Monday, October 08, 2007

Moral Art, Moral Imagination

Art in general, not merely fashion or culture, should delight, provoke, surprise, but you can’t have great art without having moral art.

Does this involve some restriction or discrimination in what one creates? Yes, but no more restriction than human nature or nature itself.

Russell Kirk used Burke's term “moral imagination,” which is an apt phrase. You can’t have one without the other. Moral-only and you can have boring, didactic art, imagination-only or you can have wild chaos.

When we look at the history of art we find that the greatest art had moral imagination.

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