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This book brings together the worlds of the ancient, Medieval and post-Renaissance. For the former all questions of art, skill, craft, work and vocation were understood as part of a matrix of ideas integral to the spiritual nature of man; art being a virtue or habit of the mind staying in the artist. With the advent of the Renaissance, art came to be understood as referring to an external body of aesthetic works made by special people called artists. This anthology effectively outlines the traditional or “normal” philosophy of art as formulated by Ananda K. Coomaraswamy and as practiced by the majority of peoples throughout human history. These writings challenge the post-Renaissance aesthetic, pointing out its insufficiency as a way of understanding man’s practical interaction with the world, as well as its diminishment of our understanding of the true nature of man.
About the Author(s)
Brian Keeble
Brian Keeble is a writer and editor who has long been devoted to the promulgation of the traditional arts. His best-known book is Art: For Whom and For What? Mr. Keeble is the founder of Golgonooza Press and a co-founder of Temenos Academy, which is sponsored by The Prince's Foundation of HRH The Prince of Wales. The Temenos Academy is a teaching organization dedicated to the same central idea that had inspired the earlier Temenos Review, a journal devoted to the arts of the imagination.
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Seyyed Hossein Nasr
Seyyed Hossein Nasr (b. 1933) is University Professor of Islamic Studies at George Washington University. The author of over thirty books and three hundred articles, he is one of the world’s most respected writers and speakers on Islam, its arts and sciences, and its traditional mystical path, Sufism.
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Reviews
- Every Man An Artist is an anthology showing that it is the human norm for all people to participate in meaningful and purposeful art, craft, and work because this is part of human nature itself. This concise introduction to the traditional philosophy of art, as it was understood for millennia in both East and West, is founded upon the idea of art as a perfection of workmanship seen in relationship to our understanding of the spiritual nature of reality.
- …We must be grateful to Brian Keeble for providing through this valuable anthology, a powerful reminder of that art which reflects both beauty and truth…
Banyen Books and Sound
- Every Man An Artist may open new doors to those who are looking for an ‘art de vivre’ fed with the gifts that men have received from the Creator and penetrated with the sense of sacredness.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr, from the Foreword
- …Each of the pieces brought together here has enduring value. Taken as a whole, the book is an engrossing and inspiring record of the attempt to rediscover, and to uphold, the ‘Beauty so ancient and so new’ in the wilderness of a tormented century.
Jean-Louis Michon, co-editor of Sufism: Love and Wisdom
- Keeble’s anthology of readings in the traditional philosophy of art, Every Man an Artist, is so valuable because it makes accessible much that I, with extreme difficulty, attempted to discover for myself As far as I know nothing as yet has anywhere been published that is comparable in scope to the present volume, which forms a truly magisterial introduction to the understanding of the art produced in traditional societies. It is a collection of passages that could be read with benefit by anyone interested in the contemporary arts and crafts.
John Carey, writing in Temenos Review
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John Lane. author of The Spirit of Silence, writing in Resurgance
