genn
Excerpt: For those of us who perform jury duty, pass judgment on the work of others, or simply give thought to what we do, mastery often picks a fight with spark. Actually, in recent art history, mastery and spark represent “The Great Divide.” It would be easy to say that those who have no mastery tend to value spark, and those who have no spark tend to value mastery. But there’s more to it than that. |
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The High Cost of Ignoring Beauty by Roger Scruton
Excerpt: The first assumption, that beauty is subjective, owes much of its appeal to the fact that it is functional in a democratic culture. By making this assumption you avoid giving offense to the one whose taste differs from yours....in Venice or Prague, in Bath, Oxford, or Lisbon, you come to see that there is all the difference in the world between aesthetic judgement treated as an expression of individual taste, and aesthetic judgement treated in the opposite way, as the expression of a community. Maybe we see beauty as subjective only because we have given the wrong place to aesthetic judgement in our lives—seeing it as a way of affirming ourselves, instead of a way of denying ourselves. Cartoon Architecture by Dennis Enguerra Excerpt: Road engineers design our streets and boulevards for maximum speed. |
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