https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=8OH8wtTdJT4
I want to shift gears here a little bit and talk to you about art because obviously you are an artist and you’ve studied in content or well, let’s say postmodern art by the sounds of it. Do you have sort of a definition of art like and maybe even a criteria of what defines good art or is that is that far too ambitious? No, it’s not at all. I don’t think it is. But my my let’s say my approach is quite radical. It’s not radical. It’s very traditional actually, but it’s radical to modern ears. Right. Which is that the idea that art has value in itself is just nonsense. Art doesn’t have value in itself. You know, the ancient way of understanding like art for art sake. You mean like you would have to fight over what art is. Who cares? Like that’s not that doesn’t matter. That is the the ancient way of understanding art, like even the word art means fit fitly joined well joined together things that are well joined together. And so we need to understand that more profoundly. The idea of of poesis or technique, even the notion of gathering disparate things into unities. That’s what art is. But it’s a capacity to bring things together into into one. And so there’s an art. So the ancient way of thinking of it was that there are arts. The art is the way which you do that. So there’s an art of poetry and there’s an art of cheese making and there’s an art of of carpentry and there’s an art and the arts are are focused on purposes. Yeah. That is the purpose is what’s driving the art. So if you’re making a chair, there’s an art to making a chair so that it is a proper chair. And so once you start to see it that way, then things change radically in the way you think. Is there a distinction? Sorry, is there a distinction between arts and crafts, though? I don’t see any. Okay. It’s a craft at all because this is this is the problem which happened, which is that the notion of contemporary art, the way we understand modern art, let’s say, as just these things that we look at, for example. Yeah, I did that. You make an object for people to look at that has no purpose in the world except for you to look at. Is that all it is? So I mean, I get that contemporary art would certainly affirm that. But perhaps maybe the fine art of the early modern period or even up to sort of classical art of the classical period. So like a painting, you could say that it doesn’t have a purpose the way a chair or a building has a purpose to be used, but it does communicate something that is edifying or good for the soul, wouldn’t you say? So I would say that the highest form of art is participative art. That is really the highest art. Okay. And the highest art actually is liturgical art. That is the highest art because it is art in the service of the highest purpose. Yes. It is art which is celebrating the source of all reality. And then from that, you can have secondary arts, let’s say, and you can even have entertainment. Like I have nothing against entertainment. But the problem with the kind of modern definition of art is that we think that entertainment is at the same level as so, for example, like the highest types of dancing would be something like folk dancing actually, where you come together and you dance together and you manifest the unity and multiplicity in a group through these patterns of movement. It’s not ballet. Ballet is fine. There’s nothing wrong with ballet. But there’s something about ballet which is already once removed from its purpose as a way to manifest communion. And so it’s the same with paintings. Like a painting that is, for example, a painting that is put in a church, a painting of Christ, or a painting that is there to celebrate a family, like a portrait of a family. There are these types of visual arts that can participate in the world in a real, like, objective way. But the difficulty is that the movement, the move that would not happen, let’s say, in the Renaissance, not a little bit in the Renaissance, but started to accelerate. Let’s say into Romanticism, was ultimately going to lead to postmodern art. There was actually no way around it because you’ve divorced art from participation. And so it becomes idiosyncratic already at the outset. And so it’s going to lead to more and more idiosyncrasy as you move forward. And it’s the same with so much of, let’s say, passive art, the type of art that you just watch, whether it’s opera, whether it’s all that stuff. Like I don’t want to say that all of this is nonsense and none of this has meaning, but there’s a manner in which there’s a difference, for example, between, let’s say, a bunch of Greek warriors that listen to a retelling of the Iliad. They’re hearing their story and they’re listening to their story is a deeply participative act, you know, and because they know it and it’s sung and they will know some of it. And there are lessons to be learned. But as soon as you remove that and you move into fiction, you’re already losing a lot in terms of participation. So like Renaissance early modern. There’s nothing wrong with that. Like, yeah, I make that type of art too. Like I make icons for churches, but I all just published a graphic novel, which is a totally fictionalized work there for entertainment. But the difficulty is that we need to be able to put things in their proper hierarchy of place because or else we end up with like people who binge, like the idea of like the idea that binging Netflix would be a cultural thing. Because it’s something we all do on our own in our own little bubbles, not in a participatory or not. It certainly doesn’t provide that unit of function that something truly cultural would. And you can see it like you can see it kind of degrading as it as it moves. And so, for example, like, let’s say the ancient liturgical year was the main mode of participation of a society. And so they would have festivals and they would have banners and they would have specific costumes for different times of the year and different dances and different types of music for different types of the year where they would all kind of participate in this grand symphony. And so as it degrades, you know, you could say that it can still be better at higher levels. So going to the theater together and sitting there in a crowd and watching a movie together is degraded from that. But it’s better than sitting at home and watching nine hours of a Netflix series along with your junk food and your it’s like so. So there’s there’s levels of this, right? It’s a hierarchy basically. Yeah. So would you say that that’s the essential quality of true culture is that it is unitive and participatory? These these things that we think as being of cultural. So let’s use art as the example or dance or music and those those kinds of fixtures of culture. If they are to be part of an authentic culture, they do provide that participatory and unitive aspects to it. Whereas pop culture doesn’t do that. Pop culture, contemporary culture is more like a cafeteria where we’re each doing our own little thing. It doesn’t provide anything where we’re participating in something together, unless we all happen to be at a concert together. But even then, it’s just us as individuals kind of embracing our identity kind of grounded in the type of music we like or something like that. Is that a fair assessment? No, that’s exactly that’s exactly right. And it’s and it’s so you can but you can see it. You can really see it playing out and as it as it devolves, let’s say, and becomes more and more idiosyncratic, you can see it happening. And, you know, the ultimate the ultimate version is, you know, that the weird and the others and their perversions of that. Because people aren’t satisfied with that. People aren’t satisfied with just entertainment culture. So they try to make it more significant. Yeah, that’s why they have cosplay. And that’s why they become obsessed with Star Wars and dress up to go see movies because they’re longing for participation for true. And I get it. That’s what we want. Right. That’s what we want. But you like that they going to church and celebrating a saint that died in the Roman Coliseum and whose relics are are there and you can venerate the relics is different from, you know, putting on your Jedi outfit and going to the movies because one of them is deeply related to your. Sorry. What is deeply related to your identity, deeply related to your history. And the other one is is kind of an idiosyncratic fiction. You can’t live in. Right. You can’t be a Jedi. Like, I’m sorry. People think they are like, you just can’t you can’t be a Jedi. No, you can be a saint. You can definitely be a saint. Right. That’s a beautiful insight that we in the absence of aiming our culture towards something that is true and leads to our own sense of true fulfillment to some higher good. We take these things that are kind of more superficial and and try to give them the significance that otherwise would exist if we were living a more liturgical or cult cult as in culture based life. Right. Where we were actually worshipping something that can be a proper object of our worship. I think that’s that’s that’s a beautiful insight. Thank you.