8 Quotes by John Walford

Postmodernism has not overcome the problems of modernism, but only compounded them with a dosis of cynicism, relativism and indifference.

In the Classical tradition, deriving from ancient Greece and Rome, beauty was perceived as the means by which the artist captured the viewer’s eye in order to engage the viewer with truth and so inspire goodness.

Beyond a narrow, elite audience, there is a pervasive sense from the side of the public that much contemporary art fails to connect – a failure not evident throughout centuries of earlier art.

Redemption in Christ should give the artistically gifted not only a new orientation and a new sense of purpose, but also a new vision of reality, seeing the world through the eyes of faith, looking at the human condition through the eyes of Christ.

Who is one’s audience, the spiritually hostile professional art world or one’s visually insensitive Christian neighbour?

Beauty, therefore, for the modern and postmodern artist has become a highly dubious metaphor for a discredited belief system.

It would be a serious oversight to limit our understanding of the impact of theology to strictly religious art, and overlook its pervasive role in shaping human understanding and artistic expression thereof within any given culture-regardless of the subject matter at hand.

Begbie offers an additional valuable contribution by rejecting the traditional emphasis on beauty, in its Platonic sense, and instead suggesting that beauty be reconceived in Christological terms-as disorder redeemed.