Mimi mentioned the confusion over Mormon theology back here, and so it seemed as good a reason as any to look into it a little more. So here’s the Nicene Creed as we say it every week, as Christians have said since the 4th century to express what we believe. As this author notes:

The Nicene Creed is the most widely accepted and used brief statements of the Christian Faith. In liturgical churches, it is said every Sunday as part of the Liturgy. It is Common Ground to East Orthodox, Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, Calvinists, and many other Christian groups. Many groups that do not have a tradition of using it in their services nevertheless are committed to the doctrines it teaches.

I’ve marked up the Creed as a Mormon would have to in order to fit their beliefs (as near as I can figure out — see my remarks at the end), and I’ve got footnotes in case you think I’m making this up. I tried to use Mormon sources whenever possible. There are some other notes of interest that follow the footnotes, and also a challenge that I have for any Mormons who might read this. ***** We believe in one God, the main God of a number of Gods(1), who acquired His place as Supreme Being over a long period of time by living a righteous life(2), the Father Almighty, Maker one of the Makers (3) of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible (and Who is married, by the way) (4); And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, one of the spirit children of God (Lucifer being another), (5) the Only-begotten, Begotten of the Father before all worlds, Light of Light, Very God of Very God, Begotten, not made; of one essence with the Father (6) by whom all things were made: Who won God’s favor by agreeing with God’s plan of salvation when Lucifer disagreed,(7) and who was called Jehovah in the Old Testament(8). Who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven, and was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, of a physical relationship between God the Father and Mary, (9) and was made man, and was married at the wedding in Cana (10); And was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered and was buried; And the third day He rose again, according to the Scriptures; And ascended into heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of the Father in the celestial kingdom, the highest of the three kingdoms of heaven;(11) And He and Joseph Smith (12) shall come again with glory to judge the quick and the dead, Whose kingdom shall have no end. And we believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, and Giver of Life, Who proceedeth from the Father, Who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified, Who spake by the Prophets; And we believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. in the Mormon Church, which restores Christianity to the form it had in the time of the apostles.(13) We acknowledge one Baptism – for both living and dead – (14) for the remission of sins as long as that baptism is conducted by the Mormon Church (15) We look for the Resurrection of the dead which will be presided over by Joseph Smith,(16) And the Life of the world to come. And Joseph Smith. (17) Amen. **** Footnotes: 1 - “In the beginning, the head of the Gods called a council of the Gods; and they came together and concocted a plan to create the world and people in it.” Joseph Smith, History of the Church, vol. 6, pg 308. 2 - “God himself was one as we are now, and is an exalted man … He was once a man like us; yea, that God himself, the Father of us all, dwelt on an earth.” Joseph Smith, History of the Church, vol 6, pg. 305. 3 - “The head God called together the Gods and sat in grand council to bring forth the world.” Joseph Smith, Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, pg. 348. 4 - “In the heaven where our spirits were born, there are many Gods, each of whom has his own wife or wives, which were given to him … while yet in his mortal state.” Orson Pratt, The Seer, page 37. 5 - “The appointment of Jesus to be the Savior of the world was contested by one of the other sons of God. he was called Lucifer — this spirit brother of Jesus desperately tried to become the Savior of mankind.” Milton R. Hunter, The Gospel Through the Ages, pg. 15. 6 - “Unlike Trinitarians, who believe that the Father and Son are of one essence, Latter-day Saints believe that the members of the Godhead are separate personages united in purpose, power, and glory. This is a key theological difference between us and the Trinitarians.” R. Bruce Walsh, Link HERE 7 - “God put forth His plan of salvation for the world, and Satan proposed his own plan. Jesus accepted the Father’s plan and offered to implement it as the Savior. The Father chose Jesus.” What Do Mormons Believe? Link HERE 8 - “Mormon doctrine teaches that Christ is the Jehovah of the Old Testament. … modern revelation through prophets of the Mormon Church and through other scripture such as the Book of Mormon and Pearl of Great Price make it clear that Jesus Christ is the God referred to in the Old Testament.” LDS Patriot, Link HERE 9 - “Christ was begotten by an Immortal Father in the same way that mortal men are begotten by mortal fathers … Christ was born into the world as the literal Son of this Holy Being; he was born in the same personal, real and literal sense that any mortal son is born to a mortal father.” Bruce R. McConkie, Mormon Doctrine, pp. 547, 742. 10 - “Jesus was the bridegroom at the marriage of Cana– we say it was Jesus Christ who was married, to be brought into relation whereby he could see his seed.” Orson Hyde, Journal of Discourses, vol 2, pg. 82. 11 - “The Celestial Kingdom is the highest and most glorious of the degrees of glory and is symbolically represented by the sun. It is this kingdom where God Himself reigns.” Mormon Wiki. Link HERE. 12 - “No man or woman in this dispensation will ever enter into the celestial kingdom of God without the consent of Joseph Smith.” Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses, vol. 7, pg. 289 Also, “If we get our salvation, we shall have to pass by [Joseph Smith]; if we enter our glory, it will be through the authority he has received. We cnnot get around him.” President George Q. Cannon, 1988 Melchizedek Priesthood Study Guide, pg. 142. 13 - (When Joseph Smith asked God in a vision which church he should join:) “I was answered that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong; and the personage who addressed me said that all their creeds were an abomination in his sight and those professors were all corrupt.” Joseph Smith, Pearl of Great Price 2:19. Also, until 1988 or so, the Endowment Ceremony — a two-hour ritualistic drama that initiated Mormons into the temple and which they were encouraged to revisit frequently — included the following passage where Lucifer attempts to corrupt Adam after the fall by introducing him to his servant, Preacher:

