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Famous Joshua Gibbs Quotes

“Americans have been slow to identify mediocrity because mediocre art simultaneously embraces virtues which both progressives and conservatives hold dear. In order to condemn mediocrity, one must believe that surviving the test of time is a very reliable sign of goodness, and very few persons on the political left would agree to this premise. However, condemning mediocrity also depends upon admitting that, regardless of other boons it might offer society, capitalism has not been good for art, and very few conservatives would admit this.”

ArtConservatismGood Taste
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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“While Spotify openly publishes user listening activity, the “Private Session” option allows users to listen to music they think stupid, immature, or embarrassing apart from their friends’ knowledge. The “Private Session” feature on Spotify subtly reveals how intensely we want our friends to think we have good taste, and yet we are unwilling to suffer any diminution of comfort or pleasure to achieve this distinction. We want to enjoy sensual trash, but we do not want to be held accountable for it.”

ArtBeautyGood Taste
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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“When progressives and Christians speak of “nature,” they are not referring to the same thing. Within the framework of Christian thought, nature can only be understood in its relationship with the supernatural... In cutting nature off from supernature, the Enlightenment inaugurated a long, slowly unfurling contempt for both nature and supernature which reaches new heights every year.”

ArtBeautyProgressGood Taste
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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“Whether a man is concerned with kings, paupers, plants, pandas, minerals, models, math, production, propulsion, or prostitutes, when he learns what usually happens— what usually works, what usually hurts, what is usually said, what is usually felt— a man has discovered something about that thing’s nature. When a man learns that holding very hot things is usually painful, he learns something about his fleshly nature. When a boy learns that lying to his mother usually leads to fear and remorse, he learns something about his spiritual nature. When we observe that dogs usually become ill after eating chocolate, we learn something about canine nature. Tendency and propensity invariably teach us about nature.”

ArtNatureBeautySupernature
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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“Apart from a belief in the supernatural, it has become very hard to distinguish the natural from the unnatural. Without Heaven, what is the difference between Hell and Earth? Without God, how can the human and the demonic be told apart? More than two hundred years after the French Revolution, the only people who attack a position or practice as “unnatural” are those who believe in God, as well, because the concept of nature only makes sense as an intermediary between the supernatural and the unnatural.”

ArtBeautyGood Taste
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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“The problem with “special” things, though, is that they do not last. As a category of being, “special” cannot help being vampiric, and so “special” is really the opposite of “holy.” Holy things beget holy things. Because holiness shares in the boundless nature of God, there is always more holiness to go around. Holy water consecrates all that it touches as holy. Holy places confer their holiness on the activities that transpire therein. As a bishop consecrates a deacon to the position of priest, or a priest consecrates the romance of bride and groom, holy men may confer their holiness on others. Special things cannot confer their specialness on other things, though. One special thing is naturally at war with other special things. Holiness is an open system, which means a holy thing can make a common thing holy without losing its own holiness. Specialness is a closed system, though, for one thing cannot become special without devouring or absorbing the specialness of another. The goal of a new blockbuster is to make old blockbusters look dull by comparison. The goal of new clothing styles is to make old clothing styles look dowdy by comparison. The goal of a fashionable new church is to make old churches seem dull and conventional by comparison. The goal of new pornography is to make old pornography look chaste by comparison. The goal of the latest KFC sandwich is to make the last KFC sandwich seem flavorless by comparison.”

ArtTraditionArties
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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“Anyone looking to follow in the footsteps of Pollock, Rothko, or Mondrian is out of luck. Pollock was not interested in painting nature. He was not interested in the world or in reality itself. Rather, he painted himself, as all Modern artists must do. Imitation is a failure of self-expression. Imitation is treason, for every act of imitation looks to the past. Imitation also implies hierarchy, for a man must choose who to imitate. If he claims to imitate no one, though, he may claim success in all that he undertakes, for he has no standard outside himself by which his work can be judged.”

ArtBeautyJackson Pollock
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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“Long term exposure to fake things makes real things seem overly dull, demanding, expensive, messy, complicated, and pretentious. Those raised on watermelon candy will find actual watermelon not sweet enough. Anyone raised on comic book movies will not find Hamlet or Paradise Lost sufficiently exciting. Anyone raised on Big Macs will find French onion soup too pungent, or else not sweet enough, not fatty enough, or not salty enough.”

