I don’t know why I write about art occasionally. I’m a confirmed middlebrow–if I don’t care for black velvet matadors or Thomas Kinkade, I don’t get Modernism or Abstract Art at all. But I liked to draw when I was a kid. I guess that gives me an illusory sense of comprehension.

Anyway, Joe Carter at First Thoughts posted a short piece on Picasso today that fascinated me, as it confirmed my prejudices.

What begins in the glow of realist love—or at the very least infatuation—ends in the violent disgust of Cubist distortion. Picasso’s love/hate relationship with the visible world was a visual expression of his love/hate relationship with the particular woman in his life at the time. Cubism, according to the evidence in Picasso’s paintings, is less the abstract juggling of shapes and colors than an index of sexual disgust.

Makes sense to me. See what you think.

Our friend S. D. Smith, over at his blog, meditates profoundly (I think) on the question of limits in art. I agree with him entirely.

In fact, if I had to define art, I think my definition would be something like this— “Art is an endeavor in which an artisan uses some physical medium with sufficient skill that the medium seems to disappear, and something greater than the medium is communicated.” Art is a synergy between artist, material and audience.

That’s what so many modern artists don’t seem to understand. They’ve accepted a subjective definition of art, one that says that art is all about the artist’s subjective feelings and his expression of them—in any form whatever. There are no absolute values. Hang a urinal on a wall? What right do you (philistine that you are) to say it’s not art? Compose a concerto that consists of a period of total silence? It expresses my feelings in ways that you peasants will never comprehend, so it’s art. Lapdancing? If you don’t understand it, don’t judge it.

The true artist struggles with his medium, entering into it intimately, so that he can make it do things nobody ever thought it could. A painting that looks like a photograph—or like a dream. A sculpture that looks like a living being—only the way living beings ought to be, not the way they are in our experience A song that reaches into the listener’s soul and brings up his deepest aspirations and sorrows, so that he weeps just as if he’d just lost—or gained–the love of his life.

Lewis and Tolkien called it “subcreation.” They could call it that because they believed in a Creator. Today’s artists, by and large, don’t believe in a Creator; they believe in accidents. So all they can do is try to re-create accidents.

They do believe in one absolute, universally applicable, value, though—that the public is obligated to pay for their art.

Loren Eaton speaks highly of my novel, The Year of the Warrior, at his I Saw Lightning Fall blog today. Thanks, Loren.