Lucifer:Have you been to college and received training for the ministry? Preacher: Certainly! A man cannot preach unless he has been trained for the ministry! Lucifer: Do you preach the orthodox religion? Preacher: Yes, that is what I preach. Lucifer: If you will preach your orthodox religion to these people and convert them, I will pay you well! Preacher: I will do my best.

In 1989 when the texts of these rituals could no longer be kept secret, the ceremony was radically altered without any explanation. The portion above was removed, as was a charming ritual where the initiate drew his thumb across his throat to indicate what would happen to him if he revealed the temple secrets. 14 - “Because all on the earth do not have the opportunity to accept the gospel during mortality, the Lord has authorized baptisms performed by proxy for the dead …. Baptisms for the dead can only be performed in temples.” Mormon Wiki. Link HERE. 15 - “All other churches are entirely destitute of all authority from God; and any person who receives baptism or the Lord’s Supper from their hands will highly offend God.” Orson Pratt, The Seer, pg. 255. 16 - “If we ask who will stand at the head of the resurrection in this last dispensation, the answer is — Joseph Smith, Junior, the Prophet of God. He is the man who will be resurrected and receive the keys of the resurrection.” Brigham Young, Discourses of Brigham Young, Pg. 116 17 - “Come on! ye prosecutors! ye false swearers! All hell, boil over! Ye burning mountains, roll down your lava! for I will come out on the top at last. I have more to boast of than ever any man had. I am the only man that has ever been able to keep a whole church together since the days of Adam. A large majority of the whole have stood by me. Neither Paul, John, Peter, nor Jesus ever did it. I boast that no man ever did such a work as I. The followers of Jesus ran away from Him; but the Latter-day Saints never ran away from me yet.… When they can get rid of me, the devil will also go.” Joseph Smith, Address of the Prophet at Nauvoo, History of the Church Vol. 6, p. 408-412. ***** Other notes of interest: Trying to pin down Mormon theology has been difficult work until recently, because it tends to have a fluidity that allows teachings to be stressed at one point and destressed or denied completely if they become inconvenient. That has changed in the age of easy information and increased transparency. Mormons recognize four sacred texts:

• The Bible, as long as it is “correctly translated.” And who “correctly translates” it? Three guesses. Sample HERE.
• The Book of Mormon, a ripping yarn of ancient peoples fighting it out in America. A brief synopsis:

  The Book of Mormon contains the purported stories of three different groups who sailed to the Americas. The Jaredites (Book of Ether) came to the New World at the time of the tower of Babel. The Mulekites came to America from Jerusalem in 586 BC. The major group was the family of Lehi. Two of his sons, Nephi and Laman, became the leaders of the Nephites and Lamanites. The last battle between the two groups, in 421 AD, wiped out almost all of the Nephites. Moroni, the last surviving Nephite, buried the records of his civilization in the Hill Cumorah. Hundreds of years later, Joseph Smith was directed to the spot by Moroni (some records say Nephi), now a resurrected being who had become an angel. Smith then “translated” the record and published it in 1830 under the title “The Book of Mormon.”

