ABSTRACT
I would like to begin with a claim as to what art is, or should be, for any account of aesthetics that would seek to be equal with its object. Art, should be an account of, and a meditation upon, our relationship to what we are given. And the given must be that against which we measure ourselves and all of our projects, be they theological, philosophical or aesthetic, because any departure from what is and its presentation to us, in the name and pursuit of what is not, is a refusal to see, acknowledge, or fulfill the promise of worldly creation. And, as such, any departure from the materiality of this world in search of a reality beyond the reality we inhabit is a form of metaphysics as it seeks the truth of nature beyond nature in a realm unseen and unheard by any natural beings. A not unimportant consequence of this metaphysics is the ubiquitous denial that what is conveys anything fundamental or decisive about human beings and their world at all. Consequently the actuality of the world is stripped of any integral goodness, beauty or truth that it might once have been thought to disclose, because for this era what is does not convey what should be and what should not; it shows only one arbitary possibility, a possibility that has no inherent right to be anything at all.
