Repost: From The Wall Street Journal: Denver’s Mustang Or ‘Devil Horse’

Full post here.  (Slideshow included).

I’ve had to think a fair amount about art lately (life could be worse), so I thought I’d post this despite the current national frenzy for the importance of (A)rt. 

The sculptor, Luis Jimenez is:

“…a widely honored artist known for melding Chicano themes and Western history in exuberant sculpture.”

and on this sculpture:

“The eyes are light-emitting diodes, which burn red like taillights. They are an homage to Mr. Jimenez’s father, who ran a neon-sign studio in El Paso, Texas... ”

That could work.  Are we getting close to kitsch art and possibly Chupacabra territory here?…do the skill and artistry transcend that?  

It seems powerful, serious and proud…a little scary even…a mythic figure.  Is it possible Jimenez was poking fun at the serious belief people have in such figures and myths…?   Maybe not.

by robvann_99

Sad fact:  “He was killed on June 13, 2006, in his studio when a large piece, a mustang intended for Denver International Airport, fell on him severing an artery in his leg.”

Also On This Site:  Joan Miro: Woman…Goya’s Colossus…Goya’s Fight With Cudgels… Goethe’s Color Theory: Artists And Thinkers…Some Quotes From Kant And A Visual Exercise

A Reaction To Jeff Koons ‘St John The Baptist’

Denis Dutton suggests art could head towards Darwin (and may offer new direction from the troubles of the modern art aimlessness and shallow depth) Review of Denis Dutton’s ‘The Art Instinct’

From Althouse: ‘The Atrocity That Is Empire State Plaza’

Full post here. (with photos)

Of course, it may not be an atrocity in your opinion (and could be quite nice), but it is presented as a top down, anaesthetic, or compromised aesthetic, piece of architecture placed there by the government in the name of the people…regardless of what came before.

It reminded me of Brasilia:  Brasilia: A Planned City

Also On This Site:  Roger Scruton In The City Journal: Cities For Living–Is Modernism Dead?

Le Corbusier’s work here, examples of Modern Architecture here.

From Instapundit: Yosi Sargent Resigns From The NEA

Full post here.

He was asked to leave, for political reasons.  But then again, he reportedly brought his politics right into the job.  

Breitbart started it here (Is a minority conservative necessarily further to the right…is libertarianism flourishing, and if so, more in California?). 

Also On This Site:  From NPR: Grants To The NEA To Stimulate The Economy?…From 2 Blowhards-We Need The Arts: A Sob Story

Poems By Robert Frost And William Carlos Williams-The Poet And The Crowd: Sunday Timewaster

Maybe I’m just confusing two human pursuits (poetry and politics), and doing justice to neither.  

I’d love to hear some comments though:

Neither Far Out Nor In Deep:

The people along the sand 
All turn and look one way. 
They turn their back on the land. 
They look at the sea all day. 

As long as it takes to pass 
A ship keeps raising its hull; 
The wetter ground like glass 
Reflects a standing gull. 

The land may vary more; 
But wherever the truth may be— 
The water comes ashore, 
And the people look at the sea. 

They cannot look out far. 
They cannot look in deep. 
But when was that ever a bar 
To any watch they keep

-Robert Frost

And now what about going to a baseball game, that fairly individualistic, uniquely American (descended from cricket), and usefully civilizing (fun) sport?:  William Carlos Williams focuses on the crowd:

“The Crowd at the Ball Game”

The crowd at the ball game
is moved uniformly

by a spirit of uselessness
which delights them —

all the exciting detail
of the chase

and the escape, the error
the flash of genius —

all to no end save beauty
the eternal -

So in detail they, the crowd,
are beautiful

for this
to be warned against

saluted and defied —
It is alive, venomous

it smiles grimly
its words cut —

The flashy female with her
mother, gets it —

The Jew gets it straight – it
is deadly, terrifying —

It is the Inquisition, the
Revolution

It is beauty itself
that lives

day by day in them
idly —

This is
the power of their faces

It is summer, it is the solstice
the crowd is

cheering, the crowd is laughing
in detail

permanently, seriously
without thought

————————————————————-

Are we witnessing a certain kind of nihilistic influence on Williams here (a progression from Schopenhauer’s will to Nietzsche’s will to power to most 20th century art?) that we don’t see in Frost?  Aside from the meter and rhyme, do you like one poem more than the other?

