"Art produces ugly things which frequently become beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time."

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese. - G. K. Chesterton

Early in the 20th century, French painter Georges Rouault gave people a new way to see Jesus. Using layer upon layer of luminous colors and bold black lines, he brought biblical themes to life on his canvases. His shockingly powerful images expressed his profound personal faith in a living Jesus. Though highly skilled and trained in the popular styles of his day, he turned his back on artistic fashion to provide fresh perspective. Because Rouault saw beyond the accepted pictures of Christianity, he exhibited his work with other creative, cutting-edge rebels. His incandescent images of Christ healing the lame and feeding the poor were (and still are) hung side by side with landscapes by Henri Matisse and abstracts by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. During his 60 years as a working artist, Rouault depicted many subjects, but his favorite by far was the face of Jesus. His studio overflowed with hundreds and hundreds of portraits of Christ. When asked why he was so obsessed with painting Jesus, his answer was, "My life's goal is to paint a portrait of Christ so moving that whoever looks on it will be immediately converted."

Has anybody here seen “The Last Samurai?” That’s a great movie. I love samurais. I love ninja, too. But I really love samurai. There’s something cool about them—they’re these fierce warriors who live by a strict code of honor and assiduously cultivate their artistic sides. They do calligraphy and painting and poetry and all sorts of cool stuff. I think that’s one of the reasons that King David of Israel is one of my favorite heroes. He’s like a Jewish samurai. I mean think about it—this is a guy who leads the way in warfare no matter what the odds, who is passionately devoted to virtue and values, and who is one of the most famous poets in all of history. He’s totally a samurai. Now here’s the amazing thing. In Acts 13:22 we read God’s opinion of David, the warrior king of Israel: “‘I have found David son of Jesse a man after my own heart; ” That’s cool—God likes samurais, too.

April 15, 1729: Johann Bach conducts the first and only performance of St. Matthew Passion during his lifetime at a Good Friday Vespers service in Leipzig, Germany. The choral work has been called "the supreme cultural achievement of all Western civilization," and even the radical skeptic Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) admitted upon hearing it, "One who has completely forgotten Christianity truly hears it here as gospel."

We resent offenses against our taste at least as much as offenses against our conscience or reason... The `sentimentality and cheapness' of many Christian hymns had been a strong point in my own resistance to conversion.

A rule says, "You <i>must</i> do it <i>this way</i>. A principle says, "This <i>works</i>... and has through all remembered time." The difference is crucial. Your work needn't be modeled after a "well made" play; rather, it must be <i>well-made</i> within the principles that shape our art. Anxious, inexperienced writers obey rules. Rebellious, unschooled writers break rules. Artists master the form.

We probably like to think that we're too smart to be seduced by such "branding," but we aren't. If you ask test participants in a study to explain their preferences in music or art, they'll come up with some account based on the qualities of the pieces themselves. Yet several studies have demonstrated that "familiarity breeds liking." If you play snippets of music for people or show them slides of paintings and vary the number of times they hear or see the music and the art, on the whole people will rate the familiar things more positively than the unfamiliar ones. The people doing the ratings don't know that they like one bit of music more than another <i>because</i> it's more familiar. Nonetheless, when products are essentially equivalent, people go with what's familiar, even if it's only familiar because they know its name from advertising.

Criticize by creating.

Evangelism requires a fallen world as its audience and aim, whereas art can be offered to God as the audience of one. Because God does not need to be evangelized art need not be encumbered by evangelistic intent. Evangelism-driven people seem unable to grasp, to paraphrase Rookmaaker, "Art needs no evangelistic justification."

The artist Bruce Herman was telling me that from childhood he’d been exceptionally good at drawing. Everybody thought he was brilliant. Then one day he placed his portfolio in front of an artist whose work he admired. The artist silently looked at Bruce’s work for a long time. Finally he broke the silence and said, “Bruce you’ve got a lot of talent, but you aren’t very skilled, and to be a great artist requires both talent and skill.”

If you've got the stick figure blues, David's got a wonderful cure that he picked up from a Stanford professor. Whether you're a kindergartener or a senior executive, he teaches the same way. Make your usual circle for a head, then imagine you're drawing a droopy, bulbous leaf. Resist those crabby old stick arms. Let your pen sweep out like a four-pointed leaf, one for each arm and leg. I think you'll be surprised. In five minutes I've seen David teach the most art-resistant corporate types how to sketch a far more friendly, human-looking person.

...interest... is usually recruited by events that differ only a little from what is familiar and therefore are understandable with some effort.... Adults show the keenest interest in ideas that are slightly discrepant from their existing knowledge. The celebrated writers and artists of any era are able to anticipate themes that are not yet, but are about to become, nodes of uncertainty in their society.... The artist who wants acceptance cannot "run too far ahead... of the reader." Over time the mind-heart, like a butterfly flitting from flower to flower, finds a fresh novelty that recruits attention to a theme it can understand with effort and in that process becomes emotionally aroused. That is one reason why the form of psychotherapy that works best changes every twenty to twenty-five years. The curative power of psychoanalytic techniques began to wane when the therapists' secrets became public knowledge. The same fate may be in store for today's favorite psychotherapeutic regimens. Humans have the unfortunate habit of mistaking originality for wisdom because novelty is alerting, and, if understandable, creates an intuition of truth.