On Seeing Art.

You may well wonder at the vehemence in my last post; I did a bit myself. It boils down to this:

Art matters to me.

Art matters not in an abstract, "Gee, isn't that pretty" way, but in a visceral, longing so strong I can taste it way.

Great art is a glimpse of God. Or, as a wise priest I know once put it, there is no secular art.

And limiting art seems very much to me like limiting God. There is no chance for surprise, no chance for the unexpected, no chance to push the boundaries of what we know as "acceptable."

I was also angered by the intellectual dishonesty in the little "test" Libertas set out. If the blogger does in fact know anything about art, they have to know you cannot assess a work of art based on pictures taken of it.

Pictures of things can lie. What was true for Henry VIII, when Hans Holbein's portrait of Anne of Cleves was perhaps a shade too flattering, and is true today, to the dismay of many a client of OK Cupid, is also true of photographs of paintings. And just as there are people who are more attractive in real life than one would guess based on their photographs, so too with paintings.

I have seen the Mona Lisa. Even subtracting the fact that it is behind a thick wall of glass (for security purposes), it is small, it is dark, it is not terribly appealing. Photographs are much more attractive, although to tell you the truth, I've never been all that smitten with her anyway.

I have also seen, not "Convergence," the Pollock used by Libertas in his little "test," but an equally unphotogenic Pollock, "Lavender Mist." From a distance, it is an unremarkable mass of brown and pale lavender. Close up, the eye detects the swirls and patterns in the paint, and , almost involuntarily, tries to make sense of them. One is -- or can be, if one lets oneself -- be drawn into the play of light and texture on the canvas, light and texture which get obliterated by the camera's lens. It is not my favorite painting -- not even my favorite abstract painting -- but I would not hesitate to call it art.

Note, this does not arise from a preference for Pollock over da Vinci, or new over old. Around the corner from the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, is my favorite da Vinci, "The Virgin and Child with St. Anne", which is breathtaking. And my favorite paintings of all are by the Dutch master Vermeer. (By the way, it should be noted that you cannot asssess an Old Master by its photograph any more than you can an Abstract Expressionist: Vermeer's paintings often go from being merely pretty in print to being transcendent in real life.)

And what is true in painting can also be true in poetry, in prose, in music.

God is limitless. Art should be limitless, too, bound only by the restrictions placed upon it by our frail human forms.