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As we head into the modern era on our long journey to the Armory Show of 1913, we realized we need to pull together some scattered ideas and lay a foundation. The roots of the arts of the West posts covering the ancient world and the Middle Ages raise a lot of different things that connect to older posts. The big Gothic architecture ones did give a snapshot of high-end medieval creativity as a starting point for the move into the modern. Now we're going to look back over the Band and tie together some big threads to try and answer the question what is art? Or the art of the West anyhow. Because the next few roots of the West posts are going to deal with the rise and fall of Western art after the Middle Ages and things will get slippery without sturdy legs to stand on. That isn't a coincidence.
Sydney Laurence, Mt. McKinley in Mist, 1920, oil on canvas, private collection
Most would consider this a work of art. It's a stunning view of a natural wonder that's carefully arranged to enhance the majesty. The sharp dark trees in the front give you something to relate to. This opens up a feeling of distance and makes the towering mountains even grander.
Why is Laurence - an American painter from Alaska - mostly unknown? Look at the date. According to the modern nonsense timelines, "art" wasn't about beauty or skill anymore. This is perverse inversion of what art was, but it is the official globalist "history". In order to recognize and undo the inversion, we need a solid foundation for understanding art. The liars and inverters depend on vague and slippery terms to push their lies and inversions. We're not having it.
"Art" gets continually made, but what the word art means changes. Beauty gradually morphs from the glory of holiness, to Classical proportion, to a feeling, to racist. It's easy to put a lump of modern crap next to Michelangelo's Pieta and ask what happened to art. And it isn't wrong. But it is more important to ask why things with such different cultural meanings are being thrown together under the same now-meaningless category. Because it's the latter question that makes restoring the arts of the West possible.
Michelangelo, Pieta, 1498-1499, marble, St. Peter's, Vatican City
Here's Michelangelo's Pieta...
John Chamberlain, S, 1959, metal, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC
...and here's a lump of modern crap.
What did happen to art?
We need a post that brings everything together instead of linking to pieces of different topics. The Band likes big pictures - the wider ranging the better - but that isn't practical for referencing So let's lay out what art is - or the art of the West anyhow - before thinking about how it was corrupted..
If you've ever searched for explanations of art. beauty, aesthetics, or similar terms, you may have noticed that the definitions are often rambling, contradictory, inconclusive... pretty much unhelpful. Most everyone has a sense of what an artwork is, so why is it so difficult to sum up? Part of the problem is that the term has been stretched to be impossibly broad. Postmodernists like to point out that "art" as conventionally understood is Eurocentric, or racist, or something lacking in universality. And they're right about that. Where they're wrong is thinking that getting bigger and vaguer is the answer. The Pieta and the modern lump of crap are already fundamentally different things. So how do we squeeze in an Aztec calandar? An African Fetish? The decoration on some Japanese pottery? A Mycanean death mask?
Monolith of the Stone of the Sun, between 1502-1520, Aztec calendar stone, National Museum of Anthropology and History, Mexico City
Female fetish figure, Bembe people, Democratic Republic of the Congo, early 20th century, carved wood, Honolulu Museum of Art
Tiered Food Box, 18th century Kyoto ware, stoneware with overglaze enamels, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Death-mask known as the "Mask of Agamemnon", 16th century BC, gold, from Shaft Grave V, Grave Circle A, Mycenae, National Archaeological Museum of Athens
These objects remind us of artworks because they're sculpted and painted. Technically, they are made in the same ways as Western art. But they were made for completely different purposes in times and/or places where "art" as we understand it didn't even exist as a concept. They aren't art. They may be craft, or material culture, or visual studies, or semiotics, or imagery, or any other basket term, but they are not art as understood in the West. Words have meanings, and in the drive to include all cultures over all time, the word "art" was stretched to meaninglessness.
If we are going to have a category, it has to have borders.
This should be obvious, but the fundamentally satanic nature of contemporary popular culture had made the idea of borders and distinctions "problematic". But the reality is that without borders and distinctions, there is nothing. Indeterminacy. Meaninglessness.
The sort of no-thing that is the antithesis to creation, to life, to the human. How long does a creature survive without its skin? Problematizing borders and distinctions is so retarded that it is irritating to even have to address. But it is also a testimony to how effective the enemies of human life and fulfillment have been in promoting their self-destructive agenda to an unthinking multitude.
The resistance of the wicked and the stupid to drawing borders brings in a much larger problem - a foundational problem festering at the heart of the modern West.
This is what the Band calls secular transcendence. At heart it is the idea that transcendent timeless things can be found or fully manifest in material reality. It's something we've written a lot on, but here are two posts that will make sense of it.
Gemma Augustea, early first century AD, double-layered Arabian onyx stone, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
The first post is where we introduced the notion of secular transcendence in the context of the the Marxist roots of Postmodernism. Click for the link.
