Panel Discussion with Alexander Stoddart, Juliette Aristides, Peter Kwasniewski, Ethan Anthony, 2018

[Music] so without further ado I think we'll introduce our panelists the speakers to take the stage and somebody who have not yet seen is the panel moderator William Newton who was a previous speaker during the year Willie Newton quite a character himself is is an art critic at the Federalist he is a graduate of the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service the University of Notre Dame Law School and South's B's Institute of Art and London he lives in Washington DC and Williams musings can be found on his well acclaimed blog of the courtier and so he will introduce some first questions ruthlessly to the speakers and and then after that we will take questions from all of you and so thank you what did you mean at the end of your lecture when you were a bit rushed for time that we were supposed to make of reclaiming classical art and architecture from the unfortunate context that it was given again bearing in mind that that you didn't get to fully yeah elaborate on your conclusion and so I think this would be a good opportunity for you to do that now well the thing is we were left in the middle of the last century with a problem the problem was that modernism us modernism had in the 1928 1920s and the 1930s begun to die there was a recovered neo neoclassicism happening dadaism was old hat Expressionism us was you know passe and so there was a great movement for building classical buildings again charles rennie mackintosh had become old hat it was James Miller in Glasgow who was the new architect and he was building great big classical buildings in a well rather austere rather a sleek style and of course Washington was doing it as well the whole Scandinavia Edinburgh and Belle and it was the new modern style that you did so official modernism which is now the thing had gone away and now a new revived Hellenism had occurred and it was in deeply embraced by the dictator of the thought you know of Germany oh the artists of Europe were very jealous particularly French to have a fewer than was soon knots about architecture I mean most food delivered down architecture I mean it's basically thought it but then of course the surviving old modernists they were delighted when everything went wrong and peddler was discovered to be a monster that he was because suddenly that are an architecture to which he was affiliated became toxic sized and so what happened then was that there was a revival a fall survival in the negative of the thing that had already burnt itself out so we're really dealing with the aftermath the the the bastard the children of a thing that was already finished an experiment and it goes on and on in a Groundhog Day of repetition so we got we started it in Marcel Duchamp's toilet you know that no and we continued it through Tracy Airman's unmade bed this is a horrible excursion it we shouldn't be there and it's all allowed because we know that that certain person would have hated it this is what we called Nazi art the art that couldn't have existed without the presence of that demon my point is this evil always hides behind the form of the good simple badness shows itself in its brute form but evil takes up the form of the good and hides behind it and this is what happened in the Third Reich they should really strictly have built in their own image shoddy Kru jagged just like they're building London these days you know well the thing sticking out the East End of London called the shoved a shout is a thing you go to accident emergency for to be removed from your I I'm finished off the mic I wanted I wanted to ask you your your your presentation was was really original and and I think one of the reasons I can't speak for the audience obviously but I think for me one of the reasons that I actually felt very touched by it was because you were sharing your personal experience as an artist obviously but you were also asking your audience to put themselves in your shoes because you kept asking us hasn't this ever happened to you haven't you ever felt this way is that empathy if you will or trying to empathize with somebody else is that something that informs the way that you do your art is that something that you sort of keep in mind when you're trying to create beauty on canvas or instruct someone else on how to create something beautiful not necessarily I feel like the desire to learn to see is something that I feel like drawing and painting will become obsolete unless we realise that there's something particular that painting and drawing and poetry and literature and architecture have to offer and that is a unique opportunity for our own self-expression not just for the painters the painters make a career of creating those fading moments those moments that as you're watching them they're gone and they're desires to make it last forever so perhaps it's a little bit of a personality glitch where you feel the loss very keenly but it's something that becomes relevant to all of us when we see that the same impulse is there mmm very good Peter one of the the takeaways that I had from your presentation and I don't I don't know if you realize that you use this word quite a bit but while I was taking notes I noticed that about a half a dozen times you mentioned the subject of Pride and and this is something that is obviously a problem in a lot of contemporary art because it seems to be a lot of it has to do with look at me but to no other end right and I was I was taken by the sort of theory that that you put forward which is that this idea that we're supposed to think that somehow were so different from every other generation of human beings that has come before us that were this uniquely exceptional