Why can Modern Art be so ugly?

If you tell me that Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring is your favorite painting, and I prefer a landscape scene of the Rockies by an artist I can’t even name, we might agree that our tastes differ, and that’s just fine.

But while there is an element of taste to anything artistic, it isn’t purely taste. God speaks of beauty and ugliness, and if He has declared some things so, then they are really are so, no matter our tastes. We recognizes intuitively too that beauty has bounds – we might disagree whether a a vase of flowers or an ice sculpture would make the best table centerpiece, but we all know that featuring a pile of dog poo would just be gross.

So why then, is there some popular art that many of us intuitively know to be ugly, but which garners such high praise from the world? Jonathan Pageau argues here that it is the ungodly ideology behind it that grabs people, and while he is speaking more to the artists who make it, it might explain why people buy it too.

Ten-story caves, zero good explanations: the Longyou Grottoes Mystery

In 1992 a few Chinese rice farmers decided to drain a “fish pond” only to discover a mysterious, man-made 10-story cave carved into the rock hundreds or thousands of years ago. Why was it made? No one knows. This is just fun. And written by a Christian with a keen sense of curiosity.

Prof uses trick to catch 32 out of 35 students cheating with AI 

This is newsworthy, not for how clever the prof was, but for the common mistake the students made – they didn’t even read what they got AI to write for them. Funny, yes, but how many of us are double-checking (or, rather checking for the first time) the sources of whatever AI-report we’ve generated?

Canadian family claims their grandmother was euthanized against her wishes

I’m going to predict that no one is going to be held accountable.

That’s because, for doctors to continue doling out death, they can’t fear that if they make a mistake they’ll be held liable for murder. Killing someone against their wishes is supposed to still be understood as murder in Canada, but it won’t be in this case. If it was, then you’d find far fewer doctors willing to take up this murderous task and risk the possibility of jail time should one of their murders be done a little too hurried or not quite according to procedure. That’s why it won’t be.

But might that fear be a way to fight our culture of death even with the horrific laws we currently have? We must continue calling out MAiD for what the murder it is – we can’t let any strategizing silence our truth-telling.

But even as we shout God’s truth, we can still demand that the state live up to its own “human autonomy is all” worldview, which says that murder is killing people who don’t want to die, and MAiD is killing them when they do. We can demand they prosecute medical personal who kill the unwilling! And we can pray that such demands throws the spectre of jail-time over the whole bloody industry.

250 years later: Canada, America, and the gift of difference (10-minute read)

Mark Carney managed to make the last election about America rather than his own government’s failings. And Canadians, united in their disgust for Trump’s repeated “51st state” jokes, “elbowed up” to the voting booths and cast their ballot against a US president who wasn’t even on the ballot. We can blame Trump for his horrible timing, and his even more terrible sense of humor (if it even was a joke – with him, how can you know?) but Canadians should also recognize they got played – Carney pointed to the threat without to have us overlook the threat within.

So how can Canadians avoid getting manipulated this way again? By recognizing that America has vices and virtues. To counter a sweeping anti-American bigotry – and let’s remember that God condemns bigotry (Acts 10:34-35) – we need to exercise our biblical worldview, and discern, not between what is Canadian and what is American, but between what God finds condemnable and what He finds praiseworthy.

Talk, don’t listen, to yourself

In the linked article Justin Taylor shares a great excerpt by D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones on the importance of preaching truth to yourself. After all, no one preaches to you more than yourself, and if you’re preaching yourself lies, at some point you might starting believing you.