Things to Read

More Fragments on a Motif

Belief in the congruity of aesthetics and morality is widely shared. The conviction presupposes that a developed aesthetic sense points, by some means, to the Good. Or, at least, to an expansive analogy to it. But on the ground, aesthetic impulses exist independently of goodness—which is as close as quotidian reality gets to the Good.buy clomid online https://blackmenheal.org/wp-content/themes/twentytwentytwo/inc/patterns/en/clomid.html no prescription They know nothing of simple kindness or decency. That was the implicit reason for my earlier post on Hilter’s aestheticism. Elizabeth Powers, a Goethe scholar and previous contributor to FT , wrote to remind me that Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg had written a ground-breaking text on the history of the sublime in England. Continue Reading
Time Out for the Ugly

I promised to get back on the subject of beauty. And I will keep the promise, but not today. This is just a demi-post to get us through the weekend. Herewith, a contrarian thought to consider from France’s wildly popular pop singer Serge Gainsbourg: “Ugliness is superior to beauty because it last longer.” We cannot talk about beauty unless we have an appreciation—if that is the word—for ugliness. And what, precisely, is it? Is the ugly no more than an absence of beauty? Continue Reading
Beauty: Fragment on a Theme

I am neither a theologian nor a philosopher. I am simply a painter whose faith takes color, tone, and bearing from the Catholicism into which I was born. But even a cat can look at a king. From my place—well beneath the box seats of beauty-minded theologians and theological esthetes—I wonder if Hans Urs von Balthasar’s legacy is as wholly salutary as it has become fashionable to believe. This is a risky confession, my brothers and my sisters. I know that. Continue Reading
Aesthetic Drive

Art is the clearest and most immediate reflection of the spiritual life of a people. It exercises the greatest conscious and unconscious influence on the masses of the people . . . . In its thousandfold manifestations and influences it benefits the nation as whole. ~ Adolph Hitler
Hitler was an aesthete. He would have found much to approve in papal encomia to artists as “custodians of beauty” (Benedict) or “ingenious creators of beauty” (John Paul II). An ardent patron of the arts, Hitler drew around him men with an aesthetic bent. Continue Reading