group of people and that because of that because of that sort of almost if you will same mentality that went into building the Tower of Babel that we can simply ignore all of the the warnings and the examples of the past that's a but but is that something that that now obviously you approach this from primarily from from from your experience in music and you mentioned how you're building upon the past your you're certainly very much aware of it and we're always told to ignore the past at our peril but how do how do we persuade people that they're not actually losing themselves by paying homage if you will to other great people that came before them in the arts it's a difficult question that you're asking because it has to do with the mystery of conversion I I find in my own life that before I could appreciate any of the fine arts including music I first had to be converted to the beauty of those things and and I say that that's a mystery because it wasn't simply a rational deductive process it wasn't like I sat down one day and said well I guess I need to appreciate the beautiful and and I somehow came up with an argument for that I I'm reminded of of many stories I've heard about people who've seemingly by chance they've wandered into a church while a mass is going on at a place like the Brompton Oratory in london which is famous for the same kind of literacies that you see at st. John Kansas and they stumble in and they're overwhelmed by the beauty of what they see they weren't looking for it in a sense God came looking for them which is the way that it always works at least ultimately it's God looking for us so in a way the question boils down to how can you expose people to the kinds of experiences that are likely to in candle in them the desire to be an apprentice to a great tradition rather than to well either to be indifferent or to be lazy or to think that they should be original in that kind of superficial way that people talk about originality one thing that that I remember really struck me is when I was taking a course on the Gospel of John and the teacher pointed out that what Jesus says about the devil is that the devil speaks from himself and it's almost like a definition that Jesus gives he's the one who speaks out of himself and the one who speaks out of himself is a liar and and that that got me thinking about the fact that human beings we don't exist by ourselves no man is an island as John Donne said we actually exist in society we can't we come into existence through a family and we we seek friendship that's in many ways the highest natural good we have so we exist outside of ourselves our very mode of human existence is to exist in and with others and that is for me tradition and and how tradition relates to culture and the arts has to do with just awakening to that communal dimension and not to go into any of this but I think that unfortunately modern life especially with with a lot of modern technology is very isolating and people are very absorbed in their smartphones or or in their internet gaming or whatever or Facebook or all these things that are good tools but well some of them are good tools maybe not all but it seems like modern life is making people more and more isolated and atomized and that's that's obviously a recipe for disaster because it's you forget how much you depend on others and then on the past and on tradition and certainly from from a learning aspect is what you were saying before the idea of apprenticeship and the it because you you can't you can't learn in a vacuum I mean you what you can but you're not going to be any good at what you do necessarily you know you're sort of a fluke if you are but this this feeds into something that I wanted to ask you which is that I was really struck by and this is not something that is said very often I was very struck by the humility of an architect who points out that you are conducting a symphony of artists and craftspeople that you know you're designing the building but then there are things that have to go into and form part of the building sculpture painting you know furniture of that kind of thing when you're doing a church or whatever it is at the same time you're sensitive to the fact that while you know look it can only be this big right you know I can't make the tympanum any larger I'm sorry you'd have to work within the dimensions that I give you how much of what you have to work we all know architects are inevitably going to be constrained by their budgets but how much of what actually goes into a finished structure that you're working on that has artistic elements to it are you going to be able to tell the sculptor the painter whoever it is that you can go this far and not further well it depends on a number of factors it's not always entirely up to me I think that it's very important the leadership of the priest because and I think Denis McNamara might have some comments about this too if you were asked but I know that Denis has trained a lot of priests and understanding what is good and what is bad and what what's going to work and what won't and I think that the priest who have an appreciation understanding of art are very supportive of the architect and that makes a very big difference the less understanding the priest has the more they tend to be subject to pressures from within the parish and that could just be you know a donor or there are so many pressures that can come to bear on the process so you know there there is this idea that and I think part of the reason why I wrote the talk the way I did was to kind of dispel this idea get rid of it that the architect is this lone genius you know striving against all odds to you know come up with a great idea sort of the sort of work frankly right family