• Journal and Discourses - Which contains 138 sections and two declarations. The first 135 sections contain Joseph Smith’s revelations from 1823 to 1844. The first declaration reversed Mormon teachings on polygamy (1890) and the second ended the disbarment of blacks from the temple (1978).
• The Pearl of Great Price - A collection of sacred writings meant to expand and explain the teachings, and featuring the Articles of Faith at the end, which has undergone numerous revisions.

The problem is that not only do the works change depending on what version you use, but the books contradict each other. A list of contradictions is HERE. So under duress, a Mormon can plausibly deny many teachings. Add to that the fact that you know and they know that you’re not about to go thumbing through the hundreds of pages of these volumes fact-checking, and you start to see why it is so very difficult to pin down a missionary on what his church actually believes. **** Finally, a challenge to Mormons If you think I’ve been unfair, I invite you to edit the text of the Nicene Creed — link HERE – in a manner you feel would make it consistent with Mormon doctrine and send it to me. If you do, I will publish it with no remarks of my own.

Finishing up this big foursome, I felt like I had to at least try to define postmodernism and how the fall of the old regime is affecting what culture producers are doing now. For reasons I’ll go into below, the parameters of pomo are a little indistinct, but hopefully this’ll give an idea about it. And if you feel like skimming, you can skip down to the bottom for my two-cents on what Christian churches need to know about the current cultural climate. Who believes? Going over some of the modernist hubris with a friend, he looked perplexed and said, “Does anybody really believe that?” And the answer is: Ohhhh yeah. Definitely. Artists, philosophers, writers, social scientists and the like comprise the subset of society that charts out the latest fad, and they believed in the secular values of Enlightenment and modernism as long as they possibly could. You may not know anybody that falls into this category, but trust me, they have a big say in what plays and what doesn’t in the public forum. They teach it, they talk about it, they care about what it means and where it’s all going. And part of the reason I’m bothering to blog about this is that I think Christians should at least have some Cliff’s notes on what it might indicate. What do they believe? Those who were strong advocates of modernism aren’t generally that keen to advocate postmodernism, and so it gets a little difficult to define. The cultural elite who thought they’d died and gone to heaven when they were reading Darwin, Freud, Nietzsche and Marx spawned a generation that thought they’d died and not gone to heaven when they read that Nietzsche was Hitler’s favorite philosopher and Marx was Joseph Stalin’s excuse for gulags and firing squads. In short, history just didn’t bear out the glowing prognostications of the modernists. Darwin’s theories are at least partly to blame for the much more troubling social Darwinism, and Freud’s methods, in spite of major cheerleading and underwriting from his devotees, didn’t eradicate all anxiety, guilt and neurosis (in fact, just the opposite). That all led to an understandable lack of confidence. So whereas modern Art is:

• self-conscious (I might almost say ’self-important’);
• optimistic about modernism, society and the future; and
• rationalistic, favoring quasi-scientific formulas and technical-sounding jargon even when it claims to be experimenting —

– postmodern art is:

• reflexive (reacting to society’s likes and dislikes rather than trying to plot them);
• pessimistic about modernism, society and the future; and
• less rational, more open to being playful, spontaneous or just entertaining.

Modern art: think Mondrian (left). Postmodern art: think Lichtenstein (right). And branching out to the world outside of just Art, Wikipedia’s entry on postmodernism says that it has had an impact on “philosophy, art, critical theory, literature, architecture, interpretation of history, and culture” and is roughly defined by the following beliefs or attitudes:

• A continual skepticism towards the ideas and ideals of the modern era, especially the ideas of progress, objectivity, reason, certainty and personal identity, and grand narrative in general.
• The belief that all communication is shaped by cultural bias, myth, metaphor, and political content.
• The assertion that meaning and experience can only be created by the individual, and cannot be made objective by an author or narrator.
• Parody, satire, self-reference, and wit.
• Acceptance of a mass media dominated society in which there is no originality, but only copies of what has been done before.
• Globalization, a culturally pluralistic and profoundly interconnected global society; decentralized in all types of global processes.

