There is some science to my point about emotions and the intellect and why I believe the reason we need to renew the mind is because that is where we lie about our emotions, the emotions themselves don’t lie.
Part 1
And Part 2
Joe
The tl;dr—Understanding art is hard. Understanding the Bible is hard. Understanding life, making choices in the real world is hard. That’s the point of both art and the Bible. Stop trying to find the easy answers. That’s not the point of the Bible and it is not the point of art. Knowing scripture and what it says should lead us to be able to look at each other and say to each other “Yeah, life is hard, that was a hard decision to make. Let me help you. Let me be there for you. Not because I know the answer, but because I struggle with my own decisions and I need people, too.”
The interesting thing about light.
You cannot see light. You can see things reflecting light. You can see the light source. But the light itself, you cannot see.
Then both the light and the object reflecting light affect each other. How an object looks, the color of the object, will be affected by what wave...
Culture is not the enemy. Culture does not need “redeeming”. Culture does not need “taking back”. Culture is not evil. Culture is what we make it. If you take an antagonistic approach and attack culture, you can’t blame culture for being defensive or offensive. If you avoid culture, you can’t blame culture for what it becomes. If you take an approach to create a counter culture, you can’t blame the “other” culture for what it becomes.
The best way to affect culture is to participate.
In attempts to understand complex issues, it is not uncommon nor unreasonable to sometimes reduce issues as part of a larger process to work something out. This can help clarify some things, figure out where pivotal problems may exist, root causes, etc. While it can often be an important part of Minimalism, it can just as easily be found utilized for other, less thoughtful purposes.
Sometimes we settle into a reductionist conclusion from the outset because, well, we may think it obvious or easier. I think this is where we are with much of the discourse of art, especially in the current environment surrounding discussions of government support of art, particularly in the form of the National Endowment for the Arts. Critics of Modern art (whatever one may mean by that, and it seems no two people are actually referring to the same thing) are again emboldened to...
In the arts, particularly in the arts and faith discussions, even more particularly in the Christian faith and arts discussions, we love to use certain words. The words are quite meaningful, but their constant use actually starts to dilute meaning. Words like Faith, Beauty, Relationship, Art, Love, Gospel, Excellence—we use them all the time, but their applications have become so diverse I truly doubt any two people talking about one of those words will be talking about exactly the same thing.
Take Excellence for example. What do we really mean by Excellence? I know it might seem self-evident, but it really isn’t. The easy assumption, such as in the arts, is excellence in technique. But what technique? Was Mark Twain an excellent grammarian? Is B. B. King an excellent guitar player? Is his technique on par with, say, Andre Segovia?
Okay, maybe we don’t really mean technique in general...
If you don’t care who sees, hears, or likes the art you create, much less if anyone gives you money for it, you aren’t trying to make a living as an artist.
That doesn’t mean you aren’t an artist, but when you decide that you want to make a living with your art, things change. Sometimes drastically, sometime subtly, sometimes so subtle you may never even notice until rent comes due or groceries need to be shopped.
At some point you realize that what you are doing is work as much as it may not even feel like it. Art becomes your job, even as you may love doing it. Or you may hate doing it for pay, but you can’t imagine doing anything else.
Sometimes we may be trying to create something that has widespread, popular demand. Sometimes we may be aware that we may be working for a more limited audience. Sometimes we are just experimenting. There is value in all that.
This is not to say you...
I want to make sure my message is clear about art and art making. Just make art. Just do it. I don’t care what you think of what you make, I don’t care what other people think of what you make. There is no such thing as failure, only education. Which is to say you can only learn by doing when it comes to making things.
There are lots of reasons to do so, which is what I try to explore and examine. All the prognostication and contemplation about art I partake in is only about understanding art metaphysically and how that may or may not affect our individual and communal physicality and spirituality.
I do think that stuff is important because inevitably the questions about art’s importance, relevance, utility, and sustainability come up, particularly in the spheres I operate in as a professional artist. At that level of discourse you can’t sit back on justifying, explaining, or...
As a working artist I am, just as many of you are, often contemplating how much I should make, why should people pay me, why society should value and pay for art… or not. I understand the frustration when my fellow artists lash out at the people who ask us to do something for free or for the promise of “exposure!”. Do people really not value me or my work when this is asked of me?
As most things in life, it is never as simple as that. There are other things going on, some I’ve written about or discussed before. Some I have been thinking about after reading other people’s thoughts. Things like how difficult it is to quantify art (Is Art History a “soft” subject?) or since art is more emotion centric it isn’t as valuable as more “intellectual” pursuits (Art isn’t free. Can we stop pretending it is?“. You know, that whole rational/irrational, reason/emotion dichotomy so much of our modern...
We have met the enemy and he is us.
The Internet Age has brought about one aspect of humanity that we may have never realized we all share—the ability to be outraged at the drop of a hat. This is the real problem at work here. What the Internet helps is not only being collectively outraged at essentially nothing significant, we can also express this outrage instantly, without even giving it a second thought.
That is a real problem, too, not giving these things a second thought, much less not much of a first thought.
Christians love to cry “foul”. No matter how many churches (as in the buildings), both active and inactive, litter a landscape[*], we somehow find comfort in behaving like we are a repressed minority, battling for our very endangered existence.
We find slight in the slightest things—such as...
From here to there in one easy step.
Mean: “In statistics, the mean is the mathematical average of a set of numbers. The average is calculated by adding up two or more scores and dividing the total by the number of scores.”
“The mean is just one type of measure of central tendency.”
I’ve long had this theory—I’m sure I’m not the first—that culture and creativity has these moments where equilibrium sets in and our art, music, choreography, all our creative endeavors, including less obvious things like interior design, architecture, and even fashion design, settles in to this groove. There is a gravitational force of average that becomes nigh on impossible from which to break free. Sometimes it is at a local level, or it might be a genre or discipline specific level. Sometimes it is because we may be honing a particular voice, we aren’t yet finished what we want to say in our chosen...