heretic888
12-09-2002, 09:16 AM
Some of you must think I have some pretty odd notions about what constitutes 'great art'. So, I will quote a few things from my favorite psychologist/philosopher Ken Wilber that might shed some light on my craziness. The first is a foreward from visionary artist Alex Grey's book "The Mission of Art":
"Alex Grey might be the most significant artist alive. In a world gone postmodern, bereft of meaning and value, cut loose on a sea of irony and indifference, Alex is taking a stunning stand: there is a God, there is Spirit, there is a transcendental Ground and Goal of human development and unfolding. Higher realities are available to us, is the message of Alex Grey’s art. And Alex has set himself the extraordinary task of depicting, in art, these higher truths.
This is art in its original and highest meaning--the subjective revelation of Spirit. When an artist is alive to the spiritual domains, he or she can depict and convey those domains in artistic rendering, which wrestles Spirit into matter and attempts to speak through that medium. When great artists do so, the artwork then reminds us of our own higher possibilities, our own deepest nature, our own most profound Ground, which we all are invited to rediscover. The purpose of truly transcendent art is to express something you are not yet, but that you can become. And this is exactly what Alex does in his truly stunning art. His work, like all great transcendental art, is not merely symbolic or imaginary: it is a direct invitation to recognize and realize a deeper dimension of our very own being. In the eternal trinity of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, art, while it can be good and true, has always staked out the domain of the Beautiful. Alex’s art is deeply, profoundly, Beautiful, the surest sign that it is on the trail of Spirit.
I myself have one other personal test of great art: when you first look at it, it simply takes your breath away. One of the great pleasures in my life is showing people Alex’s art for the first time: they always gasp, wonderfully. And you can almost see them thinking: perhaps there is more to reality, and to myself, than I thought. That is the great, profound, extraordinary service that Alex’s art serves: it calls us beyond ourselves, it takes us beyond ourselves, to a transpersonal land where Spirit is real, where God is alive, where Buddha smiles and the Tao sings, where our own Original Face shines with a glory that time forgot and space cannot recall. We are confronted with the best that we can be, the deepest we can feel, the highest we can see, and so we go away from Alex’s vision a little better than we were a minute before.
This places Alex in a rather extraordinary lineage of Western painters whose art is saturated with Spirit. Let us, with all due reverence, bow down deeply when we even hear these names: Hildegard, Michelangelo, Angelico, Bosch, Blake, Rembrandt, Delville, Van Gogh, Mondrian, Malevich, Klee, Brancusi, Marc, Klimt, Kandinsky, Fuchs, Tchelitchew… and Alex Grey."
This second is a quote from Wilber's book "The Eye of Spirit":
"Great art suspends the reverted eye, the lamented past, the anticipated future; we enter it with the timeless present; we are with God today, perfect in our manner and mode, open to the riches and the glories of a realm that time forgot, but that great art reminds us of: not by it's content, but by what it does in us: suspends the desire to be elsewhere."
This third and final quote is from one of Wilber's essays "To See A World--Art and the I of the Beholder":
"It is not the object expressed, but the depth of the subject expressing it, that most defines art. And this shifts art and art criticism from irony to authenticity -- a rather unnerving move, at least to today’s eyes. Can art and art criticism survive the loss of irony, the loss of inauthenticity, as its central source? And if today’s art abandons sardonic surfaces, where will it finally reside?"
"Alex Grey might be the most significant artist alive. In a world gone postmodern, bereft of meaning and value, cut loose on a sea of irony and indifference, Alex is taking a stunning stand: there is a God, there is Spirit, there is a transcendental Ground and Goal of human development and unfolding. Higher realities are available to us, is the message of Alex Grey’s art. And Alex has set himself the extraordinary task of depicting, in art, these higher truths.
This is art in its original and highest meaning--the subjective revelation of Spirit. When an artist is alive to the spiritual domains, he or she can depict and convey those domains in artistic rendering, which wrestles Spirit into matter and attempts to speak through that medium. When great artists do so, the artwork then reminds us of our own higher possibilities, our own deepest nature, our own most profound Ground, which we all are invited to rediscover. The purpose of truly transcendent art is to express something you are not yet, but that you can become. And this is exactly what Alex does in his truly stunning art. His work, like all great transcendental art, is not merely symbolic or imaginary: it is a direct invitation to recognize and realize a deeper dimension of our very own being. In the eternal trinity of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, art, while it can be good and true, has always staked out the domain of the Beautiful. Alex’s art is deeply, profoundly, Beautiful, the surest sign that it is on the trail of Spirit.
I myself have one other personal test of great art: when you first look at it, it simply takes your breath away. One of the great pleasures in my life is showing people Alex’s art for the first time: they always gasp, wonderfully. And you can almost see them thinking: perhaps there is more to reality, and to myself, than I thought. That is the great, profound, extraordinary service that Alex’s art serves: it calls us beyond ourselves, it takes us beyond ourselves, to a transpersonal land where Spirit is real, where God is alive, where Buddha smiles and the Tao sings, where our own Original Face shines with a glory that time forgot and space cannot recall. We are confronted with the best that we can be, the deepest we can feel, the highest we can see, and so we go away from Alex’s vision a little better than we were a minute before.
This places Alex in a rather extraordinary lineage of Western painters whose art is saturated with Spirit. Let us, with all due reverence, bow down deeply when we even hear these names: Hildegard, Michelangelo, Angelico, Bosch, Blake, Rembrandt, Delville, Van Gogh, Mondrian, Malevich, Klee, Brancusi, Marc, Klimt, Kandinsky, Fuchs, Tchelitchew… and Alex Grey."
This second is a quote from Wilber's book "The Eye of Spirit":
"Great art suspends the reverted eye, the lamented past, the anticipated future; we enter it with the timeless present; we are with God today, perfect in our manner and mode, open to the riches and the glories of a realm that time forgot, but that great art reminds us of: not by it's content, but by what it does in us: suspends the desire to be elsewhere."
This third and final quote is from one of Wilber's essays "To See A World--Art and the I of the Beholder":
"It is not the object expressed, but the depth of the subject expressing it, that most defines art. And this shifts art and art criticism from irony to authenticity -- a rather unnerving move, at least to today’s eyes. Can art and art criticism survive the loss of irony, the loss of inauthenticity, as its central source? And if today’s art abandons sardonic surfaces, where will it finally reside?"