Sunday, May 30, 2010

Durable Transmissions from One Generation to the Next

A little while ago, Dr. Mary Grabar, a poet and professor of English Literature, wrote an essay entitled, "Death by Suicide: the End of English Departments and Literacy", in "Minding the Campus: Reforming our Universities". It is compelling  — please click the link in the title heading this post and read it. She ranged through many contributing factors and supporting points leading to the core of her argument.



Copyright © 2010 Wofgang Stoudt



Her main point was that, in our society, English Literature departments in most major colleges and universities have so strayed from their missions that, not only is a higher calling never heard by truly gifted artists, but even the more straightforward competencies are being lost: we are becoming an illiterate people.



This is true not only in literature but in the visual arts, applied arts, and other related arts.


Dr. Grabar amalgamates the emblematic in her stories: not merely does her matriculant wish for and fail to receive Classics in favor of contemporary politicized swill, but graduates, in jobs as nurses or engineers, are incapable of forming adequate, basic, handwritten communication to peers.


We erode from erudition to incomprehension. This principle suggests that higher callings affect applications within their broad fields. This holds true in poetry, in music, in higher mathematics, and in the visual arts: lose the poet, lose basic literacy. Each loss from the fine arts affects applied societal and personal abilities.


Copyright © 2007 Wolfgang Staudt


Each successive wave of erosion of the quality of our fine arts incrementally decays the willpower of our society to survive and maintain the liberty to enjoy rights granted by our Creator. As we cease to be a Christian society, we employ styles of expression that are either increasingly opaque or crude, and society, through the economy, devalues the work of artists. Our art is a barometer of our spiritual state. By the loss of position of architecture as a communicant of cultural vitality, Christendom lost the means of creating certain durable transmissions from one age to another of its foundations, inspirations, and aspirations — of what ordered it — so that we now lack confidence to assert the very right to life of our own society. We forgot. What culture has done this and survived?



An example of a durable transmission that was begun more than a century ago is the Roman Catholic Cathedral of the Sagrada Familia, in Barcelona, of the Catalán province of Spain. Its durability may consist partly in maintaining the vision of its principal architect, Antoní Gaudí through the several generations required to build it, although he died in 1926. It is still under construction. Gaudí considered himself the last Gothic. The striking pictures of his work in this post are by Wolfgang Staudt (who generously allows certain of his images to be reposted online with attribution). They barely reveal the talent granted by God to the architects of such marvels. Should this building survive the destructive evils devised in modern Western civilization, it will be a witness of our Creator to generations.


Will architecture or any other art save Western society? Not by themselves, though in a degenerate state they contribute to the fraying of culture. More importantly, vital works of visual arts inspire individuals and communities to strengthen the framework of society in their locale, to "brighten the corner where you are" as it might be phrased. As we seek and identify those works that so encourage us and collect and create a market for them we are beginning to build our culture a new base of vitality and turn it from its present course of self destruction.




Saturday, May 8, 2010

Sprawlanta — American Makeover Episode 1

Many of the great old neighborhoods we cherish are now illegal to build, according to zoning and land use codes imposed in the last 75 years. While we may not want obnoxious uses next to our homes, our massive municipal regulations go far beyond that and mandate over-accommodation of cars to the extent of excluding and even prohibiting other forms of transport. Some of this resulted from car makers lobbying governments to mandate certain taxes, uses, and configurations that were friendlier to automobiles than to others. This opened up huge sections of land for the middle class, but it distorted markets for transport and for real estate. Now, many recognize the desirability of varied transportation and community configurations but must overcome a regulatory morass to build them. Here's a story of one such development in the middle of Atlanta.





This approach encompasses small towns, mid-sized cities & towns, and the cores of large metropolitan regions. Here is the website of the producers of this short video. They seek funding to continue documenting this trend.
http://www.americanmakeover.tv