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Edited on Wed Apr-15-09 11:00 PM by saltpoint
to compose the B-minor Mass whether or not it was in the service of Christianity, more specifically, institutional Christianity, and also that its language is universal rather than "Christian" or "doctrinal."
Michelangelo, we understand, had to navigate his artistic impulse through the confines of Church higher-ups. While money did change hands, his art IMO vastly transcends what the Church asked of it.
The reader of history and the lover of the arts cannot study either field without making some genuine attempt to acknowledge the roles of Judeo-Christianity or any of the other axial-age faiths, plus pagan cultures and traditions, and so forth. The universal insists on itself and imposes a decidedly universal standard upon its members. Which is its unique privilege.
There are distinctive and rather large female genitalia in the works of "secular" artist Georgia O'Keeffe, which is not to say that her subject is separate from the goddess religions of long ago. If a given O'Keeffe painting is vividly vaginal (god I loved typing that), the possibility that it is a reverent act for the creational human does not subtract from its power to inspire, nor is it dimmed if she sold it to a museum back east. What is traceable to antiquity may also occur unbidden in the modern mind.
"Worship these," Dysart tells his audience in EQUUS, "and more will appear."
Joseph's "coat of many colors" is a remnant garment from the pre-Judeo/Christian goddess cults. Jehovah is a bachelor god. But there is that coat, and look again now under the desert moon of Rousseau's SLEEPING GIPSY. The human figure on the night sand wears the same coat. We see those colors in the dead of night by the mercy of that ancient moon, or is it the moon this minute outside our windows in 2009?
Some studies suggest that scientists and artists share expansive brain capacity. But which young woman or old man in an anonymous rice field in Southeast Asia has the capacity of a da Vinci or an Einstein or a Mozart? That peasant woman may be uneducated but wildly intelligent and capable, even if none of us knows her name.
Someone without a degree in Art History from Yale drew a horse and other animals on the wall of a cave in France over 10,000 years ago. A group of modern adolescents claimed the cave as their personal space, a grownup-proof haven to gather in before eventually reporting the findings. That horse was not a ceremonial animal, nor a war horse, nor a circus horse with elaborate colors, nor a city coach horse, nor a farmer's field horse nor a horse that hauled crops to nearby towns. It was a secret horse, drawn on a cave wall, beyond any specific purpose, beyond observation itself -- just for the love of its image from the man or woman who drew it there.
It's as difficult for a rich man to get into heaven as it is for a tenured Art Historian to march through the woods and slither into a cave to behold something that eclipses his entire career.
The argument can be made that there is no god. IMO the stronger argument is that there is something visceral and sustaining that cross-knits creative acts. "Proof" is not something anyone has at the ready, even if Bach is marvelous, even if da Vinci was acutely brilliant, and so forth. Bach's talent, in the service of any other cultural context, would still be talent. O'Keeffe also painted a barn or two that will knock your socks off.
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