Modern Art



I've written about modern art on this blog before with some insight into "art imititating life." Below is a link to a UK Times piece on why it is okay not to like modern art--this reminds me of a joke that I heard on the radio the other day:



An older woman was looking at a piece of modern art in a gallery rather confused, seeing the gallery owner nearby she pointed at it and said "What is it?"



Rather condescendingly he pointed out, "It is supposed to be a mother and child."



She responded, "Then why isn't it?"



Why it's OK not to like modern art

By Julian Spalding at Times Online:



I HAVE NEVER met anyone who told me they loved modern art. No one ever came up to me, their eyes glowing with pleasure, telling me I just must see, say, the new wall drawings by Sol Lewitt in the 1970s, or the smashed-plate paintings by Julian Schnabel in the 1980s, or the life-size, glazed porcelain figures by Jeff Koons in the 1990s.



I have, however, met plenty of people who have told me that I ought to like modern art. There is some place for “ought” in life, but none at all in art; art is a gift, not a duty. The people who told me that it was my job as a curator to like modern art invariably had a vested interest in so doing: either they earned their living making, teaching, criticising or curating modern art, or they came from the worlds of the media and marketing, who genuinely admire anything that can attract so much attention.

Florida



Tallahassee Democrat | 05/09/2003 | Man who can't swim saves woman in pond



Tracy Olson cannot swim. But when he saw an elderly woman lose control and drive her car into a small pond behind his home, he knew he had to do something.



So Olson, a self-employed plumber, grabbed a hammer and dog-paddled his way to the sinking Ford Crown Victoria. He made his way to the car, broke one window with the hammer and managed to pull Ann Adamski, 86, to safety.



"He couldn't swim, but he jumped in," said Pasco County Sheriff's Sgt. Raymond Stanley. "He did what he had to do. He saved her life."



A good story about a hero, but brings home how in Florida old people drive into ponds and sometimes even into other people.

From a Sermon by Saint Ephrem



From the Universalis: Office of Readings:



Death trampled our Lord underfoot, but he in his turn treated death as a highroad for his own feet. He submitted to it, enduring it willingly, because by this means he would be able to destroy death in spite of itself. Death had its own way when our Lord went out from Jerusalem carrying his cross; but when by a loud cry from that cross he summoned the dead from the underworld, death was powerless to prevent it.

An Excerpt from My Mass Book



Found here...Our Sunday Visitor's the Eucharist

Group Evil







Most people by now have seen the images of high school senior girls beating and humiliating younger high school girls after a powder puff football game. The rage and abuse exhibited in the video is nothing short of demonic--and I am reminded of M. Scott Peck's book People of the Lie where he devoted several chapters to the subject of "group evil."



Dr. Peck felt that the root cause of why a group suddenly becomes possessed were two fold--laziness and narcissism. Both of these are obviously at odds with any authentic spirituality (regardless of what religious tradition you embrace). He muses in the book about a future where educators will provide children with the tools to avoid being swept up in the tide of violence and destruction that such evil unleashes:



Children will, in my dream, be taught that laziness and narcissism are at the very root of all human evil, and why this is so. They will learn that each individual is of sacred importance. They will come to know that the natural tendency of the individual in a group is to forfeit his or her ethical judgment to the leader, and that this tendency should be resisted. And they will finally see it as each individual’s responsibility to continually examine himself or herself for laziness and narcissism and then to purify themselves accordingly. They will do this in the knowledge that such personal purification is required not only for the salvation of their individual souls but also for the salvation of their world.



Now, if you think I'm bringing this up to pound on the high school where this occurred you are wrong. I bring it up because that high school is very symbolic of what we as a country are becoming. If sloth and pride are the very roots of all human evil--we stand on the precipice of witnessing great acts of evil in our land. For we quickly are becoming a nation of obese lazy and narcissistic individuals. This isn't my opinion but the stuff of what Time and Newsweek are reporting weekly in their profiles of America.



The sacredness of every human must motivate us to take a stand against the evil that seeks domination and destruction before it is too late. There is much to pray about these days.

Cheapest Place to Buy my Book on the Internet!



The How-To Book of the Mass by Michael Dubruiel : Booksamillion.com (1931709327, Paperback)

Gethsemani Abbey has a New Site!



The design now features the "God Alone" gate seen in the right hand column on this blog. Check it out at:



Alone in God - The Abbey of Gethsemani