was that way yes and yeah I guess it happens but in our society it's less and less a realistic way to approach the process of design I think people are much more aware I mean one of the great things about this kind of organization is that all the people who are here are becoming aware by being here of what is good and what is you know what are the problems what are the issues so if any of you now go and serve on a building committee it's going to be tough on the architect because you're gonna have a much better idea so the architect has to not only be sensitive but also be more inventive more creative and come up with better ideas so you know I challenge --is me it challenges me to come up with a better answer when someone asks the question I want I want to ask the panel in general a question because you've all trained under someone at some point in your career did the person that you trained under influence positively or negatively what you now see as the beautiful well the work training when you go to art school in the 1970s 1976 as I said there's no training available at all it's just supervised please do you do learn how to smoke and drink this is why should be always under the eyes of dead officers always hovering their shoulders and I think what can oliver think of this what will Charles Sargent Jagger think of this and other painters and poets as well all looking at the question of the taste what gesture made here is it kitschy is it wrong as it overwhelming and so we didn't have a chance to chuck our masters those of us who are self-taught that's the problem they were all dead I mean if he'd been alive bit of charm for sure and so they stayed with us mhm Juliet did you did you have to sort of hold your nose when you were studying with with a more senior painter or were they were you in sync well I studied for a decade and when I started studying the internet didn't exist for people who were working in their tradition the tradition was fragmented beyond recognition and so you had different pieces with different places with tiny bits of it so it's almost like a treasure hunt and it was very exciting but you only ever got a piece of it and so the first number of books I did was almost more for myself than anyone else say okay we're gonna put this here and then we've got a couple gaps and so rebuilding and I was very fortunate to be able to find people to study with the idea of master in which is the idea of training and learning a tradition in painting has suffered in a way more than in music and you know because if a note is played wrong its unendurable really but in painting that's not the case and so when you choose to train under someone it's almost a process of emulation and so if you think of your families how often how often do you learn to cook by going to culinary school and how often is from just being around a family that knows how to put something on the table and so when you're studying at these schools or in and I was fortunate to do under various masters a lot of it you pick up from watching and then you say okay but there's still a gap and then that's how it happened for me yeah that's fascinating you know I was thinking about I've never really thought about the point that if you're a painter you can feel very isolated and you're just doing it on your own but if you're going to sing choir music you have to have a choir and you have to give them something that they can sing and and and actually if you don't have professional singers but amateur singers you have to give them something relatively easy to sing so there are there are limits built into the very nature of music that make it I think a little more conservative I mean the worst music I've ever heard is what's played by professional ensembles because they have the talent and the money to do awful things if you have you know if you got like your parish choir they don't wanna sing a total I mean you can't do that but I had two blessings in this road one blessing was my high school music teacher whom I have a really deep reverence for I went to an all-boys Catholic school and he ran the choir he ran it very strictly yet he had a great sense of humor but also a great sense of discipline and he's the one who really inspired me with a love for music first and foremost and then I ended up taking music lessons with him and in composition lessons and he what I loved about him in retrospect I didn't notice it at the time is how he always seemed genuinely interested in my own musical ideas even though they were really primitive I mean looking back now I'm thinking how could he have been so patient and and how could he I mean was he pretending to be considerate but he was really genuinely there as a teacher showing me how to cook harmonized music and so I went through that whole discipline with him and the other blessing I had was just I went to Thomas Aquinas College and the choir director lived two hours away and when he found out that I could that I sort of knew how to conduct he said oh great can you start running for our practices for me because I really don't want to drive this far every week so as a freshman in college I was thrown into a situation where I actually had to run to help him run the fire practices which I never expected and so it was just learning on the job well in that sense again I don't know if I would have assigned that task to myself but it was assigned to me that's great and even obviously in order to be a licensed architect you have to study under a lot of people so did you have to sort of overcome a more senior architect trying to convince you that the Courvoisier was just one of the most creative some of the most beautiful buildings in the world and that you just had to sort of accept oh yes yes I think that well