From Last Week:
“Modern Art puts us back into touch with our pain and suffering…And, east of Eden, it is only through this suffering and fear that we can experience beauty, goodness, and truth.” Who’s Afraid of Modern Art? p9
Quote:
“An encounter with a painting hanging on the wall of a museum is an aesthetic reminder of our receptivity, passivity, and responsibility, activating that theological reality in which you and I stand before the face of another, whether it it our neighbor, ourselves, or God. And it brings to the fore the importance of faith. An encounter with a painting is a reminder that I live before the face of others: before the face of God, the face of my neighbor, and even before myself. It actualizes the present, where I usually refuse to live, since my troubled conscience drifts to the past in nostalgia or regret or lurches into the future in either fear or aspiration. To be addressed by a painting is to become exquisitely aware we are addressed now, at this moment, that there is nothing we have that we did no first receive. That painting that addresses me, arrests my attention, and makes a claim on me, can do so only because I have been first called into existence, because my human freedom is not…my echo, but a response.” Who’s Afraid of Modern Art? p11
Question:
Siedell seems to give a work of art a lot of “objective influence” in this quote, is this accurate? Is the message of a work of art as “neutral” as Siedell seems to assert (not directly)?
Quote:
“Cezanne was a servant to the world around him, looking and studying and ultimately reveling in the wonder and mystery of what was given to him…While his establishment colleagues in the Academy painted mythical figures, gods and goddesses, cherubs and putti, ‘elevating’ the imagination of the viewer toward God through ‘beauty,’ Cezanne dwelt in his and our creatureliness, feet firmly planted on the ground…Cezanne’s art – indeed the tradition of modern art within which he painted – reminds us we live our lives sur le motif. We are always ‘in it,’ that is, in the terrible beauty, suffering, and frightening givenness of the world, as our stomachs churn and our minds race. Heidegger said that Cezanne’s paintings declare one thing: ‘life is terrifying.’ And yet, Cezanne’s paintings also say something else. Although the world is full of pain, suffering, and doubt, if we allow ourselves to sit still…and look closely enough, we can hear something else, something real – a song. In an essay on the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, Joseph Brodsky wrote, ‘Love is essentially an attitude maintained by the infinite toward that finite. The reversal constitutes either faith or poetry.'” Who’s Afraid of Modern Art? p13-14
Question:
What is the danger of too much “creatureliness” in art or ones view of the world? It would seem the Art World has gone in the direction of too much “creatureliness” twisiting it into gain and greed.
