Though land and setting seem rarely featured in Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark, they do comprise an unusual role, one that grows towards the past instead of the future. Cather...
Though William Sidney Mount’s name is rarely mentioned except among art experts, the images he created are timeless Americana—skillfully rendered scenes full of homely comforts and the joy of life...
“How glorious it is to paint in the...
The imagination invests the world with that richness and resonance which makes it an attractive dwelling for the intellect. But the imagination is indispensable to action as well. For the real world is worth our exertion only when the visionary imagination sets the scene for action...
That Western culture is in an advanced state of decay is, I would guess, an article of faith for many readers of The Imaginative Conservative. But consciousness of this decay goes back further than many people are...
Last week a student asked me, “What is creativity?” I was unsure how to respond. I felt like the speaker from Leaves of Grass musing about a child, who, fetching a handful of grass, asks him what the...
Few artists have captured the essence of America’s industrial urbanism with the precision of Edward Hopper (1882-1967).
His images depict an intricate landscape shaped by factories and railroads, and by the collision of traditional European forms with...
It looks just like a pile of wood
Dumped in the middle of the town;
They say that it is very good,
And might be worth ten thousand pounds—
Especially in spacious grounds,
Like those of Buffy Bagshott, Bart;
They say that it will do the...
Is there a difference between evil art and evil in art? Or, to put the matter differently, is there a difference between the dark arts and the art of darkness?
As soon as we begin to ponder...
It is as if our tattooed millennials are trying to make themselves sacred creatures fallen to earth: beings who wear the secrets of the universe—known to the few—on their thighs, on their arms. They are gnostics trapped in narcissism...
Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our...
As modern art has drifted away from traditional Beauty, it has also abandoned Truth and Goodness, rejecting God, religion, and nature in one fell swoop...
"Guernica," by Pablo Picasso (1937)
To engage in dialogue about beauty and...
The beautification of life, the highest “household art” of making people happy and places pretty, also encompasses the adornment of the soul. Because life is more than work, economics, and money, the life of the heart and spirit need constant replenishment...
Culture by its very nature tends to be centripetal, or to aspire toward some unity in its representational modes. The reason for this is that every culture polarizes around some animating idea, figment, or value, toward which everything that it produces bears some discoverable relation...
The world has long sought to explain the mysteries of madness and genius and has largely failed to do so. Perhaps the better idea would be simply to allow madness and genius to go on explaining the world’s own mysteries to itself...
Today’s offering in our...
Seinfeld may be the first situation comedy truly to achieve the status of art. It’s a comic study of life after several decades of a counterculture that supposedly upended all the rules of life, definitely obscured the path to maturity, and persistently encouraged doing as one likes...