Is postmodernism good for orthodox Christians? Good question. My impression is that other Christian culture watchers say ‘no.’ I suppose I think it’s a Stay-tuned-and-find-out situation right now. If I don’t share the pessimism, it’s because I think the distrust of Enlightenment hubris is tremendously promising. Even if we can’t say categorically that orthodox Christianity has won, modernism has certainly lost. As noted above, postmodernists are skeptical and satirical, but for the first time in centuries they’re skeptical and satirical not just of traditionalists but of themselves – of their own ominiscience, of their own correctness and — most importantly — of the ability of godless man to ensure a culture for himself that is fair, good, lasting and beautiful. How long have we been saying that secular humanism is flawed? How long have we tried to point out problems and biases? Heck, we won the argument and no one was even listening to us! Can an active, intelligent, caring Christianity step into the breach? It would be more surprising if it didn’t. But it has to be all those things — active, intelligent and caring. It has to be a healthy and vigorous defender of the Truth, and Christians have to be fully versed in what the Truth is. This isn’t the time for bumper-stickers and tacky 2-cent tracts. We need to know what we believe and be able to articulate it to people who are used to arguing. If we don’t know what we believe, time to find out. We have to live in a way that shows that we put our money where our mouth is — make no mistake; the pomo generation is more able to spot a phony than the modern one, not less. If we can’t stand the scrutiny, we’d be better off working on ourselves first. And if we do think we’re ready to take our act on the road, it doesn’t mean we should dust off all the Faith-a-thon pamphlets and start cooking for the revival meetin’. Taking the opportunity of postmodernism to just revise the old methods of reaching people will guarantee that we miss this window of opportunity. Note the changes indicated by postmodernism — the globalization, the love of intelligent debate, the changes brought by the Information Age — and consider the following:

• Think locally and regionally in terms of evangelism — Think garage bands as opposed to stadium rock concerts. It’s amazing what you can do on a small scale these days, and it will be customized and personal — two things that people don’t see much these days.
• Think globally in terms of the definition of community — Helllllooo, blogosphere!
• To quote my favorite John Mark Reynolds’ mantra: Be a culture-producer, not a culture consumer. Have you noticed that these days ordinary people can make music, write books, produce art and create movies that can be enjoyed by people around the world? You may not get the readership that Harry Potter gets, but if you’ve got something to say, you don’t need to wait for a publisher and marketing firm to give you the go-ahead. Stop paying for other people’s creations. Start making your own.
• Create your own paradigm — The same idea about producing culture applies to other aspects of your life. Cook your own food — better yet, grow your own food — and consider selling what you cook. Do some gardening or farming, or support local gardeners. Do your own recycling and ecology-watching (don’t grouse about what everyone else is doing). Run your own business if you can. In short: keep it simple; cut the ties to mass-produced stuff when you can; make things count.
• Be yourself. Live the Christian life. Don’t try to be cool or trendy according to the world’s ideas. These days there’s nothing more winning than being genuine, natural and at peace.
• Don’t hardsell. Be kind to all people, including people that you think need to come to your church. This isn’t the 1800’s — everyone you meet has telemarketers, spam e-mailers, charities, workpeople, family members and media personalities trying to sell them a product or point of view every hour. Don’t be another ad they tune out. Respect people’s intelligence, their free will and their space. Don’t badger or nag.

Sounds like a lot, I know. But it’s rewarding work. Christians have been pushed out of the culture for too long. If we want to put a Christian worldview back where it might get noticed once in a while, we’ve got our work cut out for us. If we choose to spend the next generation or two isolating ourselves, licking our wounds and failing to notice the opportunities that exist, we deserve what happens when that opportunity gets away.

