Shamtastic
By Culture Issue 119
Sham is subtractive, but I, a being, am aggregate. Creation is aggregate. Human creativity is, in its deepest dynamics, aggregate and productive. Let us ornament ourselves, yes, but not toward the end of erasure. Let our adornments extend our penumbrae, our enveloping souls, into the ether that melts into heaven, stacking glory upon glory as cell and organ, skin and fur, aura and crown, radiate the Life that animates all.
Read MoreAn Aesthetic of Lack, or Notes on Camps
By Culture Issue 107
Paschal could not leave his beloved mother’s head bare. How could he? For he knew that nature gapes with lack. He knew that we’re meant to be hooked up to something else, as if our skulls were plugs. Or to put it another way: he knew that all of us are amputees from moment we’re born.
Read MoreNight Vision: Jacques Maritain and the Meaning of Art
By Essay Issue 61
THE PEOPLE WE CALL artists have always gone into a dark space. A space turned inside-out. Not a somber space, where darkness is sadness, but a mysterious one—like the nighttime darkness of the imaginative child who marches golden caravans across his bedroom ceiling. The poet Homer, archetype of artists, was famously blind—yet out from his…
Read MoreVisioning the Invisible
By Book Review Issue 77
Visioning the Invisible Recent Artists’ Biographies Cézanne: A Life by Alex Danchev (Pantheon, 2012) Caspar David Friedrich by Johannes Grave (Prestel, 2012) Leonardo and the Last Supper by Ross King (Walker & Company, 2012) T HE BIOGRAPHY is, in many ways, the most conservative of popular literary forms. It is philosophically retrograde. It presumes many…
Read MoreMirrormind: Lia Chavez and the Artistic Process
By Essay Issue 80
Neither the action nor the actors can be anticipated…. They begin as an unknown adventure in an unknown space. —Mark Rothko, 1947 OUR ENCOUNTER with reality is endlessly generative. Both Subject and Object, the contemplative and the contemplated, are replete with a beautiful, orderly complexity. The authentic artwork—glittering, effulgent with metaphysical…
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