The emperor posing as divine brings pretends transcendence can be found in the material.
Gustave Doré, The Triumph Of Christianity Over Paganism,1868, oil on canvas, Art Gallery of Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Glen S. Hopkinson, That We May be Redeemed, oil on canvas, St. George Temple
The second is a more recent look at secular transcendence as an inversion of the Biblical command to render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s. Click for the link.
Man-made structures posing as divine pretends transcendence can be found in the material.
But secular transcendence goes beyond the nonsensical claims of the powerful. It's a monstrous and all-pervasive inversion of our place in reality that distorts every level of our contemporary culture. Including art. Because art is a way that a culture expresses itself to itself and to posterity.
This means that art is tied up with how a culture understands its relationship to the reality that it exists in. What Heidegger called "Being-in-the-world", to use a convenient philosophical term that sums it up. That is, the ways that transcendent principles are understood to manifest within space and time. Click for a post.
John William Waterhouse, The Lady of Shalott, 1888, oil on canvas, Tate Britain
This painting reveals the Victorian's interest in Arthurian legend and folklore, but also cultural attitudes. How they expressed values through standards of natural and female beauty. And what moves them, like tragic stories of doomed love. Waterhouse is telling us more about his time than the Middle Ages.
Secular transcendence inverts the understanding of reality and distorts cultural self-perception - what it means to be-in-the-world on a fundamental level. Therefore art - as a form of cultural representation - has to be a casualty. We can't even attempt to get at a consistent definition of art until we've accounted for that inversion. And since secular transcendence is itself an evolving condition, the way it distorts and inverts keeps changing too. Until it winds up denying the very possibility of ontology - of an underlying notion of "Being" beyond our finite, subjective whims.
So how it poisons the notion of art depends on where we are on the secular transcendence downslope historically. This comparison shows the process.
Titian, The Holy Family with a Shepherd, 1510, oil on canvas, National Gallery; Waterhouse, The Lady of Shallot; Arshile Gorky, Crooked Run, 1944, oil on canvas, private collection
The first one integrates the material and the transcendent through logos. Subjective codes of beauty and order visualize the connection between material and transcendent ideals.
The second has lost the metaphysical. It still strives for signs of beauty but they are only anchored in material cultural values like folklore and sentiment. The logos is material only - the appeal of cultural identity and nature.
The last has no logos, material or otherwise. A talentless hack splattering garish colors so globalist elites can launder money while spitting on the true, the beautiful and the good.
By pretending higher principles are material human-level things, secular transcendence inverts transcendent ideals like beauty and truth. At which point, there is nothing to stop them from being co-opted and then discarded by a progression of atavastic satanic globalists. So before we can deal with the idiotic blather around the meaning of art, we need to deal with the inversions of secular trancendence that are responsible for the blather in the first place.
The Band started out as a tool for dismantling the lies of Postmodernism. Our very first post was called Deconstruction and consisted of this definition and image.
Using linguistic means to express the certainty that certainty cannot be expressed by linguistic means.
While this remains true, we quickly realized that the toxic garbage called the Postmodern was merely the logical endpoint of a much larger bucket of nonsense. We usually refer to this as Modernism, although it really starts during the Enlightenment of the 18th century and has roots going way back before the Renaissance. Names like Modern or post-Enlightenment get used for convenience but we are really dealing with something way bigger than a single period on the timeline. This turned out to be secular transcendence - the growing, metastasizing, and self-evidently false belief that finite, temporal, subjective, and fallen human minds can determine absolute, timeless, transcendental Truths.
The Goddess Reason Processed through the Streets of Paris, from Jules Lanin, La Révolution Française, 1862
This observation isn't an opinion, it is obvious logically and empirically. Transcendentals are timeless and infinite - things that literally can't exist in a temporal material existence. Claims to know absolute Truth are have all proven to be hollow subjective projections that crash and burn against reality.
Stated openly, the idea of an "atheist goddess" is pretty much the essence of retarded, but that's what secular transcendence is. That abstract, immaterial ideals - things by definition can't be temporal or subjective - are provinces of temporal, subjective human opinion. If this seems unbelievable, we suggest checking out the epistemology page at the top of the blog. There a series of in-depth posts that work through secular transcendence and its impossible claims historically and philosophically. We show our reasoning in painstaking detail because we aren't modernists. The point of a summary is to not have to reiterate argumentation in detail that is mere clicks away.
Realizing that modernity was based on fake knowledge claims led to a simple maxim:
This meant taking ontology and epistemology seriously - not as technical buzzwords in some academic bubble, but for what they actually describe.
Ontology is the nature of reality in its fullness, especially the underlying foundations. It's the essential nature of existence or ultimate reality that Enlightenment self-idolators pretended could be puzzled out in a salon or study. Epistemology is how we know - not "facts" but the systems and processes that make knowledge even possible. Together, these comprise the parameters of human understanding. What we can know and how we can know it.
