A short one today, as at last a virus has decided to make me miserable, just on the cusp of spring.
But it was because of this lassitude that we watched a movie last night, one that we had recorded last time HBO gave away freebies - "Monument Men." Given that it has such a star-studded cast, with George Clooney and John Goodman and Bill Murray, among others, it was surprisingly mediocre. It was also not up to the task of its theme - about a group of men who really did go into Europe at the end of WWII to save artwork from the Nazis and the USSR. While it did present arguments for the preservation of the great artworks, most were from a cultural perspective; that is, that such art shows the very best of the Western cultural heritage and is therefore worth saving, even (as Harry Truman in the movie questioned) at the expense of some soldier's lives.
But the very nature of the vast majority of the great art saved simply begs us to question this more deeply, for they were religious works, works that labored to and succeeded in transcending their culture to affect a holy presence or feeling. The art, then, was not about saving cultural history, but about saving the footprints of God in people. Great art until the last century was almost always about the sacred. And great art of the modern era still, in my opinion, must also raise us to a higher spiritual level. Most art today does not - and most is not appreciated or even known by the general public, and in this the public is right.
What the Monument Men were saving were the vestiges of a time when the sacred was taken as a public trust. Today, such works would make the artistic set cringe. Why this is so is, too me, a difficult and complex historical problem, although the traditional Perennialists believe they already have the answer: that we are in the last stages of a vast human decline, and on the eve of destruction. This I cannot confirm or deny, but this much is true: Hollywood seems to not want to touch this subject with a ten foot pole, and Hollywood is our maven of popular culture. While the sacred continues to affect people, it must now be done in a private manner, not in public art, and with this, popular culture has lost its sacred footing. Popular art has become the art of the senses or of the psychological, where the individual might feel a superficial kinship. Still, though - as I looked at the art that these people were saving in the movie, I felt the thrill and transcendent power in them of the sacred. As the actors stood back to marvel in them, this is what they wished to express. But this could not be shared openly. It had to be put in the context of individual genius and history.
All this was set during WWII, where the greatest destructive powers ever known, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, fought to steal the sacred art of the West for anything but the sacred. Instead, they wished to own it and lock it up. And perhaps that is what we have done today - set such works in museums or cathedrals that are seen and visited as museums, not as living images that bring us, together, to the sacred.
Monuments Men; monuments are for dead things, and perhaps for our time they got the name just right. FK
But it was because of this lassitude that we watched a movie last night, one that we had recorded last time HBO gave away freebies - "Monument Men." Given that it has such a star-studded cast, with George Clooney and John Goodman and Bill Murray, among others, it was surprisingly mediocre. It was also not up to the task of its theme - about a group of men who really did go into Europe at the end of WWII to save artwork from the Nazis and the USSR. While it did present arguments for the preservation of the great artworks, most were from a cultural perspective; that is, that such art shows the very best of the Western cultural heritage and is therefore worth saving, even (as Harry Truman in the movie questioned) at the expense of some soldier's lives.
But the very nature of the vast majority of the great art saved simply begs us to question this more deeply, for they were religious works, works that labored to and succeeded in transcending their culture to affect a holy presence or feeling. The art, then, was not about saving cultural history, but about saving the footprints of God in people. Great art until the last century was almost always about the sacred. And great art of the modern era still, in my opinion, must also raise us to a higher spiritual level. Most art today does not - and most is not appreciated or even known by the general public, and in this the public is right.
What the Monument Men were saving were the vestiges of a time when the sacred was taken as a public trust. Today, such works would make the artistic set cringe. Why this is so is, too me, a difficult and complex historical problem, although the traditional Perennialists believe they already have the answer: that we are in the last stages of a vast human decline, and on the eve of destruction. This I cannot confirm or deny, but this much is true: Hollywood seems to not want to touch this subject with a ten foot pole, and Hollywood is our maven of popular culture. While the sacred continues to affect people, it must now be done in a private manner, not in public art, and with this, popular culture has lost its sacred footing. Popular art has become the art of the senses or of the psychological, where the individual might feel a superficial kinship. Still, though - as I looked at the art that these people were saving in the movie, I felt the thrill and transcendent power in them of the sacred. As the actors stood back to marvel in them, this is what they wished to express. But this could not be shared openly. It had to be put in the context of individual genius and history.
All this was set during WWII, where the greatest destructive powers ever known, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, fought to steal the sacred art of the West for anything but the sacred. Instead, they wished to own it and lock it up. And perhaps that is what we have done today - set such works in museums or cathedrals that are seen and visited as museums, not as living images that bring us, together, to the sacred.
Monuments Men; monuments are for dead things, and perhaps for our time they got the name just right. FK
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