ArtBeautyForgery
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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“Very beautiful things become harder to like the more we give ourselves over to the spectacular, sexy, shocking, ultra-sensual, fashionable art and ethics of Modernity. So far as acquiring good taste is concerned, balance is a myth. Every blockbuster film a man watches makes the task of reading Paradise Lost and Jane Eyre seem more dull and more pointless. Every Top 40 song he listens to makes Mozart and Bach more incomprehensible.”

ArtTradition
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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“Most people choose the music they listen to, the books the read, and the films they watch because of some event which has lately taken place in their own lives. People who are in love listen to love songs, people who are sad listen to sad songs, people who are angry listen to angry songs. Love songs are instructive for the young man in love because they teach him how to think about love and how to assign meaning to the events which occur in a romance. Sad songs teach sad people what their sadness is. Joyful songs instruct listeners on the activities and sentiments that are appropriate to joyful people. Mediocre art asks little of us, though, and so mediocrity trains hearts to shallowness, simplicity, and selfishness. In much the same way that an unpracticed, unused body will wither, bloat, and become incapable of otherwise normal tasks, so will the unpracticed and unused soul.”

ArtTaste
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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“An egalitarian culture (which is no longer particular to progressives, but de rigueur among conservative Christians, as well) cannot fail to hate beauty, for beauty is riotously unfair. The more acclimatized to socialist thought America becomes, the less talent will be allowed to matter. The late aggrandizement of pretentious hacks like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko betrays the progressivist’s frustration with the inequalities beauty invariably establishes.”

ArtConservatism
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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“The average man sees an ugly avant-garde painting, learns it sold for a hundred million dollars, and cannot help responding, “But I could have painted that,” which is exactly the point. The progressive art critic might not claim the beauty of Pollock’s paintings was inherent in the paintings themselves, but in the ideas the painting communicates— although, it should be noted, every art critic has much to gain in championing art which cannot be understood without an interpreter.”

ArtConservatismGood Taste
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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“Physical beauty is eminently more impressive, visceral, and humbling than artistic Beauty. Were a human being the likes of Nicole Kidman or Paul Newman to stand on display in the Metropolitan or the Louvre, and were patrons of the museum able to gaze with impunity—not covertly and from a distance, but from point blank range as though the living spectacles were mere portraits— many people would quickly leave behind the artistic beauty of Rembrandt and Titian.”

ArtBeautyConservatism
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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“Beauty is a liability. “Beauty will save the world,” but don’t tell the Trojans that. “Save the world? Beauty is tearing the world apart!” Any starry-eyed messiah quoting Dostoyevsky from the walls of Troy would have been pitched over. The beauty of Helen threw the cosmos out of whack. The beauty of Sarai jeopardized Abram’s trip into Egypt. So, too, a beautiful sunbather may upset the peace of a family trip to the beach and a beautiful priest might easily distract from mass or compromise confession.”

ArtBeautyTraditionConservatism
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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“As soon as one generation undertakes a project which can be finished in a single lifetime, their children have incentive to scrap that project in favor of projects more suited to their own tastes and values. Any social or cultural project which will take fifty years to accomplish encounters profound existential threats halfway through, for everyone who started the project begins to age out of productivity and those have just entered the project have both incentive and ability to redirect time and funds to a more fashionable project which does not seem so old-fashioned.”

ArtBeautyTradition
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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“Any cultural project which only takes ten years to complete is easily undone. As an ideology, then, the problem with “Change the world” is that it is too easily accomplished. “Change” is doable over and over again, and new projects of “change” undermine and abolish the changes of a previous generation. Everyone who “changes the world” is undermining or abolishing the change some wide-eyed, well-meaning dreamer undertook just a few years ago. “Change the world” always involves crushing the dream of someone slightly older than yourself who wanted to do the same thing. Thus we reach a paradox: unless a society undertakes a project it cannot hope to accomplish, it will not accomplish anything lasting.”

