Kimball on Kramer on Modernism & Postmodernism

"Modernism" is a word with many meanings. As Hilton [Kramer] understood the term, it describes not just a particular style or period of art but an attitude towards the place of culture in the economy of life. This may be the place to say a word about abstract art. Hilton is sometimes regraded as a champion of abstract art. It would be more accurate, I believe, to say that he was a champion of good art, by which I mean art that, whatever its genre or technical prowess, was palpably true to our experience of life. An inventory of Hilton's criticism shows that he wrote, as often, and as enthusiastically, about figurative as about abstract art. Unlike Clement Greenberg, he never thought (as Greenberg wrote in 1959) that "the very best painting, the major painting, of our age is almost exclusively abstract." If modernism, as Hilton put it, remains "the only really vital tradition that the art of our time can claim as its own," it was not because of its association with abstract or other "experimental" forms of art/. It was because modernism recognized that traditional sources of spiritual nourishment had been irreversibly complicated. The "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" of the "sea of faith" that Matthew Arnold descried in "Dover Beach" was now an inextricable part of our our cultural inheritance. Preserving or reclaiming what was vital in that inheritance, and adapting it honestly to the vagaries of new experience, was the high and serious task of cultural endeavor. Hilton loathed everything that traveled under the banner of postmodernism not because it was "playful" (as was sometimes said) but because it betokened a terrible cynicism about the whole realm of culture, which is to say the realm of human engagement with the world. Postmodernism, said Philip Johnson, a doyen of the genre, installed "the giggle" into architecture. He was right. But that giggle bespoke not the laughter of joyful affirmation but the rictus of a corrosive and deflationary snideness, a version of nihilism. It is not always easy to distinguish the two. That was part of Hilton's genius: an unerring instinct for the fraudulent. 

 --Roger Kimball, "Hilton Kramer & the critical temper," in The New Criterion, May 2012

For All Saints Day

I thought this excerpt from a prayer of Our Father among the Saints, John Chrysostom before Holy Communion was especially approproate for the Feast of All Saints: ...For not with disdain do I approach Thee, O Christ God, but as one trusting in Thine ineffable goodness, and that I may not by much abstaining from Thy communion become prey of the spiritual wolf. Wherefore do I entreat Theen for Thou art the only Holy One, O Master: sanctify my soul and body, my mind and heart, my belly and inward parts, and renew me entirely. And implant Thy fear in my members, and make Thy sanctification inalienable from me, and be unto me a helper and defender, guiding my life in peace, vouchsafing me also to stand at Thy right hand with Thy saints, through the intercessions and supplications of Thy most pure Mother, of Thine Immaterial ministers and immaculate hosts, and of all the saints who from the ages have been pleasing unto Thee. Amen.

The Pontificator Returns

Fr. Aidan (Alvin) Kimel the Russian Orthodox, formerly Roman Catholic, formerly Anglican priest who was behind Pontifications back in the day is back with a new blog, Eclectic Orthodoxy.

Over at the Byzantine Forum he humbly writes, "I don't know if it will prove of interest to anyone but myself..."  Hah, very unlikely that no one would be interested.

Gain and Loss

I was reading the Wikipedia article about ultramarathoner Pat Farmer who did a Pole-to-Pole run, departing the North Pole on April 8, 2011 and arriving at the South Pole January 19, 2012. As I'm reading I say, "Oooh, he's Catholic." This being the post-Seigenthaler incident Wikipedia, there's a reference footnote. I click it. Up pops the citation:

White, Marcel (March 2007). "The scandal of Australia's anti-life Catholic politicians"...

Bah!

Distance Education & St. Paul

I have a new post over at the blog of the Dead Philosophers Society, the graduate student association at Holy Apostles College and Seminary.  The topic is Joseph Loconte's recent discussion of distance education in Standpoint magazine and the example of St. Paul.

That's Not a Catholic Church

Here's another entry for the Internet Movie Liturgical Database (descendant of the IMFDB and the IMDB). The above is the "Basilica of the Immaculate Conception" in "Red Mass", season 4, episode 4 of The West Wing.

That's definitely not a Catholic Church. Not visible in this photo is that above the sanctuary there's a balcony with seats facing down the nave.

Oh, and for the scene's most prominent music they used Vivaldi's Gloria. That piece of music lasts about half an hour and no one in their right mind would program it for Mass.

Excerpt of a Poem by Caleb Curtiss

 In the New England Review Vol. 33, No. 1 (2012):

Poem with You Drinking a Cup of Coffee 

This poem has no occasion. 

I edited that out a long time ago.
It, like a body, or like a memory,
has rebuilt itself over time:

each of its component parts
has been exchanged for newer,
more efficient ones, so that now,
when I overhear someone

saying the word “coffee,”
you are drinking a cup of coffee. 

...

The complete poem is here (except that the word "you" in the final line should be italicized.)