https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=AFTGd7pDwco
All right, it’s from Mikal. So what is your opinion on abstract icons? Malavich treated his black square as a sort of icon. He kept hanging it high in a room’s corner as if it were an orthodox artifact. Nowadays, the image is practically treated as an icon of art, as if art was a spiritual being to be worshiped. Recently I saw an exhibition of modern semi-abstract orthodox art. Some of them were really moving in a good way. You could say that traditional icons are an abstract art anyway. So it depends. So this is a great discussion that’s happening right now in, let’s say, in orthodoxy. So you could actually see that Malavich is black square, his supremacist icon, is something of a nasty system. There’s something about the desire to reduce the world to just patterns. And so it’s like, hey, I’m for patterns, right? I love patterns. That’s what I talk about all the time. But the patterns have to be embodied. They’re not, you don’t have access. I mean, you can have access to the pure pattern, but it always manifests itself in an embodied form. And so abstract art is, there’s something about it which is dehumanizing and something about it which is alienating to the human person. And so let’s say one of the tendencies in the modern times has been to, because some of the abstract artists, this is a complicated question, but some of the abstract artists, especially Maurice Denis who was a modern, kind of modern Catholic artist, and there was part of this kind of weird modern Catholic revival of art, he saw him and not just him, but other theorists saw icons as being the root in terms of abstraction towards modern abstract art. But I think that that’s a problematic understanding because you could say in a way that traditional icons are less fleshy than Renaissance art, less kind of passionate than Baroque art, let’s say. But to say that the Orthodox icon is more abstract is to act as if the fleshiness of Baroque art and of kind of romanticism or academic art is more real, is more embodied, and that’s not right. That embodiment doesn’t mean the fleshy passions, right? There is a kind of a, there’s a balance in the Christian body, you would say. And I think that the icons try to manifest that balance, that sober balance, you could say, of the body. Um…