ArtBeautyEducation Quotes
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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“The Enlightenment project was doomed from the start, though, for though human beings run out of money, time, resources, energy, and desire, they never run out of the past. A war on the past will necessarily be endless, for no sooner has a man conquered the past than the very act of conquering becomes the past, as well.”

ArtBeautyConservatismGood TasteFrench Revolution
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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“In a prior age, the human experience was understood as the temporal embodiment of desire, delight, fear, grief, faith, love, hope, hatred, horror, sympathy, gentleness, kindness, loyalty, fidelity, sublimity, desperation, chagrin, anger, fury, wrath, distress, discomposure, shame, dignity, indignity, glory, contempt, slight, heartbreak, fondness, tenderness, adoration, infatuation, compassion, goodwill, worship, sorrow, anguish, despair, woe, dejection, despondency, duty, angst, reverence, respect, esteem, exaltation, melancholy, disquiet, weariness, felicity, glee, bliss, ecstasy, rapture, euphoria, exhilaration, rhapsody, brotherhood, contemplation, mediation, surrender, fancy, impulse, yearning, thirst, hankering, pining, enthusiasm, need, obligation, fancy, mystery, helplessness, luck, recklessness, boldness, fearlessness, wildness, sorrow, regret, gloom, heavyheartedness, and dreaminess and ten thousand others. These are the sentiments which great art compels us to feel. But mediocre art truncates the human experience. It prunes and lops off all the diversity and richness of life and leaves us with little more than lust, amusement, self-fulfillment, and the resentment which comes from our endless search for the power that now attends victimhood.”

ArtBeautyTasteTraditionConservatismVictimhood
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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“Against the reliability of common sense, the laws of science, the ravages of sin, the tendencies of mankind, and the metaphysics which govern created things, some things are not destroyed by time. The ability to last is so exceedingly rare, when a man finds something which has bested time, he has found something for which there is only fitting adjective: divine.”

ArtBeautyTraditionConservatismAestheticsGood Taste
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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“It is natural to care for those who have cared for us, but at the point a man has been dead a hundred years, no one alive who yet cares for him has any natural reason for doing so. In the several decades following a man’s death, those who knew him might carry a torch for his memory, describe the love they received from him, and champion the spirit they have inherited from him. However, if people are still willing to listen to a man one hundred years after his death, he speaks from the grave. After natural affection passes, if any affection remains, it is supernatural.”

ArtTraditionHeritageConservatismAestheticsGood TasteConventionRemi Brague
Author:Joshua Gibbs
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“Despite such verve and passion for Truth, the Christian brand is now rightly denigrated everywhere as trite and trivial. To put the word “Christian” before any kind of service, institution, or work of art is to consign the thing in question to the garbage pile of cut-rate design and cheap sentimentality.”

ArtBeautyChristianityConservatismAestheticsGood Taste
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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“Pleasure takes place in the body, but satisfaction is of the soul, and so things which offer purely physical pleasure cannot help egging people on to consume more and more in search of a spiritual state the carnal thing is incapable of delivering. The economy of spiritual things is different because spirit is immaterial, intellectual, and unquantifiable. There is not “more Christ” in a small bite of the Eucharist than a large one, neither is the object blessed with a bucket of holy water more holy than an object blessed with a thimble full. Inasmuch as a thing appeals more to the spirit than the body, a man needs less of it, which is why many people have accidentally eaten an entire bag of Doritos in one sitting, but no one has ever accidentally read the entire gospel of St. John in one sitting.”

ArtBeautyConservatismAestheticsGood TasteRoger Scruton
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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“Beauty is what lies beyond usefulness. Beauty inspires loyalty and gives meaning to mere usefulness. We need useful things, but we love beautiful things. A building which is merely functional will not last, for people will not love it. They will get bored with it. The average football stadium now costs a billion dollars to build and lasts just thirty years, after which it appears dated, silly, and unfashionable. The Chartres Cathedral, on the other hand, is more beautiful than any sports complex on earth and it has been functional for more than 800 years. Beautiful things last because when they begin to fall apart, we tend to them, revive and restore them; however, when purely functional things fall apart, we tire of them and replace them.”

ArtBeautyArchitectureConservatismModernityCathedralsGood Taste
Book:Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity
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