Formal study of these terms invariably turns into historical survey - Plato's ontology was X, Kant's was Y - which may have value but is secondary at best. These aren't topics we can stand outside of . They're descriptors of the what can be known about the nature of human existence everywhere.
To discuss them as historical phenomena without considering the structures and limits of our own ontological and epistemological preconditions is a form of secular transcendence. The false illusion that we can look over reality with some kind of pure knowledge. That we have neutral absolute knowledge, unfiltered by contextual limitations.
We don't. All our observations are contingent and all our conclusions limited by the inherent finitude of ourselves and our surroundings.
The Band realized that recognizing the limits of what we can know - ontology - and how we can know - epistemology - are essential for avoiding the errors of secular transcendence. Because it broke the nonsense spell of Progress! This is our way of referring to that Enlightenment curse that improving technologically magically transformed our finite and subjective limits into the timeless abstract certainty of Truth. That this somehow gave us Reason! - clear certainty about "the way things really are". The real truth is that our fake timelines - where ages of "reason" supplant ages of "faith" - are epistemological regressions, where recognition of objective ontological limits gives way to increasingly shrill and deranged flights of solipsism.
Odilon Redon, Eye-Balloon (Œil-ballon), 1878, charcoal and chalk on colored paper, MOMA, New York
The transposition of modern material knowledge to higher ontological realities is literally this ridiculous. The difference is that Redon's image is at least sort of cool and harmless.
Once again, this is all worked out in the Epistemology posts linked above. There are a lot of them because it is a huge topic. We suggest looking though those if you are curious about our reasoning. It is all there.
Realizing that modern "thought" - secular transcendence - was untenable epistemologically and impossible ontologically meant coming up with a more credible framework. An alternative that fit within what we can know and how we can know it. Which led us to our ontological hierarchy - an idea shown in different graphic versions in a lot of posts. We identify three basic levels of reality that correspond to three different ways of knowing.
This would be the most recent and clearest iteration of the hierarchy. It took some time to really take form. The epistemology posts are full of different variations, but they say more or less the same thing. Logic and observation shows us ontology is stratified. Different modes of knowledge - epistemology - are required to access different levels. The levels are tied together by the concept of Logos, but each also has an epistemological limit that indicates the transition.
The beauty of this formation is not just that it corresponds to the reality of our being-in-the-world. It also recognizes that ontological understanding and epistemological mode are linked. This lets us see how secular transcendence isn't just wrong, but a fundamental category error that makes impossible claims of both how and what we can know at the same time.
Bruce Crane, Approach of Darkness, 1890, oil on canvas, private collection.
We all inhabit material reality - the physical world around us. This is known empirically - through the senses - from babies discovering their immediate surroundings to adult language and other semiotics. So empirical observation is the primary tool for material knowledge.
But our senses are limited in depth and scope and the world is entropic and ever-changing. There are obvious limits to what we can know by observing.
Empirical knowledge can be extended with another epistemological mode - logic. Patterns and conclusions beyond what we can perceive directly. Think how mathematics begins empirically - through basic quantification - but develops into an system of abstract operations that far exceeds what we can see. Logic is the primary tool for abstract knowledge - ideals and principles that aren't clear in the messy world of the senses.
But even logic has its limits. Consider the basis or foundation of reality - logic tells us that there must be a first cause because creation ex nihilo contradicts empirical observation and reason. And yet there is no way to ascertain the nature of that first cause empirically or logically. Existential meaning is outside the purview of reason or observation. This is the highest ontological level - ultimate reality. Logic tells us it's there, but has no way to access it beyond that.
Ultimate reality can only be known by faith. Some will question whether faith is epistemologically legitimate, but they would be wrong. And likely wrong about a great many things. Faith is absolutely a form of epistemology by definition - it is a mode of knowledge. It simply has different parameters that observation or reason.
The elegance of the ontological hierarchy is the coherence between each level and the appropriate epistemological mode.
Neither reason nor faith will tell you the color of a flower.
Neither observation nor faith will perform a statistical analysis.
And neither observation nor logic will give insight into first causes.
But they do work together. While faith can't be "verified" by logic or reason, its compatibility with them can be assessed. The Band wrote a pair of posts that we feel argue conclusively for the fundamental alignment between a Christian ontology, and the nature of the world that is known to us empirically and logically. Click for the first and for the second.
And Morality is faith applied to the world of observation through reason.
It works like this. Knowledge of ultimate reality is only available through faith. And to be credible, faith that is consistent with observation and reason. The material world is known through observation of physical surroundings. Morals are abstractions that combine the timeless and eternal charge of the ultimate with the variability and contingency of the material. They have both objective certainty and subjective applicability.
