Paul Christensen's Blog - Posts Tagged "art"

The Principles of Art by R.G. Collingwood

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


'If the Arts should perish
The world that lacked them would be like a woman
That, looking on the cloven lips of a hare,
Brings forth a hare-lipped child.'
- W.B. Yeats

Or as Collingwood has it, ‘art is not a luxury and bad art is not a thing we can afford to tolerate.’

Art is language; language emerged from imagination, the second stage of consciousness, not intellect, the third stage; but unlike everyday language, art don’t tolerate cliches.

To know good art requires an uncorrupt consciousness.

’But no one can know this except a person who possesses one. An insincere mind, so far as it is insincere, has no conception of sincerity.’

No artist is an island, and Collingwood thinks copyright laws are bad. Memes, the most vital form of contemporary art (not saying much), bear this out.

Collingwood thinks the relationship between artist and audience vital, and forms that separates them too much, e.g. cinema as opposed to live theatre, he thinks incapable of creating a truly great art (this is contestable).

Future art should be prophetic, telling the audience the secrets of their own hearts.

‘Art is the community’s medicine for the worst disease of mind, the corruption of consciousness.’

The true artist is in constant warfare against this corruption.



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Ion by Plato

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


The first half of this dialogue is good,
Dealing as it does with inspiration,
Magnetic power beyond the conscious ‘should’.
But then it makes erroneous equations,
Equating conscious knowledge with the pearl
Of true rhapsodic passion in a whirl.
Directed inspiration is a thing:
A mean, between blind groping on the wing
And uninspired and hollow artifice;
But Plato never says a word of this.



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England's Hidden Reverse: A Secret History of the Esoteric Underground by David Keenan

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


This book is a complete whitewash.

In looking at one of the most interesting music scenes of the ‘80s and ‘90s, it removes the more politically incorrect bands (Death In June, Fire + Ice, Allerseelen, Boyd Rice, and even The Moon Lay Hidden Beneath A Cloud) from the picture, thus making World Serpent music safe for ‘consumption’ by oily hipsters in the 2000s (Tony Wakeford, after jumping through hoops to prove what a good ‘anti-fascist’ he is, gets a token pat on the head).

The same hipsters who leeched onto anodyne black metal bands like Wolves in the Throne Room, scrubbing ‘problematic’ bands like Burzum and Graveland from history in good Orwellian fashion.

When hipsters leech onto something, you know it’s past its creative prime.

In 2020, David Tibet gives art shows in galleries whose curators hold his religious views in amused contempt.

Was the ‘respectability’ really worth it?



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