Sunday, October 5, 2008

notes on beauty

"If what we mean by beauty has centrally to do with honesty, authenticity, truth telling, then the congruent simplicity of the aritist's action will heighten, not suppress, the tensioned reality of life in this world."

"That is why so often "nice" art is so much more distasteful and tedious than an unflinchingly honest expression of the ugly realities an artist also perceives."

"It is God's delight in something that makes it beautiful. Beauty is in the eye of the Creator before it is in the eye of the creature."

"...to sentimentalize something is to look only at the emotion in it and at the emotion it stirs in us rather than at the reality of it, which we are always tempted not to look at because reality, truth, silence are all what we are not much good at and avoid when we can. To sentimentalize something is to savor rather than to suffer the sadness of it, is to sigh over the prettiness of it rather than to tremble at the beauty of it, which may make fearsome demands of us or pose fearsome threats"

all taken from the chapter 5, "The Holiness of Beauty" in David Willis' book, "Notes on the Holiness of God"

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