I went my junior summer in high school father Moriarty took a group of us to Italy and that was my first real introduction to architecture of churches certainly that I really felt I could emulate certainly Rome was was it was an eye-opener for me but I hadn't decided to study architecture at that point but I kind of fell in love with it when I went to study architecture it was a an enormous shock I felt like I had to go through ten years of agony in order to get to the other side so I could actually do something that I would enjoy doing and now that's not to say that the education was I wouldn't go as far as what Sandi saying I mean the education was good I think I learned a lot and I'm grateful for what I learned but I didn't learn anything about Gothic architecture church architecture anything about religious architecture I mean it's really it was hit during my time it was a very boat and subject so I had to really learn that on my own well afterward well well those are enough questions from me and so what we are going to do now who has the baton as it were yes if you would like to line up and this lovely lady are you going to taking my father or is your gonna say and if you would like to line up if you have questions for any Paul all members of the panel or any members of the panel please come up and father will hand you Mike thank you hi Douglas Julie from the Wethersfield Institute in New York thank you all this was one of the finest conferences that I've attended in many years and I go to far too many I was really outstanding ten pages of notes and we'll have the videos so he go I'll Lake them on my website as well my question anything is for you what is the what are the three best things to say to somebody to a committee or a group of people building either a chapel I was recently involved in a campaign to build a new chapel at Christendom College at Virginia and I wanted to build it out of real stone and I was told that it would be not twice as much but 25 times as much money to build the thing in stone so it has stone exterior those stuck on pieces it look beautiful its gothic but when you're building a home when you're building any kind of a structure what are the arguments that you found to be effective in convincing people that they should build not for 30 years but for two or three hundred years and how that's cost-effective what do you tell them well that's that's very difficult because I think all of us when we approach building projects whether it's as a committee member or residential have an idea of what we could really spend you know we know there a general idea of what our budget is and long term materials long lifecycle materials definitely cost more there's no question about it what I do tell people when they're building a church though is that well first of all you have to approach that as you're bringing the best gifts you can to go to God and that it's not building a house it's not building a casino or car dealership whatever you know it's not building anything else it's something that's completely separate and you have to dig deeper and and also I think if you build a church with the idea that it's going to be a typical building you know a 30-year building or 40-year our appreciation schedule for most buildings is 39 years in America we build 39 year building well so if and that includes almost every type of building so we don't the big difference with churches is that you don't have a depreciation schedule right yeah absolutely you know it's not a commercial building yeah so you really have to think about that pretty hard and think about you know do I want this building to survive a storm do I want this building to be here for generations we've all been actually beneficiaries of buildings that have been here for generations they were built by our ancestors really well and our generation uniquely is building junk so you know we I think we have to separate that and say look you know most buildings they're not going to last a long time they're not going to be here but much longer than we are yeah the church is different you know there's the the famous quote from from gaudi from the the architect of the sagrada família when they were complaining that it was taking him such a long time to finish and he said my client is not in a hurry but I like to say my client you know I have a very unique experience when I need work my client gives me work that's right so caffeine was asking about the building of st. John conscience which is really unique because it was a testament to the Polish immigrants tremendous faith many of the homes that they built we didn't have but on the pediment of the church they wrote the words on my Yoram dei gloriam for the greater glory of God and so they really sacrificed everything they were the pool poorest clash of polish immigrants and yet they built this building which is celebrating 125 years and so it's really amazing to see women when you see the plaster with horsehair intermixed they couldn't afford real marble so there was foam marbleization but the actual structure they really made to last and that's I think that also adds to the dimension of what you feel as the church being alive because of sacrifice of so many of these Polish immigrants some yeah I think it also speaks to what dr. Peter said about the humility because there is a humility in inheriting and maintaining the building that you that we are taking on and so so many churches in Chicago you're not keeping ashes but you're keeping a flame alive and that's something that is life-giving and how who could have thought these Polish immigrants would never have imagined that their church became home to Chicago's first men's religious community that their church became home to this movement that you