The Art of Life

By Tom Quiner

I read two glowing reviews of the movie, “The Brutalist.” Said Brian Tallerico, reviewing the film at RogerEbert.com, 

“the very existence of “The Brutalist” feels like a miracle: An original story shot on VistaVision cameras, released in 70mm, complete with overture and intermission. It’s a film that turns inward into itself, winding its themes around its characters like a great American novel.”

Over at the Wall Street Journal, Kyle Smith gushed:

“A great American director has announced his presence with a majestic, complicated, somewhat vexing and altogether entrancing film. His name is Brady Corbet, he is 36 years old, and the feature he directed and co-wrote with his life partner, Mona Fastvold, is called “The Brutalist.”

I bit, and went and saw it with a buddy. The movie ran 3 1/2 hours (you read that correctly) including an intermission. From the first scene of an inverted view of the Statue of Liberty to the final scene, an inverted view of a cross, I was subjected to two-hundred dreary minutes of anti-American-exceptionalism, anti-Western Civilization, anti-Christianity, and anti-capitalism propaganda. Dreary, because every scene was dark and murky, an utter waste of VistaVision.

SPOILER ALERT

In sum: the movie was ugly, characterized by a [spoiler alert] homosexual rape scene that came out of nowhere. The rape was perpetrated by the rich American capitalist against the idealistic Jewish architect. Talk about clunky symbolism. To be sure we understand how terrible our country is, the architect’s wife at one point shouts, “this whole country is rotten.” Even Iowa?

I was struck by how many ugly films are made these days, and how much ugly music is being recorded, and how the arts and culture are interconnected with sanctity of life issues. Even architecture is a piece of the cultural puzzle.

Life is creative

Today’s artists have lost sight of the art of life, which is a path to divine truth, or as Henry James put it, a search for “hard latent value.” Too many, in fact, turn and run in the opposite direction which limits their creativity. Life is creative, because it flows from God, who is Divine Truth and Beauty.

“The Brutalist” explores the life of an idealist Hungarian architect who immigrates to the U.S. where he designs buildings in an architectural style called ‘Brutalism.’ Is this ‘brutalism’ the path to divine truth? To the layman, it looks like the structures erected by the old Soviet Union: cold and soulless. Architectural Digest described it this way:

“If modernism is about architecture being honest, Brutalist design is about architecture being brutally honest,” Geddes Ulinskas, principal of Geddes Ulinskas Architects, adds. “Forms are as simple as can be and materials are stripped to be as bare and raw as possible.”

Lots, and lots of concrete is used. Here are a couple of examples here in Iowa: 

1st United Methodist Church Education Building, Iowa City IA 

University of Iowa College of Dentistry

PHOTO CREDIT: Steve Stimmel

By and large, the public doesn’t like the look of these structures. National Public Radio ran a story on the subject last year, focusing on the proliferation of brutalist design in Washington DC. 

They interviewed people in front of the sprawling brutalist J. Edgar Hoover Building (above) of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and got an earful. Not one person had something positive to say: 

“I can’t stand it,” said Arielle Carani, a 24-year-old from Chicago. “I work right across the street from it, so I have to look at it every day that I’m in the office. And it’s just so ugly.” 

Darren Williams, a 29-year-old from Michigan said, “It kinda looks like a prison with windows. Just a concrete slab stuck in the middle of a city.” And Devon Akmon, a 48-year-old from Ann Arbor Michigan said it looks like “a mass of stone and glass without much architectural detail.”

The president responds

Interestingly, upon returning to office last month, President Trump took an immediate swipe at brutalist architecture with an executive order (EO) promoting beautiful federal civic architecture. The EO advances a policy that …

… Federal public buildings should be visually identifiable as civic buildings and respect regional, traditional, and classical architectural heritage in order to uplift and beautify public spaces and ennoble the United States and our system of self-government.

‘Classical’ is the antithesis of ‘brutalism.’

‘The Brutalist’ film is a box office bust with only $12 million in box office receipts in the U.S. to date. Why does Hollywood keep cranking out movies the public doesn’t like anymore?

The answer is there has been a growing loss of faith in Hollywood and most of the art world. People don’t like films like “The Brutalist” because they’re ugly, conceived and manufactured by faithless artists. If anything, the music world was hit even harder.

Robert R. Reilly, author of “Surprised by Beauty,” identified why the creative class loss sight of the art of life:

“The single greatest crisis of the 20th century was the loss of faith. Noise — and its acceptance as music — was the product of the resulting spiritual confusion and, in its turn, became the further cause of its spread.”

As twentieth composers turned away from God, their music became increasingly atonal and ugly, rather than rooted in emotions and beauty.

Listen to some atonal music …

Now listen to some emotive and beautiful music …

The poisonous fruit of Western Civilization’s spiritual crisis, in hindsight, became manifest in 1994 when something odd began to happen. Composers of popular music stopped writing love songs.

What was significant about 1994? That’s the year the Roe v Wade Generation came of age. This is the generation raised in the milieu that bold and loudly proclaimed that human life had no intrinsic value … unless he or she was wanted. Legal abortion was the fate for those unfortunate millions of souls who were unwanted.

Love lost meaning to this generation. Church attendance began to slip when Roe was decided in 1973, as you can see in the chart below, and it began to plummet by 1994.

The end of love?

Blogger DJ Rob tracked the decline of love songs in a fascinating blogpost. In the 1960s, 23 songs with the word ‘love’ in it topped the charts. In the 1970s, it was 26; in the 80s, 25. Although there were 24 in the 90s, most of those were front-loaded in the decade.

The 2000s produced but 7 love songs; the 2010s only 5; and a look at Spotify’s top 50 songs today doesn’t have a single entry with the word ‘love’ in the title. 

I listen to some of this music. A little of it is good, but most of it isn’t, because it feels manufactured, soulless, and often profane.

Writing in The Atlantic, music historian, Ted Gioia, said “old music is killing new music.” The piece explains that …

“Old songs now represent 70 percent of the U.S. music market. Even worse: the new-music market is actually shrinking.”

Amazingly, the newest tunes represent less than five percent of total streams.

We’re ripe for a cultural renaissance.

We’re ripe for beautiful, new architecture and movies that inspire hope and appeal to our better angels. 

We’re ripe for music that embraces melody and proudly proclaims the act of love as the ultimate expression of our humanity. 

The world is hungry for artists who realize that since we are made in God’s image, and that God is creative, we are called to creatively explore the good, the true, and the beautiful with our faith as our guide.

Today’s faithless artists have hit a dead end.

As Pope John Paul II said, “politics is downstream from culture.” Let’s change the culture.

Pulse Life Advocates recognizes that we will never get rid of abortion unless we change the culture. That’s why we publish an annual list of “Top 10 Religious Movies” every Lenten season.

That’s why we’re starting a new, yearlong series beginning Valentine’s Day next week: “52 Greatest Love Songs Ever.” Every week for a year, we will count down another beautiful love song. Why? Because love is the ultimate antidote to abortion.

Our culture has been brutalized by too much bad art. Pulse is going to focus on the art of LIFE, an art form grounded in Love. Check back for an innovative pro-life series that thinks outside the box.

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