A mostly self-published book by a new and undiscovered Christian author is selling like hotcakes.  It’s called The Shack, and its sales are impressive.

Just over a year after it was originally published as a paperback, “The Shack” had its debut at No. 1 on the New York Times trade paperback fiction best-seller list on June 8 and has stayed there ever since. It is No. 1 on Borders Group’s trade paperback fiction list, and at Barnes & Noble it has been No. 1 on the trade paperback list since the end of May, outselling even [Eckhart] Tolle’s spiritual guide “A New Earth,” selected by Ms. Winfrey’s book club in January.

I’d never heard of it before reading this article, but you may have.  Here’s a little of the plot:

Early in the novel the young daughter of the protagonist, Mack, is abducted. Four years later he visits the shack where evidence of the girl’s murder was discovered. He spends a weekend there in a kind of spiritual therapy session with God, [a happy black woman] who calls herself “Papa”; Jesus, who appears as a Jewish workman; and Sarayu, an indeterminately Asian woman who incarnates the Holy Spirit.

Al Mohler has called the book “deeply troubling” for its theological implications and other Evangelical leaders have said as much.  Oh, I don’t know about all this.  I think it’s great for an unknown author to publish a book that people are buying.  I think it’s great for that author to be Christian.  I think it’s great if that book discusses faith, or concerns itself with faith.  I think it’s bad if the book is The Purpose Driven Life With a Plot.  I think it’s bad if people are buying the book like hotcakes, not because it’s quality literature, but because it’s about Jesus and Christian Stuff.  A bad book about Jesus and Christian stuff is oh-so-more-dangerous than any number of good books about depraved people.  But maybe it’s quality literature.  Maybe it’s good stuff.  You can buy it here.

The appeal of architectural symmetry, I think, is one good argument for intelligent design and the existence of some kind of natural aesthetic law.

Symmetros is a Greek word, and ancient Greek architecture used symmetry as a basic organizing principle. As did Roman, Roman-esque, and Renaissance. Indeed, it is hard to think of any architectural tradition, Western or non-Western, that does not include symmetry. Symmetry is something that Islamic mosques, Chinese pagodas, Hindu temples, Shinto shrines, and Gothic cathedrals have in common.

Of course, much modern architecture eschews symmetry for something far more engage: asymmetry!  Yet, we still beg to see what we love.

Why is architectural symmetry so satisfying? As Leonardo da Vinci’s famous drawing demonstrated, it reflects the human body, which has a right side and a left, a back and a front, the navel in the very center. Du Sautoy writes that the human mind seems constantly drawn to anything that embodies some aspect of symmetry. He observes that “[a]rtwork, architecture and music from ancient times to the present day play on the idea of things which mirror each other in interesting ways.” When we walk around a Baroque church, we experience many changing views, but when we walk down the main aisle-the line along which the mirror images of the left and right sides meet-we know that we are in a special relationship to our surroundings. And when we stand below the dome of the crossing, at the confluence of four symmetries, we know we have arrived.

Nice article.

Laurie Fendrich, in her ongoing series on aesthetic taste, says that people in a democracy love equality more than they love freedom.  This is why they can’t stand to think that someone has - and is capable of having - better “taste” than they do.

The mere thought that some people might have better taste than other people seems to make a lot of people go bonkers. (It’s funny, though, how they accept the fact that some people are just plain better at sports than other people, or that some people have better singing voices than others do. Even if you’re born with sports talent or musical ability, you have to work hard to improve them, and people accept that. But they don’t like the idea that the same things might apply to taste.)

Oh, I love this.  This works really well when you suggest to people that the book they’re reading is actually very mediocre literature.  There, I bet some of you just got angry.  I’ll bet some of you think I’m being elitist.  I’ll bet you think I’m talking about Harry Potter books and other books that people read on airplanes.  Well, I am.  And if you think those books are Great Books, then you have Bad Taste.  And now you’re mad at me.  Congratulate yourself.  You have tasted of the Radical Egalitarian Kool-Aid.  But don’t take my word for it.  Read the essay.

In her series on the teaching of taste, art professor Laurie Fendrich reminds us why good art happens to bad people, why VBS teachers like Thomas Kincaid paintings, and why I hope my daughter’s babysitter doesn’t shop at Anthropologie:

It should be obvious (although somehow it isn’t) that having good or bad taste-in anything-has utterly no connection to whether one is morally good or bad, and startlingly less correspondence with intelligence or level of education than one might think. Life mixes morals, intelligence, education and taste in individuals into various stews. When talking about art, it’s always worth noting that, as often as not, brilliant art collections have been built by people who were despotic, wicked or downright evil-Leo X, the Medici, Hermann Goering come immediately to mind.

Of course, this maxim doesn’t also mean that, because we should strive for moral virtue, we should celebrate aesthetic poverty.

Artist Gerry Hofstetter is letting his light shine in Washington, D.C.  Which is to say, he’s using giant, 6,000-watt projectors to illuminate the National Cathedral with all kinds of cool images.  It’s called “Lighting to Unite.”  I am not sure how it’s uniting people, unless he means in the physical sense of drawing a large crowd - which is a perfectly fine way, I suppose, of doing it.

This is not a post about country music.  This is not even a post about rap.  It’s not even about the death of the short story.  It’s about the need for authenticity in art, and how the current audiences of just about every art form are craving it.  In other words, rather than fiction, we prefer non-fiction, memoir, and biography in our books.  We want our films to be “Based on a True Story.”  And we want our rappers to actually be real gangsters, and our country music stars to actually be rednecks.

