The author of Brideshead Revisited was a nasty man. So much so that “a woman once remarked to Waugh that, though he claimed to be a Christian, he was one of the most unpleasant men she had ever met. Did he not, she asked, sense any contradiction here? ‘Not at all,’ Waugh is supposed to […]
Evelyn Waugh’s Christian self-control Read More »
From Igor Stravinky’s Autobiography: “For me, as a creative musician, composition is a daily function that I feel compelled to discharge. I compose because I am made for that and cannot do otherwise. Just as any organ atrophies unless kept in a state of constant activity, so the faculty of composition becomes enfeebled and dulled
How great artists become great — Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky Read More »
Chris Vaughan created a self-guided PowerPoint slide-show version of my short essay on modern and postmodern art: “Post-postmodern Art”. Also here is a PDF version of the text with the relevant, illustrative images. Related: My more-fully developed talk at ESEADE University, Buenos Aires, Argentina:
“Post-postmodern Art”: slide show and reprint Read More »
Blast from the past: At the Representational Art Conference in Ventura, California, I participated in a panel focused on the aesthetic theories of Odd Nerdrum and Roger Scruton. My remarks are from the 42:30- to 58-minute mark or so. Also on the panel are editor Peter Trippi, painters Jan-Ove Tuv, Alan Lawson, and Julio Reyes,
TRAC 2014 art panel on Nerdrum’s Kitsch and Scruton’s Beauty Read More »
When composer Igor Stravinksy met Pablo Picasso in Italy in 1917, Picasso drew Stravinsky and gave him the portrait as a gift. But when Stravinksy tried to cross the border with it, he was suspected of attempting to smuggle secret plans out of the country. As Stravinsky tells it in his autobiography: “I shall never
Interpreting Picasso — amusing anecdote from Stravinksy Read More »
In her Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in 20th-Century Art, Wendy Steiner, a professor of literature at Penn, argues that “In modernism, the perennial rewards of aesthetic experience — pleasure, insight, empathy — were largely withheld, and its generous aim, beauty, was abandoned” (p. xv). Steiner notes that “the main symbol of such
Wendy Steiner on Kant and what Modern Art Abandoned Read More »
Professor Kant first delivered a series of lectures on education in 1776/77. His views were influenced by and are often congruent with those of Johann Georg Sulzer, the leading (and scary) education theorist of the time in the German states. (Here’s an earlier post on Sulzer.) A re-reading of Kant’s On Education highlighted for me
Kant on imagination in education Read More »
… is by Sting. From his 1999 Brand New Day album. If you like, listen to the song while reading the lyrics below (YouTube version here). Then further below are the lyrics with my thematic-dramatic-arc notes added. “Fill Her Up” Mobil stationWhere I standThis old gas pumpIn my hand. The boss don’t like meA face
The best religious conservative song ever [reprise] Read More »