[edward knippers, artist of incarnation]

Check out this awesome artwork and commentary by Edward Knippers over at the Theology Forum blog.

(HT: Scriptorium Daily)

[notes toward a theory of art]

Metaphysics Chart:
(in other words, a chart representing what is)

Creation // God
||
The World // Man
||
Nature // Culture

[wolf // dog]

[forest // park]

[landscape // landscaping, landscape painting]

Where “// ” represents an antithesis,  “||” represents a subdivision, and what is in brackets “[]” is a concrete example. In sentence form:
Whatever is not God is Creation; whatever in Creation is not Man is The World; whatever in The World is not Culture is Nature. God is distinguished from Creation by His aseity and its contingency; Man is distinguished from The World by the imago Dei; Culture is distinguished from Nature by Man’s creative action upon the stuff of Nature.

I believe this consideration of what exists undermines “Art” as an ontological category. To divide artifacts of Culture into “Art” and “Non-art” is a spurious distinction. The artist and the engineer are both culture-makers, and airplanes may have beauty just as sculptures may have function. The Aesthetic is rather a hermeneutical-ethical aspect, a set of lenses through which we perceive an object to determine a specific meaning and value. Every piece of culture, from a rubbish bin to the Mona Lisa, has an aesthetic meaning and value, but some objects have more aesthetic value than others. Aesthetic meaning and value are based on the criteria of harmony (relation of parts to whole and form to content) and surprise (or nuance). For these criteria I am indebted to Herman Dooyeweerd’s Theory of Modal Aspects in his New Critique of Theoretical Thought, and I am generally indebted to Henry Van Til for his Calvinistic Concept of Culture.

[the idol]

The Idol 08.18.07
“When you grow silent, I start to fall…” -Jon McLaughlin

The dirty earthen statue stands,
Precarious on his pedestal
Of cold cash and empty music.
The mob, the crowd of manwoman worshipers,
Forms without faces falling to the gritty ground
Of the open-air temple,
Contort and cry their glossolalia.
Their sonic force of praise
Upholds the tottering icon.
But in this Areopagus are other idols found.
And other sonorous statues seduce the fickle mob.

Their worship wanes to quiet
As they heed the others’ call,
And when the crowd goes silent
The idol begins to fall.

A man steps forward from the shadows,
Immaculate in his black suit.
He cleans the clay shards scattered
Across the temple floor.
He gathers up the money from
The fallen statue’s pedestal
And loads it up into a large black bag.
He wanders in amidst the mob
And taps one on the shoulder,
Offering him the bag with his right hand.
The formless man accepts the bag
And changes in an instant
To another earthen statue
Adding noise into the fray.
The suited man rebuilds the altar
Of cash and hollow music, setting
This quaking man of clay on top
To be adored again.