By bringing together the eternal and the temporal in a continuum, the ontological hierarchy avoids the pervasive idiocy of binary thinking. That is, the habit of weak minds to force either/or conditions onto complexities that exceed their tiny grasp. Binary thinking is a plague because it guarantees that the conclusions will be wrong and entire dimensions missed, no matter which fake option is chosen. The ontological hierarchy recognizes that objectivity and subjectivity, entropy and eternity are not ultimately choices - both exist, just in the appropriate place. And if you want to understand our place in reality, it is necessary to grasp the reality of their coexistent interactions.
Transcendentalism was self-indulgent nonsense - just more projected vanity and Enlightenment secular transcendence - but the almost supernatural essence that they perceived in nature was real. What they were picking up on is the link between creation as a divine ordering shining into the material world as the beauty of the natural order [click for a recent post].
Frederic Edwin Church, Above the Clouds at Sunrise, 1849, oil on canvas, private collection
Mention of the ultimate reality shining through into the material brings us to the last important aspect of the ontological hierarchy - how the layers are connected. Here is the main post if you are interested in the reasoning - we'll just recap the conclusion here. The central axis is the notion of Logos, a Greek philosophical term used to describe Jesus - God the Son, the second hypostasis of the Trinity, etc. - as well as logic and language. We call logos an axis because it manifests on each ontological level, where it is knowable by the appropriate epistemological mode. Faith in the Logos, the application of logic, and the perception of a natural order in the material world.
This was one graphic from the linked post that captured how seamlessly the hierarchy and Logos fit together. The Band dislikes blowing its own horn, but in this case, we didn't invent anything. We just noticed a coherence that was there from the beginning. But it was amazing to realize how it all connects.
Once the hierarchical interactivity of ontology and epistemology is clear, it is easy to identify why secular transcendence is such a grotesque error. It is a misappropriation and misuse of epistemological modes in order to fluff up groundless human ego by flattening out of the ontological hierarchy. It's a consequence of that unique blend of stupidity and dishonesty that makes up human vanity. Basically modes of knowledge are misrepresented to make fake claims about ontological states that they literally can't access.
Like slippery Enlightenment frauds inventing something they call "reason" which is different from what we've been referring to as logic. Enlightenment Reason! is the self-evidently false claim that the human mind can can grasp ultimate reality and the moral abstracts that depend on it. It can't, so what it does is make stuff up and call it "reason". Then when those imaginings prove empirically false, the empirical observations are denied, because Reason! can't be wrong or else it's not Reasonable!. This is secular transcendence - the false claim that transcendent things exist in material reality - and is it asinine.
Theodore de Bry, Nighttime Attack on an Indian Village with Flaming Arrows, 1563, engraving
Like pantheon-level simpleton Rousseau and his retarded "state of nature". It conforms neither with what we can observe in nature empirically nor logically infer from it. It's not just wrong, it's stupid. So stupid that either Rousseau was deliberately dishonest or someone else had to write his books.
This is Enlightenment Reason! So wrong and stupid that it's hard to believe. There is a reason why Enlightenment is the forerunner of Globalism.
There's no ontological or epistemological reflection here, but if we were to apply this secular transcendence to what we can know, it would correspond closest to an epistemology of faith. Only unlike the logically and empirically consistent Christian ontology it denies logic and empiricism. It's really just those in power making things up to suit themselves. Pure projected desire lying about being true. The subjective and material claiming to be at the top of the ontological hierarchy rather than the lowest level.
The confirmation is in the inversion.
Temple de la Sagesse Supreme, Place de la Revolutio in Blagnac, near Toulouse
Like this bit of secular transcendent Masonic trash, with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen LARPing as the tablets of the Ten Commandments. This is because it has no authority of its own beyond state power. "Rights" neither exist empirically nor logically - in the world of man the exist only as far as they can be enforced. Any claim of higher authority is an act of faith by definition. And since secular transcendent Reason! is as toothless as an old whore, it needs to masquerade as the thing it lies about replacing.
This isn't "opinion". It's ontology. Something the Enlightenment apparently never heard of.
Hmmmm... projected desire that inverts reality while falsely claiming to overrides it... sounds familiar. Where have we heard that before? Oh right, it's a satanic inversion - the basis of luciferian or satanic "thought". Click for a post on satanic inversion.
So ultimately, secular transcendence is a satanic inversion - the self-serving pretense that the subjective and material takes the place of the objective and ultimate.
Hopefully this will suffice to lay out where the Band is coming from ontologically and epistemologically, why those terms are important, and what's wrong with the secular transcendence at the heart of modern materialism. Modern culture is so empty and dishonest because it is based on nothing more than vain desire in the form of inverted faith pretending to be logic. There's a trajectory from the "pure reason" a-holes of the Enlightenment through to the Postmodern cesspool of the present based on the objectively false claim that "truth" is the product of human consciousness. Because they all peddle secular transcendence - that there is no higher reality and that the empirical is inconsequential. Abstract is therefore whatever you project it to be.