I was afraid of this — having slept on it, I thought of other things I left out. It seemed to come down to a handful of connected thoughts about Art and others about postmodernism. So I’ll break them out and insert the usual disclaimer that none of this may be worth the time it took to key it in. Just some thoughts, impressions, opinions and (hopefully) educated guesses. Other things to blame I gave my opinion about the changes in the visual arts: (a) that a lot of them have been for the worse, and (b) that taken together they indicate a kind of societal sickness of the soul. It probably goes without saying that that isn’t the way those in the art world see it. Here’s some of that conventional wisdom, as near as I can figure it out (I confess I can’t always translate the language):

• No problem, everything’s great — A great number of Art’s chattering class carry on as if Art is still a fully functional, highly regarded cultural force. They think that modernist principles are still going strong as well. Coincidentally, they voted for George McGovern and can’t wait do it again. What can you say? Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt.
• It’s technology’s fault — With the advent of photography, the patronage fell off, as it was bound to do. Why would a wealthy patron sit for hours to have an artist’s interpretation of them done when a marvelous, scientific new device could take a completely accurate photo in a matter of seconds? And once original works could be cheaply and easily reproduced, why would the less wealthy people buy an original? So this version sees Art as just a victim of circumstance.
• It’s the public’s fault — People these days are too stupid to appreciate the fabulousness of portraits of the Virgin Mary made out of paint, glitter and elephant dung. That’s the line anyway. Don’t ask me what this means; I’ve never been able to make sense out of it. The biggest problem I have with this argument is that it perfectly insulates the speaker against any further debate by broadly hinting that if you don’t agree with them, you’re too ignorant to know what you’re talking about. I was tempted in Art classes to ask what level of education I had to attain before it was permissable to call a piece of junk a piece of junk. But then I’d remember my grade-point average and clam up.
• It’s mass-consumerism’s fault — When advertising and low-brow interests created pop culture, they created a monster. By pandering to unsophicated people’s appetite for more, faster, bigger, newer, they created an environment in which Art, with its more demanding appeal to our higher nature, couldn’t compete. I actually think there’s some truth in this — or rather, I think there would have been some truth in this if Art hadn’t rotted away from the inside by the time it was asked to survive in the world outside of galleries.
• It’s capitalism’s fault — Capitalism begets industrialization which begets class warfare which begets greed which begets commercialism, which kills finely developed aesthetic sensibilities which kills Art. I believe that’s the way that one goes. To be honest, I’ve never paid attention long enough to hear it all the way through. But it’s another big hit on college campuses.
• Just ran out of ideas — When imagery entered the market of mass production, it simply ran through all the possibilities of how to make something look totally new and innovative. Pretty Art — done. (See also Renaissance) Ugly Art — done. (See also Mannerism – the Renaissance’s post-Reformation ugly stepsister). Identifiable? — Realism. Unrecognizeable? — Abstract. Big, small; intense, restrained; sophisticated, vulgar; manly, girly — Been there, done that — so five minutes ago. With nowhere else to go, Art started panicking, offering up bric-a brac from hardware stores as masterpieces (remember Duchamp’s “Fountain”?) just to meet its deadlines.
• This is pure truth, baby! — The argument here is that if you can’t handle ugly, violent, insensible imagery, it’s like Jack Nicholson said: You can’t handle the truth! In other words that, like it or not, Art is doing its job: it’s mirroring a culture so full of horrors and meaninglessness that it can only do it by reaching for the very worst images and language it can find. This may even be true, up to a point. The problem with it is that it doesn’t reflect the opinion of most people, just the people connected with Art. If a mirror is distorted unless it’s held by one person, it’s not a good mirror.

And so it goes. The list of possible scapegoats is endless. Art and Religion I’m surprised that it’s that hard for Art’s chatterati to see a bond between Art and religion. Goodness knows, they’re not known for giving religion credit for anything good. Still, I don’t know how you ignore the evidence. The earliest paintings we know of are Neolithic cave paintings, like those in Lascaux, France made from 15,000-10,000 B.C. (link HERE). And what was the purpose of the horses and bison stampeding across the cave wall? To quote from Janson’s History of Art:

Hidden away as they are in the bowels of the earth, to protect them from the casual intruder, these images must have served a purpose far more serious than mere decoration. There can be little doubt, in fact, that they were produced as part of a magic ritual, perhaps to ensure a successful hunt.

