The Destruction of Art by Artists

I just finished watching Bruce Elder's latest film The Young Prince. Being a prolific artist and writer, this two hour "experimental" film was made at the same time as he was writing his book "Harmony and Dissent: Film and Avant-garde Art Movements in the Early Twentieth Century".

As I wrote in the short (preliminary) review on the book, my observations that modern-day avant-garde filmmakers (and artists in general) are interested in non-Christian ways of reaching the transcendence are being validated. Although Elder never elucidates this in his book (he takes a more of a descriptive approach, writing about this phenomenon, rather than expressing his views), his film is a clear indication of his approach. His final quote in his film, from the apocryphal Acts of St. John (which according to many Christian theologians is heretical), is further evidence of this Godless world of modern art.
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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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Beauty, Dissent and Wreckage: Art Without God

The vanguard artists were right. Film - cinema - is the best medium for depicting the transcendent.

Here is a quote from the preface of the book Harmony and Dissent: Film and Avant-garde Art Movements in the Early Twentieth Century by R. Bruce Elder:

Vanguard artists proposed that a universal transcendent art might come forth, might yet unite the arts, might yet re-enchant the world of nature and even of ordinary objects by treating them as hieroglyphs of an invisible reality, and so sway the mind toward a creator-unity immanent in nature. That new art might yet come forth that could fully express the artist's mind. At the beginning of the twentieth century, cinema seemed to many that most closely approximated this ideal. Furthermore... they believed that since it was a synthetic art that exemplified the best attributes of each of the other arts, it was the Ottima Arte.

This quote sounds innocuous enough, but the whole idea is to bring transcendence without God. A kind of man-made transcendence. Not only that, but to conjure up ways for the viewer of these films to be caught up in this transcendence.

This is the false deity, or the hollow deity, that modern artists proclaims to us.
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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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