I’ll just put up some quotes I’ve put up twice before:

“Public opinion, I am sorry to say, will bear a great deal of nonsense. There is scarcely any absurdity so gross, whether in religion, politics, science or manners, which it will not bear.”

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. He who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or decisions possible or impossible to execute.”

-Abraham Lincoln

See Also On This Site:  Review of Denis Dutton’s ‘The Art Instinct’…From The Harvard Educational Review-A Review Of Martha Nussbaum’s ‘Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education.’   Stanley Fish At The NY Times Blog: ‘The Last Professors: The Corporate Professors And The Fate Of The Humanities’  A Few Thoughts On Allan Bloom–The Nietzsche Connection

From The NY Times Via A & L Daily: Helen Vendler On Wallace Stevens ‘The Plain Sense Of Things’

Full review here.

Vendler reviewed John Serio’s new “Selected Poems”  of Wallace Stevens.

“Stevens’s conscience made him confront the chief issues of his era: the waning of religion, the indifferent nature of the physical universe, the theories of Marxism and socialist realism, the effects of the Depression, the uncertainties of philosophical knowledge, and the possibility of a profound American culture, present and future.”

and

“Stevens’s poetry oscillates, throughout his life, between verbal ebullience and New England spareness, between the high rhetoric of England (and of religion) and the “plain sense of things” that he sometimes felt to be more American…”

See Also On This Site:  Trying to stick something against his poems: Wednesday Poem: Wallace Stevens-Anecdote of The Jar…Wednesday Poem: Wallace Stevens, The Snow Man…Friday Poem: Wallace Stevens And A Quote By David Hume

From Big Hollywood: ‘The National Endowment For The Art Of Persuasion?’

Full post here.

What is the NEA’s mission?  Our author claims he was invited to participate in a new program:

“Backed by the full weight of President Barack Obama’s call to service and the institutional weight of the NEA, the conference call was billed as an opportunity for those in the art community to inspire service in four key categories, and at the top of the list were “health care” and “energy and environment.” 

Where freedom, the state, and art meet.  Yet, shouldn’t there be some public funding of the arts?

Reason just put up a post as well.

Also On This Site: From NPR: Grants To The NEA To Stimulate The Economy?…From 2 Blowhards-We Need The Arts: A Sob Story

From 2 Blowhards-We Need The Arts: A Sob Story

Full post here.

Someone else seeking handouts for their livelihood…

Shouldn’t there be some funding of the arts by those other than private donors and patrons? 

See Also On This Site:  From NPR: Grants To The NEA To Stimulate The Economy?  Roger Scruton says keep politics out of the arts, and political judgment apart from aesthetic judgment…this includes race studies/feminist departments/gay studies etc.:  Roger Scruton In The American Spectator Via A & L Daily: Farewell To Judgment

A Reaction To Jeff Koons ‘St John The Baptist’

 

Excellent photo found here…gps1941 photostream here.

I’m not really one for the shock of pop-art, nor do I find the idea of high and low mixed entirely compelling (too easy a novelty idea itself, moralistic and confining), but when I went to the Seattle Art Museum this past weekend, I started laughing out loud.  

It was something in the familiarity of the figures and their blank stares (this is a kitsch trinket par excellence, I remember thinking Bob’s Big Boy,) and the obvious juxtaposition with deep religious and Christian themes that had me for a moment.  The craftsmanship is excellent (porcelin) yet it still maintains a vaguely repulsive air about it as many tchotchkes do (a whiff of emotional desperation that comes from clinging to such items?) which can’t be easy to achieve.

Anyways, maybe it was St. John causally pointing upstairs to “the big guy”  that made me laugh, or that smiling little pig.

Addition:  An emailer suggests that my post reeks of snobbery and too-rigid boundaries of what good art ought to be, and that’s what Koons is trying to address, mainly with the quality of his work.  Oh well.