If Huckleberry Finn were released today, it’s easy to imagine the mass-market audience responding with a yawn. “Not even written by a fugitive slave.” Fiction is absent from our general interest magazines, replaced by intensely reported narrative features. The message is simple: We want it to be real.

Of course, this writer says that maybe country music is the one place where we don’t demand authenticity.

Some genres are immune from our weird and novel demands. Country, both in its classic and alternative forms, tops them: “I take the truck on into town/ And buy whatever we can’t seem to grow/ I work these hands to bleed cause I got mouths to feed/ And I got 15 dollars hid above the stove.” You don’t hear that and think: I know Ryan Adams is a wine-guzzling short guy with a lot of money, not a poor farmer.

As a writer of plays and short stories, oh, how I feel the burn of all this.  I’ve written creative nonfiction, too, but I’m afraid that if I start focusing my writing on personal essays, I’ll run out of subject matter and have to start making it up, like David Sedaris does.  What do you think?  Why do we seem to crave authenticity now more than ever?  It’s not an uncommon question.  Postmodernism is supposedly all about authenticity.  I suspect the answer is theological.

Why teach taste?  Painter and art professor Laurie Fendrich says some of her readers wonder why she professes to teach, and to be able to teach, taste. 

Why are college art professors so afraid to convey to their students that they have superior taste?, and, Why are they afraid to teach that taste to their students?

This is a good question in a world where taste might not exist.  She says it has something to do with the same kind of moral relativism she sees in university types.

This same relativism clearly shows up in people who insist that matters of aesthetics boil down to preferences. It shows up in university professors when they say they are there simply to “make it clear to…students that the job of an art historian is not to judge whether art is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (i.e., notions of our own taste are not what matters), but to try to understand art within the context in which it was produced.”

Of course, Fendrich doesn’t seem to have a problem with moral relativism (read the essay), although she is offended by aesthetic relativism.  Of course, God doesn’t provide as many universal imperatives about aesthetic behavior as he does about moral behavior, which means it’s even more difficult to judge, even if the implications are less dire.  Nevertheless, she makes a good point.  When art professors teach the absolute relativity of aesthetic tastes, then “No wonder so many students fall asleep in art history classes!”  Nothing is more caffeinating than a professor who says you’re wrong.

Laurie Fendrich, a blogger for The Chronicle Review and a painter and a fine arts professor, shocks higher education by suggesting that not everyone has good taste.

It’s said that there’s no accounting for taste, although I believe it’s often the case that it’s rather easy to account for it. Yes, taste may be subjective at its core, but that core is surrounded by a lot of reasons that very adequately explain why something is good or bad. There are many who would argue that because of the subjectivity of taste, it follows that no one, including a college teacher, has the right to challenge the taste of another person, including students.

I’m sure her students love to hear this, and her colleagues.  But why teach art or literature - which is just another way of saying one teaches “taste” - if there’s no such thing?  Fendrich is going to be writing more columns about taste and how to teach it, and I’ll be commenting here.

This is not an article about Aliza Shvarts, the Yale art student who either did, or did not, make an art project out of her real, or fictional, abortions.  It is, however, an article about what’s wrong with the cultivation of young artists and how people like Ms. Shvarts can be led astray by too much politicizing and too little practice on how to make an eye look like an eye and so on and so forth.

A traditional program in studio art typically begins with a course in drawing, where students are introduced to the basics of line, form and tone. Life drawing is fundamental to this process, not only because of the complexity of the human form (that limber scaffolding of struts and masses) but because it is the object for which we have the most familiarity — and sympathy. Students invariably bristle at the drawing requirement, wishing to vault ahead to the stage where they make “real art,” but in my experience, students who skip the drawing stages do not have the same visual acuity, and the ability to see where a good idea might be made better.

This same pedagogical method can be applied, really, to instruction in anything.  Learn the rules first.  Break the rules second.  Come to a more healthy and less legalistic application and appreciation of the rules third. 

It is often said that great achievement requires in one’s formative years two teachers: a stern taskmaster who teaches the rules and an inspirational guru who teaches one to break the rules. But they must come in that order. Childhood training in Bach can prepare one to play free jazz and ballet instruction can prepare one to be a modern dancer, but it does not work the other way around. One cannot be liberated from fetters one has never worn; all one can do is to make pastiches of the liberations of others.

Writing should be taught this way.  And art.  And architecture.  And much else where imagination drives the work.

My post of yesterday, “Abortion as Art” started off with the caveat: This is not a joke, where Yale art student Aliza Shvarts impregnated herself and aborted fetuses for an art project.  Apparently, though, it was a joke.  Or at least a “creative fiction.”  The Yale Office of Public Affairs posts this announcement:

Ms. Shvarts is engaged in performance art.  Her art project includes visual representations, a press release and other narrative materials.  She stated to three senior Yale University officials today, including two deans, that she did not impregnate herself and that she did not induce any miscarriages.  The entire project is an art piece, a creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman’s body.

She is an artist and has the right to express herself through performance art.

Had these acts been real, they would have violated basic ethical standards and raised serious mental and physical health concerns.

Thanks, Yale.  Does lying also violate basic ethical standards, too?  Oh, I don’t know.  The whole thing still testifies to the dereliction of universities and contemporary art into the realm of the absurd.