see before you today and so it's a great testament to their sacrifices our next questioner is actually one of last year's speakers dr. Dennis McNamara sometimes known as d-mac by his students he was known for shooting down Roger Scruton last year he teaches future priests and he's the director of the liturgical Institute thank you Father my question is for mr. Stoddard I wanted to know what you might comment about our no Brecker the great sculptor who also worked with the Nazi regime that has classically inspired sculptures Thank You Dennis can you all hear me yes I baked instead of it this is Dennis asking about our new breaker the sculptor that worked most famously for Hitler and actually correspondent with breaker I discovered who it was living in Dusseldorf and he was hiding out there fantastically wealthy of course it's due to Switzerland it's rather bothers you and you can put all your ill-gained money in there and he was absolutely thrilled to be dug out by a young Scottish sculptor and I actually can brought to us before the days of Internet or any other and said I was interested to know his story oh it's interesting because he put me in touch with an American foundation that was advocating him and they had some terrible publications and I discovered really how poor the work of armor breaker was but how strange the story was breaker had been a friend of sovereign darling Mikasa he did part of the Parisian set jean cocteau all these dudes were kidding about being evangelists and for this reason breaker had always been regard to this beyond the pale by the third race you know he's always under surveillance because he was known tough chopped with Antarctic Winston degenerate artists so it was a very sticky experience for him the highest paid sculptor yosef toric was the other one he was older breakers position was very very catchy very questionable during the third right now after the the end of the war he was tried at Nuremberg and forbidden to work for 12 years so went scuttling up into the hearts mountains but he opened a private studio where he proceeded to make Henry Moore look-alikes in a massive effort of backpedaling and then Stalin don't touch of them and say what were me he said can have been there done that so I gave it the bypass and ended up in Dusseldorf wealthy unknownst by the you know unrecognized but in every scene and then I wrote him and asked him about his work he came out of Rudin there are other sculptors that what Junius Andre who came out of a man called Adolf when Hildebrand who died in 1921 very accomplished sculptor that you had to work for architecture there's a great fountain sculptor and with the name I Adolf von Hildebrand you know you're not gonna get anywhere if your pupils will follow you but breaker was different he was trained in or he went to study in Paris and picked up the Rudin desk would I you know August wooden and for this reason his work has a particular catchiness that we find from rhoda rooder has a tremendous catch monger oh yeah you've got it's awful stuff all that surging in there rectal tissue it's beyond the pale and this is this is what gives break of his frightening ly attractive quality for us you know I'd often Hildebrandt was a seriously cultivated artist so when we break a wrote me a letter saying thanks very much nobody pays attention to me anymore I'm nearly dead and then he that died so I gave the letter he wrote to me to the Henry ruins to Chilton leaks in England where from whence it disappeared entirely so we're going the trail of one day well you went to give me talk dotty but Rodin then Michelangelo's next my question is based off of what you mr. Stoddard has said in your your speech this your lecture this evening but is of course open to the entire panel to comment or answer on you laid out and your in your talk how people like Nietzsche laid out and prophesize the coming of the modern worlds because God is dead not as a proclamation but as a warning of what would come and what monsters would come fill the void once God has left the center of Western civilization and how much how many horrors we've seen in the 20th century because of that decision to remove God from our lives and also how much you've referenced people like Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and Sartre as talking about the ramifications and the new guidelines laid out in this new modern worlds because of that essential decision and also the way that art has progressed in these in these years between that and also mentioned previously how people like Salvador Dali and the DA tests were really reactionary against war against the horrors of the 20th century that they were seeing unfold before them and then became lauded as progressives and modernists in the coming generations to get to the point do you see do you does the panel see traditional architecture and art and aesthetics as the new avant-garde in art [Music] yes God me me yeah yeah the avant-garde is such a ghastly expression who'd ever want to be part of it mm we are radicals because we a pertain to the root that's what radical means it comes from the Latin word or a DK meaning the root as in radish it's gonna repeat so we're a radical artists because we go not for the flower but for the root and the flower can be manifested in various divergent ways but the root saw or was only one thing and it's buried be dug up because they die so we are radicals in that respect I don't think we're revolutionaries because we're not born of that perpetual revolution idea that central to Trotskyism for instance the general dialectic you know the Hegelian triad do that thing you know a thesis is risen to be opposed by an antithesis the to fight and out of the fight the ruins of the fight they make a synthesis which