Art

"Art hath an enemy called Ignorance."

"Art...has always been a polite form of terrorism."

"Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth."

"As all Natures thousand changes But one changeless God proclaim; So in Arts wide kingdom ranges One sole meaning still the same: This is Truth, eternal Reason, Which from Beauty takes its dress, And serene through time and season Stands for aye in loveliness."

"It is the glory and good of Art, That Art remains the one way possible Of speaking truth, to mouths like mine at least."

"Art can only flourish in total freedom. In an artists’ assembly I recently stated: The artist must, as an artist, be an anarchist and as a member of society, as a citizen dependent on the bourgeoisie for the necessities of life, a socialist. The state can give the artist no other advice than that he freely and independently follow his innermost impulses, and that is the best the state can do to encourage art: that it gives the artist complete freedom of his artistic action. Its concern, and its justified concern, is that the artist be able to live, that he be able to exist as an economic entity."

"Thus Orpheus, arguably the most prevalent symbol for Art in the Western world, shows us both the power and limitations of the whole venture. Yes, it might feel like you’re conquering death when you play that song, paint that picture, compose that poem, or type that story. Yes, you might experience the sensation of escaping the everyday world, perhaps even your own mortality, upon hearing, watching, and reading the best artistic examples. But the feeling is illusory, Orpheus tells us. The feeling is, after all, just a feeling."

"While our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all."

"Roger Lundin surveys the history of Christian engagement with the arts, noting that the Reformation and Romantic movements, which encouraged inwardness and freedom as opposed to the new science of impersonal laws of nature, scuttled medieval contemplation, which had enabled art as mimesis of an enchanted cosmos. Modernists and fundamentalists in the twentieth century ironically shared a common aversion to nature and culture, positing a Manichean divide between the material and spiritual worlds. In the mid-twentieth century, evangelicals began to call for reengagement with culture, but with the exception of Dutch Calvinists were handicapped by shallow theology and limited cultural understanding. Lundin suggests that black church music has been evangelicalism’s greatest contribution to the arts, and highlights contemporary evangelical thinkers such as Wolterstorff, Begbie, and Vanhoozer, who in their different ways see art as useful action."

"Art isnt just technique, in any culture…its also Content. Its understanding not just How, but also What, to express."

"Art that matters creates a context of meaning which draws on the most basic experiences of being in a world that makes, albeit transient, sense. Such experiences can be of the kind which children have that determine their subsequent responses to the world, which we have when gripped by a natural scene of great beauty, or when we experience the world in a way which makes new sense by falling in love. The difficulty of modern art is in this respect a reflection of the extent to which such experiences have become lost, neglected, repressed, or commodified in many areas of modern society, and so need new ways of being articulated and expressed.... [But] If what is aimed for in both art and philosophy is a wholesale critical response to the totalizing nature of the commodified world, the danger is that they will mirror what they oppose."

"Pop art is the inedible raised to the unspeakable."