Posted on 04/20/2009 8:37:39 AM PDT by bs9021
Studying the Sublime
by: Bethany Stotts, April 20, 2009
Is artwork a portal to the divine or an expression of humankind’s innermost creativity? Catholic artist and teacher Hamilton Reed Armstrong explored these questions at an April 15 lecture on “Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder.”
“We have two schools in ancient Greece, starting with Plato, and Plato looks at beauty as existing as a triad with the good and the true, [as the] essence of God himself—transcendental,” he explained. In Platonic philosophy “God is beautiful, God is true...God is good and it is totally apart from the existing order.” This later became known as idealism.
“For Aristotle, on the other hand, beauty exists in the here and now and points to the elements of symmetry, harmony, and definiteness—things are what they are,” he said. Thomas Aquinas was later inspired by these Greek philosophers.
“St. Thomas Aquinas, indebted to Plato and Aristotle, placed beauty in both the supernatural and natural orders,” Armstrong wrote for an essay distributed at the event. “Accordingly, Aquinas acknowledges that ‘God is beautiful in himself...and the source of all beauty’...but also lists the attributes of beauty to be found in nature. These are: proportion, clarity, and integrity.”
According to Armstrong, these ideals provided the foundation of the “old world order” prior to the 19th and 20th centuries. He argues that modern art has gotten it “wrong,” abandoning the pursuit of real beauty in order to emphasize the individual, internal perspective of modern artists routinely attempting to break and redefine aesthetic boundaries.
Thus schools host galleries with artwork by Felipe Baeza, who depicts Catholics with crucifixes and rosaries stuck in their rectum and Angels sporting rosaries with male genitalia attached.....
(Excerpt) Read more at campusreportonline.net ...
the political left controls contemporary arts instruction on university campuses.
Modern art is empty because most modern artists have wizened, deformed souls. They do not inspire because they cannot see beyond their own sad selves.
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