rises to be the new thesis to be opposed by a new antithesis a secondary fight another Center arises a reverse to become the new thesis so this is this is basically what the forward moving mmm culture of the modernist Age advocates they all comes from Hegel via laminar or Plekhanov as German to pronounce it there was a Soviet hey Gillian I don't have anything to do with this my view is let's try to stop time happening this is what I would like to try Denton Mass because I can be in Chicago in 2000 and what was it eating and I hear that divine mutter I could be in Sicily in 200 AD and hear the same thing thus time and space have been overcome and this is very far from the Revolutionists culture which is all to do worth corresponding and collaborating with time and with place so I should hope that our revolution inter evolution it's our disorder mental or an end of the revolution that made us somehow strange yep Peters your music strange that a loaded question it's an interesting idea that a large chunk of the world might wrongly consider what you do rather strange well let me he was a different example I think that the strangest form of music that Catholics have is Gregorian chant and I say that because in about eight different ways chant is different from any form of music that we've been accustomed to for about four hundred years for example it's written in modes rather than keys it's written a metrically or without a definite meter it's unaccompanied by instruments in most cases it's sung in unison rather than in parts it's authors are anonymous I mean I could go on there's all these characteristics that make it that's separated from other forms of music and I I would suppose that to a person who lived a thousand years ago chant wouldn't have seemed strange because it was the primary mode of music that there was and there really weren't any other competitors but but now fast-forward to 2018 and we've had we've gone through Renaissance music and Baroque music and classical and romantic and modern and you know we have all we live in this gigantic sort of melting pot of musical styles and then when we hear the chants come out in the church it's like this it's timeless and it's somewhat static but it's also hauntingly beautiful and it puts you right in them in the mode of like we are worshiping God right now this is what we're doing this music is custom-made for this function for this purpose and so it's it has the attractiveness but also the strangeness of God and that I think is true about a lot of things that we do as Catholics that is it for Tricia lien client we use a lot we use gold chalices and brocade vestments and we and incense we do things that don't have any other context anymore in the modern world except to be used for divine worship and that's what gives them there they're extremely powerful resonance and symbolism right that they're you know they're consecrated for this purpose I'd like to add something to that I kind of take a different view than sandy I think we are not revolutionaries in a sense but we are rationalist in the true sense of the word and for example playing off of what Peter was just talking about we want to build churches that can have chant in them without back without amplification that's a radical concept in modern architecture modern architecture for the most part the modernist movement has been about well you wanted louder we'll put in some amplifiers for you you know oh you want some echo we got that and and so you really lose all richness of the building and I think what we're about is putting the richness back in the building making a building that's good for chant making a building that works for prayer making a building that works for song for the organ all of those things and you could say that it's radical and it's it's only radical in a sense that it's a reaction to a radical point of view the radical point of view was technology can do anything I think that's a false radicalism I agree and because it's dependent upon floral effects at the other end of the tree and they come and go with the seasons the root is always there even in the depths of winter so I don't I don't go for for revolution ISM revolt is not doing its for sergeants yeah well we are also the other thing is we are a grassroots movement and I think that really is important because it really developed out of I mean everybody that I've worked with all of the priests that I've worked with have had a very strong idea about what they wanted and didn't want some of that's Dennis's fault but you know I mean in all seriousness dennis has introduced a lot of priests to the idea and I've worked with a lot of the priests that have been through Dennis's training would have introduced priests to the idea that it matters what they built yes yes I would like to know from I guess briefly from each of you if there's been a moment you've encountered something sacred be it sculpture painting music or architecture that has touched a wound and you exclaimed within yourself my lord of my god has there been something particularly then that has influenced your work going on a wonderful question and there's their there actually with music there was so many occasions when I've been wounded by beauty in the way that Roth singer talks about but I'll just mention to one of them was hearing Monteverdi Vespers of the Blessed Virgin for the first time that work if you're familiar with it you know what I why I'm saying that if you're not you should get to be familiar but it's it's just it's it's a it's a work of music that is like the heavens opening and and the glory of God just shining forth in a way that's ineffable and breathtaking so that was my discovering that work was one sort of epiphany or theophany for me another one was