Think about how art effects you

Be aware of the effect of watching a movie or reading a book or any other way you participate in culture.
Do not use art solely for self-satisfaction. Do not be hypnotized by beauty, artistry, drama, or appearance. Understand what a work of art says, what view of life it promotes. How does a work of art make you feel? What is its human and spiritual impact? Does it inflame your ego? Does it reinforce stereotypes? Does it make you compare yourself to something unimportant? Or does it recognize the part of you that you admire? Does it make you feel more human? Does it address what is best in you?


It is hard to see through appearances
“Mere splendor of appearances does not appeal to the man of piety…Shining garments, a smiling countenance, or miracles of art do not enchant him when they cover vice or blasphemy.”
“It is easy to appreciate beauty, and hard to see through the masquerade of the ostentatious.”
Abraham Heschel

A hollow, empty place of celebration and grief should be at the center of culture
“Our culture also emphasizes individual freedom, but such freedom can be enjoyed only when there is a waiting village of open-armed, laughing elders who know compassion and grasp the complexity of the spirit world well enough to catch us, keep us grounded, and protect us from ourselves. If the modern world is to start maintaining things, it will have to redefine itself. A new culture will have to develop, in which neither humans and their inventions nor God is at the center of the universe. What should be at the center is a hollow place, an empty place where both God and humans can sing and weep together. Maybe, together, the diverse and combined excellence of all cultures could court the tree of life back from where it’s been banished by our literalist minds and dogmatic religions.” Martin Prechtel

Examine the consequences of suffering and violence

Reduce participation in the superficial, illusory, idolatrous, degraded and violent. Question your participation in mass culture or mass events. Don't participate in harmful cultural activities
Do not glorify destruction or misery or enjoy it for thrill only. Do not worship vanity, greed or the ego. Do not reinforce stereotypes. Do not make the user feel alone, envious or depressed. Do not be destructive to the human psyche.
Never portray violence, dysfunction, cruelty or misery as an end in itself. When portraying the vile, show how it is a distortion of the good, and with the intent of finding a resolution to it.
Find a resolution or suggest responses to dysfunctional behavior. Look for the human and spiritual impact. Explore long-term and deeper effects.


Do not escape
“Not to have found an escape may be your salvation. In their fear of being lonely, of feeling cut off, some take to drink, others take drugs, while many turn to politics, or find some other way of escape. So you see, you are fortunate in not having found a means of avoiding this thing. Those who avoid it do a great deal of mischief in the world; they are really harmful people, for they give importance to things that are not of the highest significance. Often, being very clever and capable, such people mislead others by their devotion to the activity which is their escape; if it isn’t religion, it’s politics, or social reform—anything to get away from themselves….They become leaders, or the followers of some teacher; they always belong to something, or practice some method, or pursue an ideal. They are never just themselves; they are not human beings, but labels. So you see how fortunate you are not to have found an escape.”
J. Krishnamurti, Commentaries on Living, Third Series

The mind can be permanently profaned
'Life Without Principle,' maybe just part of the second part of this 30 page essay. "If I am to be a thoroughfare, I prefer that it be of the mountain-brooks, the Parnassian streams, and not the town-sewers...I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with triviality." 83 "We should treat our minds, that is, ourselves, as innocent and ingenuous children, whose guardians we are, and be careful what objects and what subjects we thrust on their attention. Read not the Times. Read the Eternities."
Henry David Thoreau

"Beauty which is acquired at the cost of justice is an abomination"
"Beauty which is acquired at the cost of justice is an abomination and should be rejected for its loathsomeness. All values are esteemed only to the extent that they are worthy in the sight of God, for only through the Divine Light is their light seen." "The criterion by which we judge beauty is integrity, the criterion by which we judge integrity is truth, and truth is the correspondence of the finite to the infinite, the specific to the general, the cosmos to God."
Abraham Heschel Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity

“When in wild, unruly crowds
We move with care to shield our broken limbs,
Likewise when we live in evil company,
Our wounded minds we should not fail to guard.
For if I carefully protect my wounds
Because I fear the hurt of cuts and bruises,
Why should I not guard my wounded mind,
For fear of being crushed beneath the cliffs of hell?”
Shantideva, The Way of the Bodhisattva

A hollow, empty place of celebration and grief should be at the center of culture
“Our culture also emphasizes individual freedom, but such freedom can be enjoyed only when there is a waiting village of open-armed, laughing elders who know compassion and grasp the complexity of the spirit world well enough to catch us, keep us grounded, and protect us from ourselves. If the modern world is to start maintaining things, it will have to redefine itself. A new culture will have to develop, in which neither humans and their inventions nor God is at the center of the universe. What should be at the center is a hollow place, an empty place where both God and humans can sing and weep together. Maybe, together, the diverse and combined excellence of all cultures could court the tree of life back from where it’s been banished by our literalist minds and dogmatic religions.”
Martin Prechtel, The Sun, Sept, 2001.

Depict suffering and violence without thrill
"Homer records these mutilations with an apparent physical relish that suddenly gives way to bitter sorrow (this is one way the images differ from those in horror movies).” David Denby
“Any story which we tell about ourselves consoles us since it imposes a pattern upon something which might otherwise seem intolerably chancy and incomplete. However, human life is chancy and incomplete. It is the role of tragedy, but also of comedy and of painting, to show us suffering without a thrill and death without a consolation.” Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good

Retain the capacity for moral judgment
“The great realists – Cezanne, Courbet, Millet, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, George Eliot, Ibsen – were not naturalists. To be sure, their works take a cool, dispassionate stance toward social life and individual psychology, often laying bare the injustices of bourgeois society. Yet, because they retain the capacity for unsparing moral judgment, their art never sinks to the level of crude ideology or thrill-seeking decadence.”
Martha Bayles, Hole in Our Soul

Put the fair and good into your mind

The goal of culture should be not beauty but goodness
The value of culture is its effect on character. It avails nothing unless it ennobles and strengthens that. Its use is for life. Its aim is not beauty but goodness. Too often as we know, it gives rise to self-complacency. Who has not seen the scholar's thin-lipped smile when he corrects a misquotation, and the connoisseurs pained look when someone praises a picture he does not care for. There is no more merit in having read a thousand books than in having plowed a thousand fields. There is no more merit in being able to attach a correct description to a picture, than in being able to find out what is wrong with a stalled motorcar...



...In each case it is special knowledge. The stockbroker has his knowledge too, and so has the artisan. It is a silly prejudice of the intellectual that his is the only one that counts. The True, the Good, and the Beautiful, are not the perquisites of those who have been to expensive schools, burrowed in libraries, and frequented museums. The artist has no excuse when he uses others with condescension. He is a fool if he thinks his knowledge is more important than theirs, and an oaf if he cannot comfortably meet them on equal footing.
Matthew Arnold did a great disservice to culture when he insisted on its opposition to philistinism.
– W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up

Do not use art for only for self-satisfaction. Every work of art is a challenge to understand life. Explore new possibilities. Explore inner as well as outer beauty. Stand up against superficiality, manipulation, and degradation. Aspire to the good, not the vile.
Support culture that calls you to your higher nature, culture that lifts and inspires, informs and transforms.

Aim to understand a perfect soul and a perfect society
"Utopianism is, as Plato taught us at the outset, the fire with which we must play because it is the only way we can find out what we are. We need to criticize false understandings of Utopia, but the easy way out provided by realism is deadly. As it now stands, students have powerful images of what a perfect body is and pursue it incessantly. But deprived of literary guidance, they no longer have any image of a perfect soul."
Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind


