The Christian Vanguard

I recently found out that there is a Rothko Chapel . Apparently, Rothko intended on arousing a religious experience when you looked at his paintings, and it inspired some to build a chapel in his honor, where there would hang some of his work (different panels of the same project). Looks cold, sterile, and somewhat dystopian.  Two years ago, I wrote about how realism is necessary for art, which you can find  here . It was a reaction against Pollock and Rothko, and I still agree with what I said there. I did qualify myself as saying realism may not have been alone a sufficient reason, but it was definitely a necessary one. I want to add that abstraction is also necessary, which wasn't a view I held at the time. My reaction against the radical abstractionism of Rothko and Pollock inclined me against the view that abstraction was a necessary condition. I mean, look at the "chapel" and you could see why I believed it. It was nothing but abstraction.  But in a con...

People are confused about art, or if not confused, willfully ignorant. You see people trying to be edgy or avant-garde by looking at garbage and calling it art. I don't mean art that is bad in technical skill (like a child's finger painting) or even immoral (I'll use my better judgment and not cite anything here), but literally a thing that doesn't belong to the category of art but that some people want to claim it is. What art actually is, I won't explore in depth here, but I do want to say that realism is a necessary condition for something being art.  I have to be careful about the word "realism" because that's somewhat technical in the art world.  By realism I mean that whatever the subject is in the artwork, it has to capture (or at least attempt to capture) the essence of the thing. And this presupposes that things have real knowable essences. So I mean metaphysical real essentialism. The image must be trying to take a form, something like a...