singing the mr. Popham art Shelley by Palestrina which I've had the chance to do twice over separated by long intervals but that again is a mass that is so richly beautiful I mean I wept both times I sang that mass as part of a choir because it's the beauty there is supernal it's it's on a different level than any merely earthly beauty and you you can tell that there are times when artists even great artists they reach beyond themselves to a new level you know Julia I'm very curious if you can pick something because this is actually a lot of what you talked about today that kind of moment that you describe for example when you went out to your car in the middle of the snowstorm and you had that almost suspended in time moment of seeing the snow going upwards and being struck by that yeah it's interesting because I don't know if you asked the question because you really want to hear what we have to say because we all experienced that and the sublime experience is actually very difficult to put into words unless you're an artist yourself because what do you experience when we experience it we feel something and when we're talking about it it's almost new secondhand and so we almost cheap in our own experience as trying to say this so john ruskin not to repeat the name too much he wrote about this interesting idea of art versus news of the day and he said news of the day is something that you've read the newspaper is valuable but the day after it sold and it's that you know you you wrap up your plates in it before you ship it ups or it becomes useless the day after but something that's extraordinarily well done there's an element of taste and there's an element of timing but a great artist of all stripes they have the ability to put the very best of themselves into what it is they're creating and what he said was kind of interesting because you think wow I really love this poem I imagine if I met the poet how much more they would be to experience and the irony is often when you meet the person there's how much less you experience because they put the very best of themselves how many of us have the community around us to be able to support our deepest thoughts so for people over hundreds of years they saved that secret salt for art and to the degree that they were brilliant is a degree that there's a resonance it's almost the greatest form of time-travel ever created nothing we have technologically has ever matched it so that would be mine I've experienced that lots of times I'm so lucky yeah sounded to me it's through music first of last you know we've all heard of the chill factor in music but we hear something and we get a bristle at the back of our necks for me it's in Meister singers by Wagner we've got the great Stalin C major overture relentless C major signifying the conservatism of the Meister singers of Nuremberg we know that vault of installed Singh is going to come along and shake this up to a little extent but still honor the German masters well the music was on in the prelude last thing time [Music] it goes on and on with it was astonishing fugle developments and then suddenly the cotton comes up and we were than the Church of Newt America and the choir takes over the orchestra dies and it's not a coral corral for me even talking about it now I've got the bristles going up the back of my neck what are these hackles these bristles here's a thing here's a city block in Chicago okay and along here the only sidewalk it's coming a dog right and a long here is coming a cat right and a corner they meet each other and what do they do they Brussels up to make themselves bigger so that when they meet one sees a bigger creature than the other the man is a creature and the rising of the hair follicles on the back of the neck are to do with a residual experience of how to deal with fear you talk about the aesthetic wounding high aesthetics let this cause a man or women to be afraid of something and this is what gives us this delicious experience of our hackles rising when we encounter something particularly beautiful and powerful it is the will within us dying at that experience therefore it seeks to bring us to life to make us bigger so that we can counteract this artistic experience saying that you see something in an experience like that that terrifying it's better because it's as schopenhauer proved or than prove you can prove nothing in this lane but as he postulated aesthetic experience stills the will to work so that when we have a very strong aesthetic experience we feel ourselves beginning to die so therefore we bristle ourselves up to defend ourselves yes against us our and this is always why beautiful art is on the backfoot because it is a threat to humanity yeah this is the tremendous paradox and this is why I believe that the cave painters of antic view of great prehistory that's why they painted in caves they scuttled away down into the depths of the earth so that nobody should catch them doing this thing that was freak everybody else out and and and along that line although you were speaking about music and this is maybe a little bit more along with Julie I would say the Israelites were afraid of God right yeah Moses right and then when he sees God and his his face is transformed and he comes down from the mountain they have to put a veil over because they can't even look at him he's white because he's seen the numinous yeah and is bringing it back and I think in great art particularly for a Christian if it's if it's great sacred art but great art and generator Las Meninas or something like that when you see it for the first time it is the hair on your back of your neck it's joy and sorrow combined and it's the sense of wanting to stay in that moment forever and being so upset that you know you