{"product_id":"9781630875152","title":"Before the Beginning, During the Middle, After the End: Cosmology, Art, and Other Stories","description":"The divisions that mark my subject are three. The first is that point where the world begins--where it appears from out of the mystery of non-being. The second lies somewhere between its progeny and its future--the times between beginnings and ends where we, the beneficiaries of our being-here, come together to sing a celebration of the wonder that it happened at all, and then intone the fear of its ending. The third division is a speculation on ends--our own and the ending of the world.\u003cbr\u003eI use these divisions to locate a something that comes from nothing onto a historical tradition that imposes a value on the progression of that something, and so requires a judgment on all that has passed. I first discuss these through religious attempts to invest life and history with purpose--for they form the major explanatory traditions of Western culture and are a thematic source of much of its greatest art. I continue with an art-critical approach where themes of process and purpose are located in artworks through their stylistic histories and ambitions. I indicate how present art, when open to reconstitute such themes, could change the nature of today's efforts to give art polemical purposes, and so provide new reasons for its making. I conclude with some stories, unevenly biographical, partly fictional, which I offer as parables for the developed themes and their transformations. This last aim is to elucidate a view of art as providing specific symbols for a cosmology of beginning, living, and ending. \u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Wipf \u0026 Stock Publishers","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47152017408240,"sku":"9781630875152","price":30.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781630875152_p0.jpg?v=1763671159","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781630875152","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}