Blue Tower Arts

“Art’s peculiar power as a form of address arises through its mediation between sublime silence and the din of everyday sight and sound.”

Homi Bhabha in “Aura and Agora: On Negotiating Rapture and Speaking Between” (From Negotiating Rapture edited by Richard Francis)

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a little text on beauty…

“There is an unsettling prodigality about the beautiful, something wanton about the way it lavishes itself upon even the most atrocious of settings, its anodyne sweetness often seeming to make the most intolerable of circumstances bearable; a village ravaged by pestilence may lie in the shadow of a magnificent mountain’s ridge; the marmorean repose of a child lately dead of meningitis might present a strikingly piquant tableau; Cambodian killing fields were often lushly flowered; Nazi commandants occasionally fell asleep to the strains of Bach, performed by ensembles of Jewish inmates; and not doubt the death camps were routinely suffused by the delicate hues of a twilit sky. Beauty seems to promise a reconciliation beyond the contradictions of the moment, one that perhaps places time’s tragedies within a broader perspective of harmony and meaning, a balance between light and darkness; beauty appears to absolve being of its violences. But in an age when, by and large, a philosophical decision has been reached?correctly?that the violence of experience must not simply be met ba an earnest and wary ethical vigilance on the part of reflective intellects, beauty?conceived as a gracious stillness artificially imposed upon the surface of the primordial ontological tumult?mocks the desire for justice; if beauty is no more than a diversion from the spectacle of world suffering, philosophy would be excruciatingly remiss not to assume the aspect of a kind of Brechtian theater, impatient with being’s charms and mystifying ministry of the beautiful. And frankly, from a strictly theoretical standpoint an infuriating imprecision (though one might prefer to say richness) i the language of beauty; the modern disenchantment with the beautiful as a concept reflects in part a sense that while beauty is something whose event can be remarked upon, and in a way that seems to convey meaning, the word “beauty” indicates nothing: neither exactly a quality, nor a property, nor a function, not even a really subjective reaction to an object or occurrence, it offers not phenomenological purchase upon aesthetic experience.

And yet nothing else impresses itself upon our attention with at once so wonderful a power and so evocative an immediacy. Beauty is there, abroad in the order of things, given again and again in a way that defies description and denial with equal impertinence.”

excerpted from The Beauty of the Infinite by David Bentley Hart

moving mountain – Zach Kleyn

“A true classic, as I should like to hear it defined, is an author who has enriched the human mind, increased its treasure, and caused it to advance a step; who has discovered some moral and not equivocal truth, or revealed some eternal passion in that heart where all seemed known and discovered; who has expressed his thought, observation, or invention, in no matter what form, only provided it be broad and great, refined and sensible, sane and beautiful in itself; who has spoken to all in his own peculiar style, a style which is found to be also that of the whole world, a style new without neologism, new and old, easily contemporary with all time.”

Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve

The Scale of Belief, Wes Hurd, 2000

“Art is the pure realization of religious feeling, capacity for faith, longing for God.”

-Gerhard Richter

“Art is one of the main barriers against a social drift into technical materialism, with which goes a shallow optimism. Where everything is seen as making life easier for all, there is no room for grief, pain and doubt…”

Francis Stuart (1902-2000)

“Why do people think artists are special? It’s just another job.”

Andy Warhol (1928-1987)

Idealism and pragmatism. They are at odds with each other, yet within any productive art-maker they must coincide and take turns. Ideally one makes art in an attempt to create something meaningful in a world that so often steers “into technical materialism”. Practically speaking though, an artist must make the practice of art-making “a job” and not something special that waits for inspirado to strike. It must be made part of the daily routine: 1) Wake up and feed the kids, 2) Go to work and pay bills, 3) come home, feed the kids and have a relationship with the significant other and also take out the trash and pick up the house, 4) make art because if I don’t do my job as an artist I will not stave off the punishing effects of a soul-sucking, media fed existence and someone may miss an opportunity to experience the “really” real.

The tensions of idealism and pragmatism can be inspirational enough. But is has to be a job before it can do the world any good.