Tag: Art

• December 6, 2024

  Should I Curb The Mental Chatter?

  Question: During my self-observation, I’ve noticed what strikes me as needless mental chatter. Should I try to curb it? What I learned from Zen was to really sit with whatever was arising. My Zen teacher would suggest that I sit without a timer. Just sit for as long as possible. No doubt he had many reasons…
• July 18, 2014

  Plenitude: The Romantic feeling of joy

  Against the postmodern view that the aim of art is to desecrate what is higher, to transgress sacred boundaries, or to disrupt the status quo, I posit that contemplative art glorifies while active art makes what is more plentiful. The tradition espousing the fullness of being is, of course, Romanticism. For all his bluster against Romanticism as…
• July 17, 2014

  Rejecting art as transgression

  It was about five years ago, in 2009, that Roger Scruton’s essay, ‘Beauty and Desecration,’ appeared in City Journal. What is remarkable about the essay is that we had nearly forgotten that art was, until quite recently, not at all concerned with the transgressive and provocative. In fact, it is only after 1930, according to Scruton, that the…
• February 8, 2014

  Plotinus on sculpting the self

  In Enneads I 6, 9, Plotinus writes, Go back inside yourself and look: if you do not yet see yourself as beautiful [i.e., as participating in the Idea of Beauty], then do as the sculptor does with a statue he wants to make beautiful; he chisels away one part, and levels off another, makes one…
• August 9, 2013

  Lunga School, ‘an ambitious offspring of the festival’

  My friend Jonatan Spejlborg Jensen, a graduate of Kaos Pilots in Denmark, and his colleague Björt Sigfinnsdóttir have launched Lunga School. Lunga School, whose first incarnation will be 4-month-long semester of art and self-cultivation workshops starting this spring, is ‘the first of its type in Iceland.’ To learn more about the school, you can read…