If you want to dig deeper, we invite you to the archive.
This is relevant to art because art is an expression of culture. And culture is an expression of man's relationship to reality. Change the relationship to reality and you change culture. Change culture and you change art.
Enlightenment secular transcendence destroys ontological foundations, ignores empirical reality, and warps the abstract principles bridging the two into magical thinking and projected desire. And it was during the Enlightenment that "serious" philosophical inquiry into the nature of aesthetics got going. Any bets on whether it wound up indelibly tainted by lies and nonsense?
The birth of aesthetics as a distinct branch of philosophy in the 18th century has been studied to death. It's probably a consequence of the secular transcendence of fake Reason! - since this was "explaining" everything else, why not art? Art was linked to ancien regime institutions like king and Church, so it needed a new foundation. The projectors of inversion took up the task with gusto.
If you've ever felt the compulsion to delve into this sludge, don't bother. Once you cut through the tortured convoluted language, the conclusions are inane. But it does lay the foundations for what will metastasize into modern "art".
If you do read aesthetics, one of the first thing that jumps out are the simple-minded binary categorizations. It's how we get objectively retarded criteria like the "disinterested judgments" of Shaftsbury and Kant. This is an artificial division between a judgement with an external interest - like appreciating a beautiful meadow for it's real estate value - and one without - appreciating the beauty purely for its own sake. An aesthetic judgement, according to Kant's Third Critique and others who should also know better, is the latter.
Here's the problem - there is no way to differentiate subjective response this cleanly and absolutely. Uh oh...
Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin, Brook in a Forest, 1880, oil on canvas, private collection
You might consider the pleasure of a hike. Or perhaps the pure disinterested beauty of the picture. Or of the scene. Perhaps you think of the beauty while hiking. Perhaps the beauty is what make hiking appealing. Perhaps you like to fish. Perhaps fishing is only fun in beautiful settings. Perhaps the setting reminds you of other beautiful settings. And hiking...
Perhaps you're thinking of all of it together.
Behold the unreality of secular transcendence. In subjective, human, material reality, judgments don't fall into precisely defined slots like interested and disinterested. These are abstractions that conceptualize tendencies in real human thought without actually describing any actual thought. Sort of like the difference between a mathematical absolute and the uncertainty in any actual measurement. We would place them in the middle of the ontological hierarchy - as higher order categories reasoned inductively from human behavior. But they aren't something that can account for art and/or beauty as material experiences of actual subjective humans.
To put it graphically:
But because of secular transcendence, there can't be an ontological hierarchy. Conceptual abstractions and subjective experiences have to be jammed together in the same Flatland. And the ultimate reality that objectifies abstracts can't be considered at all. Some Enlightenment thinkers are smart, but they are all epistemological geldings. They deliberately limit themselves to a fake Reason! that can't do what they claim it can, while pretending that the empirically-false faiths they are actually practicing isn't faith. Trying to situate abstract logic in material reality implodes the disinterested judgment, and with it the foundation of Enlightenment aesthetics.
Enlightenment Flatland! The whole ontological hierarchy compressed into secular transcendence.
Kant was sharp enough to realize that there is a subjective aspect to art and beauty. The Third Critique [The Critique of Judgment - his seminal work on aesthetics and a foundational text for both Modernism and Postmodernism] recognizes that without access to nouminal reality [more or less his ultimate reality - we don't want to get bogged down in summarizing Kant. Click for a post] aesthetic judgments are subjective. He tries a work-around by claiming that critical consensus - seriously - is sufficient to objectify beauty. This ultimately convinces no one.
Title page to the first edition of The Critique of Judgment - one of the most influential works on philosophical aesthetics. The book actually deals with two types of judgement - aesthetic and teleological, but teleology in the sense of nature and its processes. The relationship between the two parts is not completely clear. All judgement requires cognitive processes, but the is a phenomenal quality to nature that is less purely subjective than aesthetics.
The reflections on teleological judgement do not have the impact on art that the aesthetic ones do.
Kant's legacy is enormous.
His secular transcendence - pretending abstract absolutes have material existence - is the basis of the manifestly wrong Modernist claims of artistic autonomy and pure self-referentially [click for a post].
Josef Albers, Homage to the Square: With Rays, 1959, oil on masonite, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
This piece of crap (the "artist" not the work) started his series "Homage to the Square" as a Yale professor in 1950. The Met says: "his would become a body of more than a thousand works executed over a period of twenty-five years, including paintings, drawings, prints, and tapestries. The entire series was based on a mathematically determined format of several squares, which appear to be overlapping or nested within one another." It was his "template for exploring the subjective experience of color-the effects that adjacent colors have on one another".
