Kitsch and Pseudo Art

Hey, maybe the kitsch part of this is part of what's wrong with Haugen and Haas and their ilk. Think so?

Kitsch deprives feeling of its cost, and therefore of its reality; desecration augments the cost of feeling, and so frightens us away from it. The remedy for both states of mind is suggested by the thing that they each deny, which is sacrifice. .... Sacrifice is the core of virtue, the origin of meaning and the true theme of high art.

Sacrifice can be avoided, and kitsch is the great lie that we can both avoid it and retain its comforts. Sacrifice can also be made meaningless by desecration. But, when sacrifice is present and respected, life redeems itself; it becomes an object of contemplation, something that "bears looking at", and which attracts our admiration and our love.

Sacrifice can be avoided, and kitsch is the great lie that we can both avoid it and retain its comforts. Sacrifice can also be made meaningless by desecration. But, when sacrifice is present and respected, life redeems itself; it becomes an object of contemplation, something that "bears looking at", and which attracts our admiration and our love. This connection between sacrifice and love is presented in the rituals and stories of religion. It is also the recurring theme of art.

from Beauty and its Corruptions, and another HT to Running River Latin School.

In somewhat the same line, Cavarnos in Fine Arts and Therapy:

"To properly understand Plato's teaching on fine art as a means of therapy one must be aware of one further element in his philosophy: his sharp distinction between true art and pseudo art. True art is governed by the principles of idealism, rationality, simplicity, clarity, organic unit, appropriateness, measure, proportion, harmony, rhythm. It is guided by wisdom, that is, by knowledge of man's true nature and ultimate aim in life, by knowledge of Divine and man's proper relation to it, and by a clear apprehension of the true hierarchy of values that should be the object of man's aspiration. Such art seeks to convey this wisdom....

Pseudo art, on the other hand, is not guided by wisdom, but is directed by personal or public opinion, by conjecture or imagination, and gives expression to wrong forms of character and action. Pseudo art presents what is ugly as though it were beautiful, disease as if it were health, and it praises evil under the guise of good. Thus it has the effect of suggesting, and hence inclining people to do, what is ugly instead of what is beautiful. And it results in their developing various forms of ugliness or disorder of the soul and thereby of the body. Pseudo art addresses itself not to the highest part of the psyche, but to the lower parts. It strengthens these, weakens the intellectual power, and thus leads to the disruption of the hierarchical structure of the psyche.

scoil chois claí

That's one Gaelic name for the Irish Hedge Schools of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Raised on Song and Story by Alice Gunther is a keeper post, and I was thinking about blogging it, but my daughter Clare saved me the trouble. Her post said it better than I would have. By coincidence, Liam was just telling me about a conversation he recently had with another member of an American Celtic family, and her memories were much the same as Liam's and Clare's. Different family, different experiences, but something of the same heritage.

Reading Little House in the Big Woods, I was struck anew by how much Laura Ingalls was raised on "song and story" and how rich her life was in lore in spite of the fact that they had only two books in their cabin -- the Bible and a big green book on Natural History.

Songs and stories and lore provide something irreplaceable in a family -- a unique, individual reception of the best things of the past.

I was just reading with Kieron the section in George Washington and His World where it talks about Poland and its revolutionary heroes of the 18th century. When I was reading about Pope John Paul II's youthful days in Poland, a country overrun first by Germans and then by the Soviet Union, it struck me how clear the young Karol Wojtyla and some of his young compatriots were in recognizing that culture -- song, story and in their case drama -- is a remedy for and resistance against the absolutist encroachments of modern governments.

But more proximately, "song and story" build memories and family solidarity. And they impart a rich texture to daily life. And children are naturally receptive to that form of learning from their earliest days... even the youngest members of the family partake. As Alice says, these things become part of who they are.

Gilbert --- & Sullivan, and Chesterton!

This Gilbert and Sullivan ditty has been running through my head all day thanks to my kids:

I am the very model of a modern Major-General
I've information vegetable, animal, and mineral
I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical
From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical

I'm very well acquainted, too, with matters mathematical
I understand equations, both the simple and quadratical
About binomial theorem I'm teeming with a lot o' news
With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse

With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse
With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse
With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotepotenuse

It goes on, and on!


The students at my oldest son's college just put on an in-college production of Pirates of Penzance last week. We didn't get to see it, but my ds said someone was filming... so we are hoping that we will get to see the DVD version at least. My daughter got to see a couple of the rehearsals when she was visiting there last month.

I thought maybe Chesterton would have had something to say about Gilbert and Sullivan, and indeed, I found this Introduction to a critical appreciation of the Savoy Opera pair. A quote:

And then the odd thing happened that was like a lucky coincidence in a farce or a magic gift in a fairy tale. As it stood, his satire was really much too intelligent to be intelligible. It is doubtful whether by itself it would ever have been completely popular. Something came to his aid which is much more popular than the love of satire: the profound and popular love of song. A genius in another school of art crossed his path and co-operated in his work; giving wings to his words, and sending them soaring into the sky. Perhaps no other musician except Sullivan would have done it in exactly the right way; would have been in exactly the right degree frivolous and exactly the right degree fastidious. A certain fine unreality had to hang over all the fantasies; there was nothing rowdy, there was nothing in the special sense even rousing about such song, as there is in a serious, patriotic, or revolutionary song, or even drinking song. Everything must be seen in a magic mirror, a little more delicately distorted than the mirror of Shalott; there must be no looking out directly upon passing events. The satiric figures were typical but not topical. All that precise degree of levity and distance from reality seemed to be expressed, as nothing else could express it, in the very notes of the music; almost, one might say, in the note of the laughter that followed it. And it may be that in the remote future that laughter will still be heard, when all the voices of that age are silent.