Search for Beauty 2017

11/30 The part in reconsidering the spiritual in art that really struck me was the quote that said, "It was an artistic experience of art - a sense of the easy and seamless merger of religious and artistic experience, their inevitable reciprocity." In other words, you cannot have religion without art, and you cannot have art without religion. This made me think of van der leeuw's theological aesthetics section in Sacred and Profane Beauty. He states, "It is completely true that genuine, great art is, as a rule, also religious art; genuine, noble expression of the beautiful is simultaneously expression of the holy." This quote truly explains what art is and should be. It should be a creation of the most raw and spiritual experiences we have in our lives. This at least applies to great or fine art. It should evoke this holy awakening in the viewer. This is why creating art like singing a song or painting a fine painting is considered worship. There is such a ...

After reading van der Leeuw’s section on architecture, one bit stood out to me in particular. I refer to the part where he proclaims that temples no longer exist, since a temple is a home for God, and God cannot be contained in a mere building. Thus, churches and synagogues and mosques and the like tend to be only places of prayer and meeting, though it preserves something of the those of a place of holiness. This claim that the temple no longer exists calls to mind I Corinthians 3:16, in which the Apostle Paul reminds the Corinthians, “Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s spirit lives in you?” Fear not, this post is not leading into “bodybuilding as architecture” (though that might be a topic for Paul Chung). But I am curious as to how van der Leeuw might respond to that idea or take it into account, how it might fit into his overall phenomenology. The sense I get from this book is that he view religion and spirituality through a slightly more anthrop...

In the movie Pollack, Lee Krasner, Pollack’s wife, states “you're not just randomly putting   paint on the canvas, you're painting something. You can't abstract from nothing, you can only abstract from life, from nature”. Pollack then replies, “I am nature”. This dialogue provides evidence for Plato’s theory. Plato theorized that art is imitation. Abstract art seems so strange and so unrepresentative of anything at all. Abstract art actually takes “advantage of the innate properties of the brain”. “The geometric brushstrokes are a nod to the quirks of our visual neurons, which prefer straight lines”. "If cells in the brain did not respond to this kind of stimulus, then this kind of art would not exist." All in all, abstract art is imitation of the uncensored mind. Works Cited https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200907/unlocking-the-mysteries-the-artistic-mind

Is beauty beautiful because it is mysterious and alluring? If we find out more about the beautiful object does it lose significance? Why is art mysterious? Art is mysterious and perplexing because it does not provide enough insight to the artist mindset, it lacks a definitive answer, and is nonconforming. We never seen anything like it. According to Albert Einstein, “ the most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science”. What Einstein means in the quote is that real beauty comes from challenging yourself to find out more. Beauty is what first catches our eye. Learning more about it does not mean it loses any beauty. However, gaining knowledge of it may cause the object of beauty to lose psychological value. The object can still have aesthetic value since it is independent of psychological value. For example, a new relationship is mysterious, thrilling, and fun. Several years later some of the thrill about getting to know each ...

If audio and visual senses were to be removed would there still be beauty? Could one still understand the beauty in art? And if it is understood does art lose value if translated by another sense.             Let us think about it. On a sunny Summer day, I would not be able to perceive the colors, textures, or sounds of nature. However, I would still be able to feel it and smell it. I could feel the breeze, the vibrations in the air, and I can feel the sunlight thus I can appreciate the beauty of that day. “We do not want merely to see beauty. We want something else which can hardly be put into words-to be united with the beauty, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, and to become a part of it” (Lewis pp 42-43). We use our vision and hearing more than the other senses and the senses can sometimes overpower the rest. In addition, the two senses are easily tricked. Vision and audio are the most unrelia...