Disinterested autonomy.
And Kant's acceptance of subjectivity lays the foundation for theories of artistic solipsism. From the pleasure and pain of twitching protoplasm like the Romantic Burke to the no reality, anything goes, anti-aesthetics of Postmodernism.
Kevin Larmee, Two Ladies, 2002, oil on canvas
Neo-Expressionism is a Postmodern movement that is "subjective" because the paint is rough and the subjects supposedly emotional in the energetic portrayal. We could add scribbles of a talentless hack to the subjectivity.
The art world needs these talentless hacks though as "content". It's all ugly trash, but it gives the critics something to blather about and the make the soulless poseur collectors feel better about money laundering. It's one giant scam.
And if you understand the hierarchical nature of ontology, it's all secular transcendent horseshit.
You can't talk meaningfully about transcendentals like truth, morality, and yes, beauty and art, without metaphysics because transcendence is metaphysical. No Kant, you can't pretend that abstract categories describe real thought. But they do apply to it. No Postmodernists, you can't pretend there is no truth and offer anything of value beyond your own dyscivic longings. But the application is subjective.
Sanford Gifford, A Gorge in the Mountains (Kauterskill Clove), 1862, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Most would find beauty in this painting. But the appeal will vary by viewer. And on the artist's side, how he depicts the scene, the view he chooses, even the decision to paint this particular landscape are all subjective.
It's like there's something objective in there, but it's hidden behind layers of subjectivity...
Secular transcendentalists and solipsists alike can't deal with aesthetics because they life in an existential Flatland and can't see ontological stratification. They want to deal with something that bridges different levels of the hierarchy by treating it as a single level. But art and beauty combine transcendental objectivity and material subjectivity at the same time. Aesthetics are "undefinable" in post-Enlightenment terms because post-Enlightenment terms lack the breadth and depth to discuss the effects of simultaneous ontological stratification and interaction.
So if we want to understand art and beauty in ways that align with reality, we will have to not be ontologically retarded. We need to consider the full ontological hierarchy and how it is knowable. And while we can't apprehend ultimate reality through logic or observation, we can describe its role. Because the meaning of both art and beauty are fundamentally connected to it.
The Band uses a structure derived from ancient Greek thought to explain how the transcendent and the material are both necessary to art. It was introduced in this post and worked out over a few earlier roots of the West posts and probably best summed up in one called The Terms of Creation. It brings together the transcendent and the material into a fusion of objective and subjective that the Greeks called phronesis and we call... art. One version of the graphic looks like this:
Techne is skilled craft. This is where the subjective comes in, because it's a material practice based on customs and expectations that vary by time and place.
Episteme is the opposite - it refers to higher abstract principles. These are the objective metaphysical ideals that are timeless.
Phronesis is the coming together of the two - the higher objective principles of episteme expressed in the subjective material processes of techne.
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The mistake to define art as either the making or the ideals - it is the coming together of the two. The beauty of this model is that it can differentiate art from craft or skilled labor without descending into the modernist idiocy of disinterest, autonomy or pure self-referentiality. Because phronesis does have a purpose - just a different one from the usual output of the skilled artisan.
Phronesis or art is techne whose main purpose is to communicate something about episteme in material terms. The main purpose of craft is functional despite having aesthetic qualities of workmanship. This is not an absolute abstract distinction because absolute abstract distinctions don't actually work in real human affairs. Consider a Greek vase.
Niobid Painter, Red-Figure Amphora with Musical Scene, between 460 and 450 BC (Classical), terracotta, Walters Art Museum
Greek pottery is our best source of Greek painting and the Niobid Painter is regarded highly for his calm, balanced classical arrangements. If we just consider the painting, it expresses the values of Athenian society - episteme - in material form - techne - and is therefore phronesis. But the decorated vases were practical items, produced in large numbers to hold and transport liquids. The pottery has a functional purpose - carrying liquid - and is therefore just techne and not phronesis.
Is the purpose some sort of representation or mimesis, something practical, or a mix of the two? See how the Kantian notion of a purely disinterested judgement collapses in reality?
Joseph Severn, Keats Listening to a Nightingale on Hampstead Heath, 1845, City of London Corporation
Romantic poet John Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn (1819) shows the problems with Flatland thinking. His famous closing lines are an apostrophe - the urn expresses the classical formula that the Band often references: "'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,'—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." But he doesn't differentiate between Beauty as a transcendent abstract and beauty as a material manifestation in phronesis.
So a liquid-carrying vessel faces a literally impossible claim because the poet can't make an ontological distinction.
Modernists made the argument that art cannot express transcendentals objectively like beauty because they were man-made subjective objects. Which is true. But modernists are also ontologically gelded liars and ignore the difference between the transcendental nature of ultimate reality and how it is subjectively reflected in the material.