The earliest art objects we have are “venus” figures, like this one from approximately 25,000 B.C. — female fertility figurines. And think of the ancient architecture (or is it sculpture?) of Stonehenge, the pyramids of Egypt, the ziggarauts of Mesopotamia, the Buddhist temples, the Aztec ruins, the American Indian totem poles. The difficulty isn’t to find Art that did originate with religious expression, but to find any that didn’t. Throughout history and in every culture, from Greek vases to stain glass windows, the desire to represent the natural world in pigment and glass and stone has gone hand-in-hand with the desire to articulate spirituality. The symbolic act of re-making the natural world using the elements in your environment doesn’t seem to happen apart from the desire to get closer to your God or gods. When artists decided to leave that aspect behind, it was the beginning of the end. In that regard, it’s actually surprising that “godless” Art has survived as long as it has. Secular Art and Insanity Just as patently evident but just as ignored is what happens to Art apart from God. Separated from the idea that it could manifest heavenly truths on earth, Art could only manifest its opposite — isolation, disorder, hellishness. There are lots of ways to characterize insanity; I won’t even begin to try to define the word in all its permutations. But to my understanding, it refers to the separation of the mind and senses from the order, cohesiveness and enjoyment of Creation. Apart from God’s light there’s only darkness, and so it’s been the sad legacy of a discipline that could have refreshed our souls with beauty to grow progressively blinder and more obsessed with its own darkness. The nightmarish element existed as early as the medievel works of Hieronymous Bosch, but it took the demagogues of Enlightenment thinking to pass off nightmares as things of deep value and meaning. And so Fuseli’s “Nightmare” and Blake’s twisted visions became defining works of Art in the 1700’s, as were Goya’s dark ravings and Turner’s scrabbled seascapes (which Mark Twain described as looking like what you’d get if two tomcats fought in a plate of tomato sauce) in the 1800’s. And good grief, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, we went from this (which supposedly depicts the field where he shot himself) to this to this (and so on and so on and so on …). So what’s the hot new market that the Art world has been buzzing about? Well, that would be Outsider Art, the Art of anybody who inhabits the fringes of society or is labelled dysfunctional by society. That can include prison inmates or desperately poor people, but since they have a disappointing habit of getting out of prison (thus losing their dysfunctional label) or being enriched by their art (thus losing their fringe status), the best Outsider Artists are crazy people — psychotics, schizophrenics, anybody that’s inventing their own reality. If they’re treatable, that’s no good, because then they can’t offer us the thoughtful reflections like this one or this one (which is part of a 15,000 page book about the battle between good and evil, starring “The Vivian Girls” who fight against “Glandelinians” with occasional cameos by the Coppertone Girl and a comic strip character called Little Annie Rooney). So, in the ultimate insanity, irrationality is seen as important and insightful and reason is deemed worthless. What’s that quote I’ve heard from an Orthodox source? Something about, “When the world goes mad, then madness will seem like reason …” I’m sure someone can help me out. Art and Love On a lighter note, I don’t mean to say that there’s no reason to visit an Art museum. Even feeling the way I do about the direction things have taken, I can’t stay away from them. In spite of all the baloney, there are glints and glimmers that catch the Light that it dare not allude to. And when that happens, they sparkle all the more for the darkness that’s around them. And so when you see something like this, you see the work of someone with a love of storytelling; when you see this, you see the work of someone who loved the countryside; when you see this, you see the work of someone who loved the gatherings of the common people. The common element is love. Only love would make a man work on his back for seven years in a medium he hated and produce this. Or make a woman paint enormous flowers like this so that “other people could see what I see.” Or make a man almost blind with cataracts in his old age paint his favorite place again and again and again. It’s a fine thing that made man look at his world and know somehow that it was good. And it’s a extraordinary thing to still feel that way when your head has been filled with a lot of bad theology and bad philosophy that tells you to think differently. Those people who have the talent with raw materials to offer back visual impressions of the goodness of things still have the power to evoke the sweetness of heaven in the middle of the dreary world. Those are the things that I go to galleries and museums to see. And with modernism dead and buried, a new generation of artists, architects and musicians has emerged that isn’t afraid to make things that are playful, beautiful, fabulous, elaborate or just fun. But that’s probably something to take up in the next epilogue that focuses on postmodernism. (Whew! This thing got away from me! Oh well, it’s keeping me from diving into a bag of chips on this Labor Day weekend. You gotta love that.)

