Modern Age - Summer 2016 - 68

MODERN AGE

SUMMER 2016

First, art is an embodied act. Art is not simply the imagination
at work, although imagination would seem to be an indispensable part. Art requires bodies acting in space and time. Human
creatures are a fusion of spirit and body, and art is a result of this
unique conjunction. As an embodied act, art is performative in
its essence. There is, in other words, a perhaps infinite distance
between an artistic act and discussing, describing, or interpreting an artistic act. The story is told that the composer Schumann
was once asked to explain a difficult etude and in response he
simply played it again (the same is true of a poem, a painting, a
film, or a novel). To explain it is to reduce it and, in reducing it,
something of its essence inevitably slips away. In our enthusiasm
for explanation, we too often miss this essential meaning of art in
our attempt to analyze it, and thereby reduce it to mere propositions or intentions or readily grasped meanings. Wordsworth
was on to this temptation of our age when he lamented that "we
murder to dissect."
Second, the artist is an actor who, whether knowingly or not,
strives toward a reality that transcends the mundane world of
appearances. Of the transcendentals, art strives, most obviously,
toward the beautiful. Beauty is a proper object of love, for it is,
perhaps more clearly than anything else, rooted in grace. It is a
sheer gift that has no intrinsic usefulness if we consider the matter only in baldly pragmatic terms. Nevertheless, beauty seems
worth dying for. Or to put it in other words, a world bereft of
beauty would seem unworthy of affection or even of life itself.
But in striving toward beauty, art also traffics in the realm of the
true, for in beauty there is no falseness, for falseness is a blight
on the purity of beauty. As humans we are naturally drawn to the
beautiful and naturally recoil from the ugly, and to prefer the ugly
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Modern Age - Summer 2016

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Modern Age - Summer 2016

Contents
Modern Age - Summer 2016 - Cover1
Modern Age - Summer 2016 - Cover2
Modern Age - Summer 2016 - Contents
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