"All delight in fine art, and all love of it, resolve themselves into simple love of that which deserves love. That deserving is the quality which we call ‘loveliness’—(we ought to have an opposite word, hateliness, to be said of things which deserve to be hated.).”
“Take a picture by Teniers, of sots quarrelling over their dice; it is an entirely clever picture; so clever that nothing in its kind has ever been done equal to it; but it is also an entirely base and evil picture. It is an expression of delight in the prolonged contemplation of a vile thing, and delight in that is an ‘unmannered,’ or ‘immoral’ quality. It is ‘bad taste’ in the profoundest sense—it is the taste of the devils. On the other hand, a picture of Titian’s, or a Greek statue, or a Greek coin, or a Turner landscape, expresses delight in the perpetual contemplation of a good and perfect thing. That is an entirely moral quality—it is the taste of the angels. And all delight in fine art, and all love of it, resolve themselves into simple love of that which deserves love. That deserving is the quality which we call ‘loveliness’ – (we ought to have an opposite word, hateliness, to be said of the things which deserve to be hated); and it is not an indifferent nor optional thing whether we love this or that; but it is just the vital function of all our being. What we determines what we , and is the sign of what we are; and to teach taste is inevitably to form character.”
John Ruskin

Discover inward nobility or compassion
“This capacity to shift the scenes suddenly, to strip away from the apparently ordinary man of the story the outer coatings of the commonplace and superficial – the coatings all of us wear – and show him in his inward nobility: this, surely, is the meaning of literary genius. Or to expose a common human weakness so that we feel only compassion, compassion bred of understanding—this is the same genius turned about.”
Manas, February 13, 1952 (See entire article)

Love, learning, growth
“I have dealt at such length with the organism’s need for stimulation and excitation because it is one of the many factors generating destructiveness and cruelty. It is much easier to get excited by anger, rage, cruelty, or the passion to destroy than by love and productive and active interest; that first kind of excitation does not require the individual to make an effort – one does not need to have patience and discipline, to learn, to concentrate, to endure frustration, to practice critical thinking, to overcome one’s narcissism and greed. If the person has failed to grow, simple stimuli are always at hand or can be read about in the newspapers, heard about in the radio news reports, or watched on television and in movies.”
Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness

Find the secret strain
“All things carry a surplus of meaning over being – they mean more than what they are in themselves. Even finite facts stand for infinite meaning. It is as if all things were vibrant with spiritual meaning, and all we try to do in creative art and in good deeds is to intone the secret strain, an aspect of that meaning.”
Abraham Heschel, Man is Not Alone,

Genius in art is invisible to ordinary eyes

“The – to me frightful – discovery, that the most splendid genius in the arts might be permitted by Providence to labour and perish uselessly; that in the very fineness of it there might be something rendering it invisible to ordinary eyes.” The Genius of John Ruskin, 327


“And I felt also, with increasing amazement, the unconquerable apathy in ourselves and hearers, no less than in these the teachers; and that while the wisdom and rightness of every act and art of life could only be consistent with a right understanding of the ends of life, we were all plunged as in a languid dream – our hearts fat, and our eyes heavy, and our ears closed, lest the inspiration of hand or voice should reach us – lest we should see with our eyes, and understand with our hearts, and be healed.” The Genius of John Ruskin, 330
“The more beautiful the art, the more it is essentially the work of people who ; – who are striving for the fulfillment of a law, and the grasp of a loveliness, which they have not yet attained, which they feel even farther and farther from attaining the more they strive for it. And yet, in still deeper sense, it is the work of people who know also that they are right. The very sense of inevitable error from their purpose marks the perfectness of that purpose, and the continued sense of failure arises from the continued opening of the eyes more clearly to all the sacredest laws of truth.” 345

What is the crown of rejoicing in a work of art?
“Well, what do these two men [Homer and Shakespeare], centres of mortal intelligence, deliver to us of conviction respecting what it most behooves that intelligence to grasp? What is their hope – their crown of rejoicing? what manner of exhortation have they for us, or of rebuke? what lies next their own hearts, and dictates their undying words? Have they any peace to promise to our unrest – any redemption to our misery?”
John Ruskin