From what I can tell Kanye West got into the fame, I mean music business, the same way the mafia get into the ‘protection’ business.  “I’m the one telling you how it is, or else”.  That or it is something about the sheer force of charm.  He clearly has no talent by any objective standard.  Which is the real issue.  Today art is defined by whatever ‘artists’ decide to do.  Once you get the label, you are in and what you do is art.  This view stands in stark contrast to the rich tradition imparted to us in the West.  This tradition was sharply cut off by Modernism.  The remnants lingered for a while and now under postmodernism, whatever anyone wants to do is accepted, but we do still have people at the top, who serve or represent a large number of people with their ‘art’.  Based on consensus this is the new model.  Kanye is king.

‘F’ is for Fool.  I was going to photoshop this and then I found an actual picture.

Edmund Burke lays out the traditional view in his excellent book A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.  Which is what he did, he made an inquiry as why things were the way they were.  Another famous work, by Adam Smith had a similar title, which we often forget, as we turn it into his belief or a perscription rather than an observation; An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.  So they made observations and commented on them.  This was the status quo of the day.  A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of Pop Culture, I believe was exhausted in the short paragraph above.  Seriously, who is writing treatises on this mess that will last more than 200 years?  No one.  I hope this post doesn’t last more than a few years and is replaced by something better, by people who write longer sentences containing deeper thoughts.  But for now, we have Kanye.

At this point I really just want to recommend Burke’s book and stop writing.  But most people won’t get around to it.  And I don’t really feel like a review.

Burke took for granted that there was an objective standard for beauty present, to some degree, in all people, because that’s what everyone thought at the time.  Truth was something fixed.  That’s why science was born out of the Christian West, because Christians believed that God was faithful, and operated his world consistently.  Therefore we could observe those operations, systematically and Science was born.  Today we have come unhinged from this basic assumption.  Today truth is in the eye of the beholder, so of course beauty is.  Oh the Medievals had such a beautiful idea that creation of any art was simply a discovery.  Modern science has ‘discovered’ much the same thing as they experiment with music.  Infants who should have a clear objective palate, respond consistently to different types of music.  C. S. Lewis, a pre-Modern to the death, explored the idea of sehnsucht, that is joy.  The type of joy we are brought to by an experience that is so close to heaven, it is as if heaven is pushing into our world and we get a small taste.  A taste that leaves us hungry and longing for more.  And since God made a world where our longings can be met, with the correct cautions observed, there must be a heaven to satisfy these sorts of longing. God made us, he made this world, we bear the image of God, is it really so far fetched to think that there are inherent good and bad types of art to speak to that humanity?  Christians should believe in objective truth.  Of course man has rebelled, and created his own version of truth.  Lots of people believe it and it seems legitimate.  But Paul says the wisdom of man is foolishness, to God.  And the same goes for the tastes of man.  It’s not hard to see that a people unable to tell the difference between male and female would have a hard time telling the difference between good and bad art.

It is a fact that large numbers of people on this earth developed a taste for human flesh.  Large numbers of people so alter their standards of right and wrong that they no longer have any problem with the evil they do.  It seems normal, and they have a taste for that which is totally forbidden by the word of God.  These sort of people seem to end up destroying themselves with no supernatural intervention necessary, but before they do, they operate with bad taste.  And we all can do this to varying degrees with anything.  Just because you like something or something makes you feel a certain way is no basis for beauty.  You may have been badly trained.  Your tastes may be off.  I am certain that the tastes of our culture are off.  Look around, we exemplify the worst most immoral behavior as defined by the the objective standard of Scripture.  Why should we produce or appreciate true beauty?  Even in the church, we certainly don’t ask these questions anymore.  Taste is up to you, you have a right to do whatever you want.  It’s all about you, and if people don’t realize how wonderful you are, go to another church.   But we don’t have to wander in the dark.  There are many examples of peoples who were in tune with what Scripture said about everything.  They produced much fruit, they produced us, then we threw it all away.  The Medievals are a great example or the Puritans.  We need to get our tastes back on the right track.  We need to do more philosophical inquiring.

That’s enough chattering, go read Burke’s book and throw eggs at Kanye if you ever get the chance.