Look what happens when we superimpose the Greek terms onto the ontological hierarchy:
We can no more grasp "Beauty" in material terms than we can God. But we can access it in an incomplete accommodation suited to our limited natures through Logos.
Absolute claims fail in material reality beacause material reality is entropic, temporal, finite, and processed subjectively. Art attempts to represent the absolute within those limited parameters, and therefore always falls short of the transcendent. That doesn't mean that art can't be beautiful. It just means that it isn't the same as ontologically-abstract Beauty.
See how it works? The Greek episteme was different from the God of Christian ultimate reality but it is structurally similar and Logos connects levels in the same way. Art contains some aspect of truth - about reality, about human nature, about something - that shines through the techne. It isn't disinterested, it's interested in communicating something that isn't obvious in everyday life. It may be beauty, or a warning, or some other higher aspect of episteme. Truth through Logos in material form.
It's the same relationship that we identified in morality. Subjective accommodation of objective transcendence that can never be fully present.
The vase - or any phronesis - doesn't have to be Beauty, or Truth, or Heidegger's Being, or the divine, or any other transcendental in its essence. It just has to try to express it. Whether or not the effort is successful is a judgment for the finished work.
Kant and the other secular transcendentalists failed because their aesthetics deny the existence of anything that isn't fully present to human subjectivity. But the very existence of human subjectivity requires ontological preconditions by necessity. Not being able to grasp them in themselves is irrelevant. And insisting we must is the luciferian formulation that we determine the nature of reality. We can discuss what we can't fully see. The episteme of the West - Christian metaphysics, ethics, and objectivity - is known by faith, with the unknowable aspects left open. Art is the expression of this through skilled craft.
Naukydes of Argos, Discophoros, Roman copy from the 2nd century AD after an early 4th century BC original, marble, Frankfurt
That was Heidegger's aesthetic theory - that "Art" was an instance of Being - ultimate reality - manifesting in the material. He, like many Germans, fixated on ancient Greek art as the ultimate expression of this. Germans from Winckelmann through Hegel were obsessed with the special powers of Greek art for reasons that are culturally subjective and without any historical or logical substance.
What the idealists miss is that there is always a subjective component to art - even the classical Greeks. Truth can't literally shine forth, which is why Neoclassicism was a short-lived as it was. The Greeks themselves saw their sculpture as techne guided by episteme, not episteme incarnate. Disinterest is impossible - all human activity is interest driven and at the very least, sculptors carved for a living. There was a financial interest - as with all art everywhere. And techne is hugely subjective - just difficult.
Secular transcendent Flatland has to incorporate the objective and the subjective together in a fake "rational" absolute. Rational meaning a Reason! that doesn't actually exist and so can't explain anything. It's how subjective techne-level choices like style are falsely ascribed metaphysical characteristics that it literally can't have. Consider two images of Jesus, one in a Neoclassical style derived from Greek antiquity, the other in a more fantastic image by the Russian master of water.
Bertel Thorvaldsen, Christus (Christus Consolator), 1838, marble, Church of Our Lady, Copenhagen; Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky, Jesus Walks on Water, 1863, oil on canvas, private collection
The techne is completely different - medium, style, color - all subjective choices at the techne level. But both are highly skilled representations that truthfully convey some impression of the Logos in material terms. That's the objective part. Which is better? More beautiful? Closer to the truth?
The answer is subjective. Material reality always is.
Eastman Johnson, The Nantucket School of Philosophy, 1887, The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore
So that's our take on the art of the West. It's the formula that we'll use as we move into the beginnings of the modern era. By combining the ontologically objective and subjective we'll be able to flay the fake objectivity of modern formalism and empty subjectivity of Postmodernism alike.
Returning to the beginning of the post, we can now see why the Pieta and the piece of modern crap seem like totally different things.
One shows techne of the highest degree, and drips logos in its subject, ordered arrangement, and beauty of the figures.
It's hard to imagine a more perfect example of phronesis.
The other is a mess of ugly junk that would embarrass a child. There is no techne, no logos, no point other than to ridicule cultural achievement.
One is art and the other isn't.
The last thing to address is the luciferian globalist blather about oppression and universality. This, like all Postmodern inversions, is a reaction to post-Enlightenment modernist lies. The whole argument that art is exclusionary or elitist is based on the false claim that "art" is universal - that it is the kind of absolute abstract category that can't exist. Art isn't universal, and has no claim - oppressive or otherwise - on those outside it's borders. Other cultures have their own image cultures and traditions, which is fine. The oppressive thing is to deny those and the art of the West for some impossible fake category that self-destructs under it's own impossibility upon scrutiny.
