Grant me a simple premise: How one thinks about the nature of reality has an impact on how one thinks about art. Consider, for example, the contrast between medieval art and modern art. For the medievals, the world of sense perception in and of itself lacked substantial reality. It was subject to constant change and decay, and thus could not be thought of as ultimately existing in any real or eternal sense. What was real and eternal for the medieval mind were the forms and essences that did not change. The reality of the world of sense perception was thus symbolic, in the sense that it reflected or perhaps better stated instantiated the eternal order of things. What was real was not the world but rather the divine order that the world represented. The notion that sensuous experience was ultimately symbolic of intellectual experience was then reflected in art. The greatest example of this is the gothic cathedral, which — like the world itself — is a symbolic representation of the divine order, a sensuous experience of symbolic reality.<\/p>\n
Fast forward a couple of centuries to the rise of modern art, and what do we see? (Note: I am not using the term “modern art” to refer to abstract or non-representational art, but rather art produced under the influence of modern philosophy.) One of the most important changes is the creation of the artist. For the medievals the notion that art should serve as a monument to the genius of its creator would have been utterly non-sensical. The notion of human creation would have been seen as hopelessly confused at best and blasphemous at worst. However, with Descartes and his contemporaries, western thought took a subjective turn. Rather than explicating the nature of the divine order that constituted true reality, thinkers turned in to the self, seeking to justify personal knowledge (think of Descartes famous cogito ergo sum<\/i>) and understand and justify personal and political freedom. With the emergence of the individual as the locus of understanding and meaning it is natural that art should take an individualistic turn. Hence, we see the rise of the myth of the genius creator which in on form or another is the dominant way of thinking about art from the Renaissance to the end of the 19th century. Finally, with the faltering of faith in modernisms construction of the individual and his ability to know, think, and choose, we see the complication and decline of the artist into post-modern irony.<\/p>\n
If I am right about these crudely drawn connections between metaphysics and art, it seems to me that we ought to ask how — if at all — Mormonism can inform our thinking about art. Like the medievals we believe in a divine order and a creator god. Yet our god has a different metaphysical relationship to the world. Rather than standing as its ontological ground, he — like us — is an actor in a pre-existing ontological frame. Hence the divine order of the world reflects God’s creative organization of “matter unorganized,” matter which in some sense resists his organizing power. With the moderns, we have a powerful individualistic streak in our metaphysics. We believe in intelligences co-eternal with God. Indeed, one might think of the philosophical anthropology of Mormonism as a kind of modernism on steroids. What are we to make artistically and aesthetically of this collidiscope of metaphysical concepts. It seems to me that we problematize both the all-encompassing symbolic ordering of the medieval aesthetic, as well as the heroic individualism of the moderns. I am not suggesting that the One True Church must also have a One True Aesthetics. I suspect that there are lots of different ways of artistically reacting to our metaphysics. It does seem to me, however, that we ought to be awake to the possibility that we can do more than simply assimilating the aesthetics of others without thinking about their philosophical assumptions or how our own philosophy might change and challenge the ideas that we appropriate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Grant me a simple premise: How one thinks about the nature of reality has an impact on how one thinks about art.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2542","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corn"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2542","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2542"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2542\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2542"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2542"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2542"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}