My daughters Lydia and Becca, ages 12 and 10, are thoroughly delighted by the contemporary art collection at the Milwaukee Art Museum. They hurry to the Warhol soup cans and Lichtenstein comics they recognize from art class, a large sculpture made entirely of clear plastic buttons, and plenty of outrageously “simple” pieces they insist they…

Continued from yesterday. In some ways, “mystery” is perhaps the boldest term we chose as a subtitle for Image, the one most out of touch with our times. It is true that secular artists and writers regularly speak of navigating uncertainties and ambiguities. But in their embrace of post-Enlightenment thought, they tacitly accept various determinisms…

The following is adapted from the preface to The Operation of Grace: Further Essays on Art, Faith, and Mystery. My God, my God, thou art a direct God, may I not say a literal God, a God that wouldst be understood literally and according to the plain sense of all that thou sayest? but thou…

Impressions flood in on me: grayness; verticality; burning; ice, splitting; verdancy. The distant; the present. Wild swathes of light, of intense growth—is that a tree? a body of water? fire? Cold, crisp, thin air? I am standing in a small, warmly lit gallery. Paintings on the third and fourth days of creation surround me. Substances…

“Why,” asks the title of a recent movie review by Salon writer Andrew O’Hehir, “are Christian movies so awful?” He asks this after watching Soul Surfer, a film targeted at American evangelicals, about a one-armed surfer girl. It’s supposed to be a true story, insofar as anything can be true once it has been plucked…

We’re in the six-month slump. I remember it well from the first baby. The euphoria wanes, the hormones settle, and the delightful newborn grows into an impatient dictator, waking ten times a night to nurse, ready to move and play but unable to do so unassisted, unhappy unless making direct eye contact with another human.…

This morning, with my wife at work, my four-year-old daughter at pre-school and my infant son asleep in the next room, I watched the 1955 Danish film Ordet directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer, recently voted the #1 film religious or “spiritual” film in a poll facilitated by Image and voted on by forty critics and…

There’s a 1920s film clip, available on YouTube, of George Bernard Shaw jauntily arguing that anyone who can’t explain his cost to society should not be allowed to live in it. Said the celebrated playwright: “[I]f you’re not producing as much as you consume or perhaps a little more, then, clearly, we cannot use the…

So much of Exit Through the Gift Shop is shrouded in mystery. The documentary film’s (purported) creator, Banksy, is an elusive British graffiti artist whose identity is unknown, even though he’s the darling of the international art world who routinely sells screen prints for six figure prices. In his first foray into film, Banksy presents…

The Vienna Secession’s new exhibit of Gustav Klimt’s Beethovenfries strikes me as somewhat apt for the artist, a man whose “Self-Portrait as Genitalia” looks at first glance like a cartoonish satyr stuck to the body of a chicken—but, on closer observation, reveals goateed Klimt with a haunch of engorged testicles and the plumage of an…