Scenes from the life of Gautama Buddha from a Burmese watercolour parabeik (picture book), 18th century, MS. Burm. a. 12, pages 15-18, Bodleian Library, Oxford
The Band has been discussing the art of the West. "Non-Western art" has its own terms that depend on the culture in question. A painting like this is obviously techne that follows subjective Bermese standards. It also expresses an episteme, but not one that aligns with Christian logos. It does not belong to the art of the West. If we apply our Greek terms to the art of Buddhist Burma, it would fit with an art of Burma. But ultimately it would be up to them to determine how to judge and classify this. Art isn't universal.
There is nothing wrong with appreciating images from other cultures or displaying them so people can see them. What is wrong is expecting the art of the West to transform it's ontological status to accommodate them. Or expect them to abandon their own terms for some fake universal globalist pink slime.
Must art be beautiful? It does have to be true, and though truth and beauty are related, there are truthful aspects of human reality that aren't beautiful. That's fine - so long as there is logos. Absolute Beauty as a quality of the Good and the True can't manifest clearly in a fallen world. Sometimes an artist has to consider material truths that aren't beautiful in appearance.
Luke Fildes, The Doctor, 1891, oil on canvas, Tate Gallery, London
A helpless doctor and ailing child in a hovel is not a scene of beauty. But the picture is full of logos - the limits of medicine, the frailty of life, and the artist's own loss. And it's very skillfully painted.
Art is higher truth expressed by logos in skilled craft. Sorry modernists, but if you traffic in images that are dishonest or inverted, lack logos, or are unskilled, and you aren't making art. You're an atavist, like the corrupt institutions that support your atavism.
Is art ideological? Many Marxist types criticize aesthetics for "reifying" certain ideological positions. But Marxists are self-selecting liars. The idea that there could be a subjective human perspective that isn't ideological is just another example of secular transcendent idiocy. All human activity is ideological on some level. Might as well criticize it for being hand made. The question is whether the ideological projection is sincere.
Sir Joshua Reynolds, Anne Dashwood, 1764, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Society portrait by the first president of the the English Royal Academy. The shepherdess' crook was part of the aristocratic love of Arcadian fantasies that went with their country estates. The dramatic country background too. The bit of classical sculpture shows she's cultured.
The whole thing stinks of elite self-indulgence, but it is a sincere illustration of the tastes of the time. It lets us see into a different era. And the painting is very realistic. There is logos here - it is just logos serving vanity. What's interesting is that the skill of the painting still impresses, while the aristocratic puffery seems silly. The passing of time divides the true from the emptily vain.
Some art is more aggressively ideological than others. That's what adjectives are for.
Art is privileged. Most lack the skill to master the techne and support themselves. And yes, teat-riding on government and institutional grants is a form of privilege - you are given funds to support yourself when others aren't. There is no way to escape the reality that only a few get to make art for a living. The art of the West recognizes this and simply demands that those making the livings are doing it with, well, art. Skilled making, not pandering to satanic globalist theft.
William McGregor Paxton, In the Studio, 1905, oil on canvas, private collection
Quality art takes time - the time that a skilled practitioner can't be doing something else. Someone has to pay for it. And the artist has to be skilled enough so that the people who can pay will. There are ways around that - selling prints is one - but the that just spreads the cost around.
Our current system is based on theft - governments steal from taxpayers or borrow in their name and give money to atavistic hacks to dismantle culture in the name of globalism. The point is someone is still paying.
The art of the West includes skill and insight. This is not cheap and art has always been an elite activity because of the cost. The Band does recognize that there are benefits to the public from a healthy art scene, but that isn't what we have right now. The art of the West is based on the cream rising to the top. Let skill and vision win out and we can figure out ways to let the public appreciate it. Ways that don't include boring children by making them try and copy pieces of abstract modern trash. Or waste precious resources putting said trash in public venues. A real art that reflects national culture by channeling logos with skill will never lack support.
But not everyone can be an artist. Art is not universal. The messages may aspire to be, but pretending human practices are universals is secular transcendence, and that's just satanic inversion. Art expresses universals in material form - the hows are culturally subjective, but techne is a requirement in all of them. And desire alone is not enough - techne requires skill. The definition is fixed. It is up to the participant to meet it.
John Atkinson Grimshaw, Lovers on a Moonlit Lane, late 19th century, oil on canvas, private collection
Grimshaw made a fine career as a master of moonlit skies and foggy atmospheres. His paintings are an amazing blend of striking realism and haunting fantasy. The logos is in the way he captures the feeling and beauty of his settings. They're familiar and astonishing at once.
Not everyone can do this.
Finally, not even this definition will make everyone get or appreciate art. So they shouldn't have to support it. Open to anyone doesn't mean for everyone. And there are some who are unmoved by expressions of transcendence.
That's because we're in the valley of shadow.
Frederic Edwin Church, Vision of the Cross, after 1847, oil on canvas, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York
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