The Culture Club

Tag: Art

  • CG Jung on What Art ‘Means’

    I’ve written here before on meaning in poetry and it’s a subject that continues to fascinate me. Many of our discussions at Culture Club meetings concern meaning (particularly the heated debates around meaning in Bob Dylan’s Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts), and I still suspect that this is not necessarily the question we…

  • Thomas Mann on Spirituality in Art

    Terry Teachout’s quote of the day at About Last Night is relevant for our discussion on sprituality in art. It’s from Thomas Mann’s Reflections of an Unpolitical Man. Art is a conservative power, the strongest of all; it preserves spiritual possibilities that without it–perhaps–would die out.

  • Beethoven’s Molecular Growth, and Why He’s Probably the Greatest Composer Who Ever Lived

    In the Charles Eliot Norton lectures, Leonard Bernstein analyses Beethoven’s 6th Symphony, and highlights one of Beethoven’s greatest strengths as a composer: [The 6th Symphony] exemplifies that special molecular growth process of his, the incredibly ongoing quality of his music, whereby motifs, or parts of motifs, can become attached, or detached, in infinite numbers of…