More On Koons and his work here.

Robert Hughes wrote a review for Time entitled the “Princeling Of Kitsch.”

Also On This Site:  Denis Dutton suggests art could head towards Darwin (and may offer new direction from the troubles of the modern art aimlessness and shallow depth) Review of Denis Dutton’s ‘The Art Instinct’

Denver’s Devil Horse may be flirting with kitsch: From The Wall Street Journal: Denver’s Mustang Or ‘Devil Horse’

and I like his work:…Joan Miro: Woman

Repost-A Goya Tour Of Madrid At The NY Times

Full slide show here.

“Fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters: united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of their marvels.”

See Also On This Site:  Goya’s Fight With Cudgels and Goya’s Colossus.  A very good Goya page here.

Roger Scruton In The American Spectator Via A & L Daily: Farewell To Judgment

Full article here:

So what’s lacking in the humanities?  Roger Scruton has some keen insights:

“The works of Shakespeare contain important knowledge. But it is not scientific knowledge, nor could it ever be built into a theory. It is knowledge of the human heart”

So forget the recent, and rather desperate, attempts to make the humanities into a science  (however…it’s been done before with some success).  Scruton suggests it’s been a long slide for the humanities to arrive where they’ve arrived:

“In the days when the humanities involved knowledge of classical languages and an acquaintance with German scholarship, there was no doubt that they required real mental discipline, even if their point could reasonably be doubted. But once subjects like English were admitted to a central place in the curriculum, the question of their validity became urgent. And then, in the wake of English came the pseudo-humanities—women’s studies, gay studies and the like—which were based on the assumption that, if English is a discipline, so too are they.”

And now that we’re left with somewhat balkanized and politicized departments of English, these departments have become a target of the political right, dragging many people into a nasty fight that eats up political capital:

“And since there is no cogent justification for women’s studies that does not dwell upon the subject’s ideological purpose, the entire curriculum in the humanities began to be seen in ideological terms.”

So how to restore the vision? Scruton advises to restore (and not eschew) judgment:

” Of course, Shakespeare invites judgment, as do all writers of fiction. But it is not political judgment that is relevant. We judge Shakespeare plays in terms of their expressiveness, truth to life, profundity, and beauty.”

This is deep insight and I think the better part of Scruton’s thinking in the article comes when he resists his own political (anti multi-cultural, pro-conservative, pro-church of England conservatism) impulses.  Here are the last few lines:

“It will require a confrontation with the culture of youth, and an insistence that the real purpose of universities is not to flatter the tastes of those who arrive there, but to present them with a rite of passage into something better.”

One could argue that this is necessary though how to arrive there is in doubt.

Here’s a quote from George Santayana:

 ”The young man who has not wept is a savage, and the old man who will not laugh is a fool.”

———————————————————————-

On another note:  Despite the importance of beauty, the refinement of our experiences through poems and prose, the difficult work of cultivating”taste” for ourselves as well providing a rite of passage for our youth:  Aren’t we still attaching the humanities to something else?

We know the humanities will never be a science.  Politics is always in conflict with the arts.   Much philosophy is indifferent to the humanities at best.   In fact, Plato banned them from his republic (good overview here).

One target here may be somewhat political as well:  anti-social constructionism and anti-multiculturalism, though I am speculating.

Just some food for thought.

See Also On This Site:  Philosopher Of Art Denis Dutton of the Arts & Letters Daily says the arts and Darwin can be sucessfully synthesized: Review of Denis Dutton’s ‘The Art Instinct’

Martha Nussbaum says the university needs to be defend Socratic reason and still be open to diversity:  From The Harvard Educational Review-A Review Of Martha Nussbaum’s ‘Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education.’ 

Stanley Fish also says keep politics out of academia: From The Stanley Fish Blog: Ward Churchill Redux…

Scruton again has deep insight, but will Christian religious idealism have to bump heads with Islamic religious idealism?: From YouTube: Roger Scruton On Religious Freedom, Islam & Atheism 

Thanks to iri5