“Just as we discovered that truth is not a mere matter of opinion, we should understand that beauty is not simply a matter of opinion either,” says Revd. Peter Mullen in an article on Daily Reckoning. Appropriately, Mullen quotes Roger Kimball and Humpty Dumpty from Alice in Wonderland and Joseph Goebbels, and adds:
A fashion has arisen for defining a work of art as anything that anyone says is a work of art. This is just as silly as The Macpherson Report on institutional racism which irrationally defines a racist incident as any incident so described by the victim or any other person … Beauty reaches far beyond art, music and literature, for it is characteristic of the natural world – or as Christians would say creation. For beauty, like truth and like goodness, has its origin in God.”
The title fits the author. “On God” by Norman Mailer, who “was born a Jew but is not a practicing Jew; he’s interested in Catholicism but is not Catholic.” Here’s a mention from Wilkes University’s creative writing program, where Mailer is an advisory board member.
Design News-SVA has some information about a NY conference on the impact of religion on secular art education, including details on proposals.
Kamau Patton’s Throne of Third Heaven Project is “an interdisciplinary piece in which Patton shrewdly integrates anthropology and fiction in order to explore African American spiritual practices.” You can see it at Tilton Gallery on the Upper East Side. Here’s some more information:
Patton tells his story with manufactured evangelical public access television broadcasts, a pre-existent dazzling throne built by James Hampton, a janitor who secretly created an assemblage of religious art through the 20th century, which he places in his photographs, both found and fabricated texts, and the artist himself who takes on the role as the religious leader. Together these elements form a new mythology complete with a convincing set of practices and beliefs. Though, unlike real living systems that are intended to instruct, Patton’s religious universe serves only as an allegory intended to uncover how these processes accommodate and inform communication and social change.
Paul Buhle writes at the Forward on “Will Eisner’s Life, Drawn by His Own Hand.” Buhle says of Eisner, “he was to the end what he had been from childhood: his own best creation.”
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