(This started out life as a book review, but as I started adding in thoughts about the subject, I realized that it was more of a brain-dump of my accrued thoughts from years of having tried to figure out what the heck happened to the once-honorable visual arts — painting, drawing, sculpture. It got lengthy, so I broke it into two pieces, but I’d like to think that in the end it might be of some interest to the many people I know who have only a passing interest in fine art, but would like to know what went wrong.) Last Christmas a friend who knows I have an interest in art got me a book he came across in a museum bookstore. Called “The Fine Art of Advertising,” (Amazon link HERE) it’s an examination of how advertising borrows from the art world and vice versa. That’s exactly the kind of coffee-table book that a museum could depend on — lotsa pictures, some copy (that probably no one will read) and a popular-culture angle, in case the purchaser only came to the art museum to get out of the rain (which I think was the case with my friend). But I was surprised to find when I dived into it recently that it’s a pretty meaty read. And I don’t think you have to care about art history to consider it worth the price, though being an avid culture-watcher helps. The text has a surprisingly grand scope to it. Consider, for example, that in the introduction the author gets to a point about the founding of the country that seems to me to do a better job than anything I heard in high school or college:

America is the product of European imaginations: its government was structured on the precepts of eighteenth-century rationalism. Out of the Age of Reason came a country whose origin wasn’t rooted primarily in tribalism, ethnicity, or territoriality. It was rooted in a point of view. No other country had ever introduced itself to the community of nations with so succinct, evocative, and inspiring a phrase as the one that became America’s calling card. “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” is more than just a few fine words. It is the idea that drives and defines the American experiment.

To start a book about the nexus of (capital ‘a’) Art and advertising by examining the foundations of the American experiment may seem grandiose, but if you’re going to talk about both, it’s almost impossible not to paint with that big a brush (no pun intended). There’s a lot that Art says to us about the condition of the culture it’s in. That could be kind of a depressing thought to us these days, when it seems to go out of its way to be provocative, insensible, irreverent and pointlessly shocking. But then I think a person could make a plausible case that Art has more or less gone mad. Art once drew its vigor and lifeblood from the virtue, vigor and God-revealing, God-praising mission of the Church, but for a host of reasons, it cut all its ties to its own best reason for being and after that descended from romance to passion to unbounded emotionalism and eventually into the meaningless raving that now counts as Art. The only thing that Art can do now to feel like it’s being relevant is to try to take down the institution that gave it its best years — the Christian Church. And on its way down, Art met a crisis. Gallery Art and the like was considered to be “high-culture,” the delicate food of educated palates. Pop culture — television, radio, movies — was “low culture,” the TV dinner of the unwashed masses. Art galleries might have liked to have gone on forever ignoring the plebeian interests in Clark Gable’s latest flick and tonight’s guest on the Rinso-White Comedy Hour (or whatever), but there were a couple problems with that:

• Those audiences were vast, and represented a wealth of attention, current thought and, well, wealth that any artist would’ve died for. When public interest in the latest Art movement waned, no one wanted to ignore a captive audience.
• By continuing to make a lot out of the high culture/low culture thing, the Art world was indulging in a kind of elitism that flew in the face of its grand words about egalitarianism and relating to the common man. It took a very long time for the hypocrisy of that to sink in, but once it did, it was impossible to ignore.
• Artists might have felt like turning up their noses at consumers of low culture, but the producers of that culture had no such snobbery about Art. In other words, the advertising world had already started borrowing handily from Art when it wanted. For Art to return the favor was more or less a matter of destiny.

And so we have the story that unfolds in this book: What happens when one of the jewels in the crown of secular humanism has to give ground before tawdry commercialism and mass consumerism? Definitely the beginning of the end of all the bombast about Art being beyond the comprehension of us normal people, which made the movement much despised by Art purists, much enjoyed by the rest of us and one of the more shrill of the heralding trumpet blasts of postmodernism. (Which is a word that someone might need explained, but this entry is getting a little long, even for me, so I’ll pick it up in Part II - link HERE)

