Art Goes to Seed

“In the sensate style, techniques become elaborate, complex, highly skilled, often showy. They are designed to impress, even to stun viewers. The means used to produce sensate art are varied and enormous in scope. Often a work’s mere size—its hugeness—passes for quality; the bigger a statue or building, the better it is thought to be. …

Truth Has A Face

“However, the biblical story is pretty unwieldy and remains storylike despite our best efforts. But over the course of the last 350 years, we have risen to the occasion and have trained ourselves to think of the story as just so much external baggage carrying around the internal, timeless truths. Depending on how the story …

Integral Art

“In technique, integral art approaches perfection. Figures no longer are portrayed frontally. Statues come to life. The means of execution remain moderate but are used to marvelous effect. Though visual in form, the art continues, in the ideational tradition, to ignore the vulgar, the debasing, the ugly, the immoral, the eccentric. If something base appears …

Ideational Art

“Ideational art, speaking for its culture, represents a nonvisual world of transcendental realities lying beyond both reason and the senses. Its subjects are spiritual: Almighty God, the Divine Christ, the blessed Madonna, inspired apostles and saints, and, generally, the realm of intangible spiritual values” (B.G. Brander, Staring Into Chaos, p. 269).

Up to Our Chins in Sensate

“Drawing their data from encyclopedias, histories of art, and museum catalogs, from art journals, scholarly monographs, and other reference sources, the researchers listed art works by the scores of thousands. They classified each item according to its traits, whether ideational, integral, or sensate. Then Sorokin compared changes in the arts to the changes of cultural …

And Narrative Is All the Rage These Days

“MTV’s rock videos tend to be fragmented and surreal, with fast cuts, visual rhythms, and imagery that is striking but does not make a lot of sense. Country videos naturally tend to be narratives, reflecting the storytelling character of the music'” (Gene Edward Veith, Honky-Tonk Gospel, p. 165).