On Forms vs. Art Forms

[lhynard]

For the last 7 weeks, my graduate student Christian fellowship on campus has been watching a video series by theologian R.C. Sproul, entitled Recovering the Beauty of the Arts. In this series, Dr. Sproul discusses modern Christianity's seeming fear of the arts and the problematic nature of this issue

Comments

[lhynard]

Communication is not the same as transport of information from one system to another with the information staying the same. That goes without saying, I suppose.

I did not intend to imply that it is transport with the information staying the same. On the contrary it never does. Just like in engineering, there is no perfect machine, in communication, there is no perfect medium. (Yet despite our inability to make a perfectly efficient machine, we still have functional machines, and one machine can be said to be better than another objectively.)

I should have been more clear in my post that I believe that art forms are the media through which something is communicated. All communication has to have a medium, a source, and a recipient. When I agree that an art form communicates something, I am implying -- and from the context of his talks, so is Sproul -- that the art is solely the medium and not the source. I guess I would have done better to say that a form without a communicative source is not a medium for any communication and thus is not art.

I do not believe that all beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I think this statement comes about because we -- unfortunately, in my opinion -- refer to at least three different things as beauty. But I've discussed that in another place.