David Zach, futurist

Infinite Illustration, take 2

Someone wrote to me telling me that one of the links on my old blog went to a website that I probably didn't want linked to my stuff. Yeah. So I went back and corrected that and tracked down the correct link.

It's to a website called ZoomQuilt2. It is an illustration that goes on forever, or for 88 some illustrations, all extending from one to the other seemlessly. It's fun. If you click on many of the named artists who collaborated on this, you'll see their own websites.

Let's hope this link lasts a bit longer.

Also apparently my old blog is still up in my archives so for those who want to explore the history of the future, here's the link.

Claymation of Verdi's Traviata

This is just delightful. Almost as good as stained glass windows . . .

When seeing such playful creativity, one should have more confidence about our future along with some simple reasons for wanting to defend it. Imagine what Verdi would have said if he could see what has been done with his music. Again, try to look at things from a different time perspective than your own. We grow use to things and thereby we are no longer surprised or impressed. This is flawed reasoning brought on more by being tired than by being reasonable. Children (or at least children from the pre-electronic game age) don't quite get bored with marvelous things - adults do and so we give children the sort of toys that allow them to grow bored just like us - and then we call it progress.

We should be startled by the sun, not by the eclipse; we should wonder
less at the earthquake, and wonder more at the earth.
G.K. Chesterton

Verdi - Traviata - Choeur Bohémiens
Uploaded by Quarouble

Found on a link from The Anchoress

Stained glass beauty

There are few things more beautiful than stained glass windows and here's a website of stained glass photography. When I'm at Church, my attention constantly drifts to the simple elegance of these windows. Without words, they speak volumes, not only about their subjects, but also about those who crafted them, the congregations who paid for them and all those who gazed at them down through the years. When I'm in a modern church with abstract glass windows, I don't quite know where and when I am. Before these old windows, I am more certain of my time and more certain of that time that came before me.

Popular novels in our age might serve the same function as stained-glass windows did in the Middle Ages.
Andrew Greeley

Within the temporal arrogance of current times many see these windows as quaint, more often outdated, religiously controlled art. But imagine seeing them for the first time, in their era of origin. There were no novels, no newspapers, no tv, few books and to quote the title of William Manchester's fine book, it was A World Lit Only by Fire. Dangers were everywhere, and life was incredibly uncertain. These windows were seen by people who were humble not just because of awe before God, there was also a humility borne of gratitude for being delivered out of the times of unpredictable savagery that ravaged Europe from the fall of Rome. The stained light from these windows was for many the first light seen coming out from that stained darkness.

Camille Paglia on the Future of Art

Paglia explains in Arion, a publication from Boston University, how a renaissance in American art can only happen through religion. She said that and she's an atheist. She's either bi-sexual or a lesbian (that's vague), a libertarian, pro-choice, a Democrat and she knows more words than you and me combined. She's also one of the sharpest cultural critics alive.

In Art and Religion in America, (PDF found here.) she explains the arts have been at the center of the cultural war between the left and right. As is her style, she criticizes them both for their failures - the right has mostly not engaged in art and the left has obsessed about it and often reduced it to self-absorption. I strongly agree with her that now is certainly not a high point for American art and that the real genius of America is in her technology and business arena. Seems a bit of a waste not to spread the genius out a bit more.

She writes: Great art can be made out of love for religion as well as rebellion against it. But a totally secularized society with contempt for religion sinks into materialism and self-absorption and gradually goes slack, without leaving an artistic legacy.

The article is rather long-winded and she seemingly explains the entire history of America and art. Closer to the end she gets into the rise of modernity and slipping of religious influence on art, except perhaps using religion as something for artists to attack to show they were free from it. (To do just the opposite is also a form of imitation. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg) It was interesting to see how many former Catholics played a part in the attacks on religion through art, from Serrano's Piss Christ to Maplethorpe's bizarre sadomasochistic photography.

She concludes by saying that conservatives need to get over such things as their fear of nudity in art (Europe could teach us a few things about that, as could a tour of the Vatican) and the left needs to start recognizing the fuller costs of secularism and reducing most things down to economics along with our tremendous spiritual poverty that leaves us facing a soulless future.

G. K. Chesterton makes a point about all of this sort of thing, quoting the artsy hero Oscar Wilde who said that we don't appreciate sunsets because we can't pay for them. GKC countered that we can pay for sunsets; we can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde. One suspects that Wilde, who converted to Catholicism on his deathbed, would have eventually agreed.

Utterly useless. Oh wait, it's art. OK, it's fun.

Theo Jansen is an artist and he's at least clever - which is more than I can say for far too many artists.

I really don't object to this sort of thing, really, I don't. What I also don't do is ascribe to it some sort of godlike quality that can't be criticized or for that matter, dismissed. I can look at his self-mobile art and think it's fun, and it's clever and even that it's artistic. What I have a struggle with is calling it art. Um, Art - capital A - r - t. That sort of thing should raise our vision and our spirits. I'm impressed that it can tell us fellow mere mortals that we can do really fun and inspiring things. I don't think it tells us that we are more than that - it can raise our spirits, but probably not our spirit.

Add on: If this sort of thing inspired people to be more creative and inventive, then I'm all for it. I probably picked the wrong example of an artist to tie in with my comments. I really do like what he's done here. It is fun, it is imaginative and if it's inspirational then let's have even more of it. Do we call it art? Maybe, but I tend not to think so. I think we can easily call this sort of person artistic - but moreover I'd refer to him as inventive and more like an industrial designer with an artistic aesthetic. It's when art and science come together that the sparks really fly and some catch fire. A lot of self-important artists just create smoke, no fire and they use the smoke to obscure. When there's smoke there should be fire.