can't write also the fact that at that moment we realize we're great we're so capable of so much more like you you realize how life ought to be and that we could be and that were not yes and so for a moment it's there yeah yeah is a grieving for the miniscule ration that you get yeah you could have had a feast yes absolutely good evening experience absolutely a modern age brought up on the icy teat of nature suckled on the ICT that's that's very grounds no that's the modern age this feeling of grief compassion sadness none of these things we want to match up to yeah I'll confess yeah you get to pick a building if you want a building or whatever I would say one night just going into Notre Dame Cathedral on a whim walking in and walking into evening prayer without realizing it was happening all in French but some hmm and standing at one end and looking down the enormous expanse of that Cathedral and they have very elaborate sort of French Renaissance high altar which is nothing in the daytime but they had it lit beautifully at night and seeing the singer in a white dress you know really beautifully lit and then seeing the altar behind was an overwhelming experience it's just absolutely spectacular and hackls woven it back of the neck yeah and taking you out of time oh so it's just a very brief we stayed for the rest of evening prayer of course yeah yeah yeah l had that famous experience in the same Cathedral mmm is the experience of midnight mass that converted him to the faith hmm it's walking in listening to evening prayer the other one that is the st. Francis of Assisi the going down to the to the shrine was an extremely incredible experience and Ralph Adams cram talked about it as a conversion experience I think the first time I went it was like that of course they've they've renovated it made it much brighter now so to have lost that that was the first time that I went down it was that way it was dark it was all lit with candles it was you know you just really thought you were in the presence right there the final question for the evening thank you so I teach drawing and painting at the school thought Institute of Chicago and in that I don't want to over generalize but I would say that the general idea about beauty the most kind of commonly held consensus is that it's subjective purely on the level experiential now we've had many talks through the Catholic Art Guild about beauty and the arts but my question is understanding the difference in painting especially and the plastic arts compared to you music and architecture juliet primarily is for you you'd started out your conversation with your father this debate about an objective Beauty versus purely experiential and then you spoke to us on a very personal level again about I felt the experiential so my question is what criterion we can hold in common as painters and visual artists for the beautiful again I experienced the very subjective side of it and then I have a degree of pessimism about a lot of the arts movements that are looking back where I feel the goal is to imitate rather than to absorb and kind of or paths and I really am craving a criterion for for painting so you you're looking for a universal principle that you can apply to beauty that doesn't involve looking back to a specific art form I'm at a specific time period or specific just limited to a particular epoch so it's it's interesting because you see in art schools and you find it if you ever talk to people about beauty a lot of discussion that actually we tend to give it more validity than it actually deserves because most people if you taught if you tie it to other things for example if you'd give somebody a choice between a nice picnic in a parking lot of a Target Center or a 4-star magnificent dinner at I created the rose but yesterday which was outstanding and nobody would choose a parking lot nobody doesn't matter what their view of aesthetics is so people put up a great fight that isn't actually matched by their behavior and you can always tell what somebody truly believes by the choices that they make as far as going for principles rather than any sort of principles as as a rather than subject matter which is kind of weighing sub with which you're weighing for music there's vibrations and sound and painting there's vibrations and light but in all art forms there's harmony and rhythms and design as human intention that distinguishes art from accident and often when you begin to start just looking at ratios and looking at nature and seeing how plays out in art you can start to get towards the bare bones of things and so there's a lot and when you talk about but Vitruvius who design buildings in the shade with the divisions of proportions of a human being the same way you'd see growth patterns in a plant as it expands outward towards a light well you go and look at the work by Piero della Francesca and the geometry he used with his compass and his ruler matched in some way although not the outward form of a building the construction of a canvas so I don't think because you use traditional medium or you use representational painting you are tied to any particular outcome and I'd just be bold and stand right where you are it will come around I think thank you to our speakers what a wonderful panel discussion great conversation [Music] you

Channel: Catholic Art Institute

Views: 3,396

Rating: 4.9230771 out of 5

Keywords: Alexander Stoddart, Juliette Aristides, Peter Kwasniewski, Ethan Anthony, Catholic Art Guild, Catholic, beauty, traditional catholic, classical art, classical architecture, Formed in Beauty Conference, Catholic Art Guild conference, Catholic Art, Catholic Artists

Id: x272lB0HrdU

Length: 59min 53sec (3593 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 09 2018