At this time of year with seasons changing and Lent starting, I’ve had a couple Orthodox insights I’ve heard bouncing around my head. The subject is time and how we perceive its passage. The same, but different I can’t believe that we’re coming up on another Cheesefare Sunday. So here we go. This week: omelettes; crepes; mac and cheese; cheese and cheese; cheese, cheese, spam and cheese … oops, no spam. Next week: peanut butter and jelly sandwiches; soy milk (blech!); spaghetti marinari and bean burritos. The lenten recipes, liturgical CDs and Orthodox books come out, and it becomes Lent again. Time to count off Sundays — Sunday of Orthodoxy, St. Gregory Palamas, Veneration of the Cross … — then count off Holy Week services — Bridegroom Monday, Bridegroom Tuesday, Holy Unction, 12 Gospels … — then count off hours to Pascha, when everything is singing and celebrating, and then get ready to do it all again before you know it. Cycles of daily prayer hours, cycles of eight tones — a different tone each Sunday for two months. Cycles of church seasons, cycles of moving and non-moving church feasts. In the Orthodox Church, we’re always either going someplace we’ve been before or approaching someplace that we feel like we’ve been before. Last Pascha, next Pascha; last Advent, next Advent. Do we do the same thing over and over? In some ways we do, and to our friends it might all sound kind of boring. The world is so wearied of its own restless race against the clock that the cyclical aspects of life can seem pointlessly repetitive. But it’s something that you just can’t explain to people about church life, they have to just experience it. It turns out it’s the same, but different. Because last Pascha and next Pascha really aren’t the same, anymore than last summer is exactly like next summer. On a lecture by Fr. John Finley about the church calendar, he said that though the cyclical calendar can seem to people like just two-dimensional circles that come back around where they start, it’s actually more three-dimensional — like a helix or a spiral staircase. If you think about taking a Slinky and extending it a little, you’ll get the picture. Yes, a Slinky is circular when viewed from the top. But if you were to start at the top of the Slinky and run your fingertip around the inside, at the point where you started the circle again, you would be at a different depth than you started. Each repetition would take you progressively deeper. And even though from a distance, it would look like you were going around and around, you would actually be making a series of unique circuits. And if you were a small enough thing to be making that journey yourself, though the angle would be constant, the view as you progressed would always be different and you would always be going somewhere. The church calendar is like that. Leaving time behind The second thought comes from “Beginning to Pray” by Archbishop Anthony Bloom. When I reviewed it here, I didn’t even mention that he’s got an entire chapter devoted to managing time, because I could find no brief way to talk about it. Abp. Bloom includes the words about time management as a prerequisite to an active prayer life, but I found that they were more important than that — it seemed to me more like a prerequisite to an active life of any kind. It’s been much on my mind as I re-enter an Antiochian church after some years away and try find my pacing and rhythm all over again. Abp. Bloom tells of a time during the German occupation of France when he was with the resistance movement and was caught by the police. In that one intense instant, he felt like there was no such thing as the past and no such thing as the future — only that one moment in the present:

It was then I discovered that living in the past on the one hand and in the future on the other hand was simply not possible … I discovered that I was pressed into the present moment and all my past, that is, all the things that could be, were condensed in the present moment with an intensity, a colorfulness that was extremely exhilarating and which allowed me eventually to get away! Now as far as time is concerned, there are moments when one can perceive that the present moment is there, the past is irremediably gone … and the future is irrelevant because it may happen or it may not … You discover with great interest that you are in the now. You know the very, very thin plane which geometry teaches us has no thickness. This geometric plane which has absolutely no thickness, which is ‘now’, moves along the lines of time, or rather time runs under it, and brings to you ‘now’ everything you will need in the future. This is the situation we must learn, and we must learn it in a more peaceful way. I think we must do exercises in stopping time and in standing in the present, in this ‘now’ which is my present and which is also the intersection of eternity with time.

This may sound too cerebral an activity for common folk, but I think it’s possible in small ways even for those of us who may not feel capable of such things. At my new homechurch, St. Basil the Great, I feel again the haunting quality of Byzantine chant that seems to always be in motion but never in a hurry. And the cradle Orthodox of St. Basil’s seem to be that way as well. Greetings, visits, comings and goings aren’t according to my American timing — they take as long as they take. They happen until they’re complete. And I know that such moments are always there; they needn’t depend on a particular archdiocese or musical tradition. You just have to attend to them. After reading this chapter of “Beginning to Pray,” I decided to try to tune in to God’s timing a little bit more (and yes, I wish there was a way to say that that didn’t sound like a bumper sticker). If I was in a huge rush and one thing after another got in my way, why not let loose of the idea of the future moment that wasn’t getting here fast enough? Why not forget all the other moments and just trust God to determine what was important and what wasn’t? I’ll just say from this small bit of anecdotal evidence from one poor weakling that I have never missed anything significant since then, and I have enjoyed many moments that had seemed like they would be hell-bent.