3 – I like your idea. I remember a comment made on here some time ago about quaker meetings that seem to work on the opposite idea, they are comfortable with the space. I think that a balance between the two might be appropriate.

#5 – I think your comment raises important points. I suspect that what is his speaking about here reflects his position on the spiritual and the beautiful. I believe that he sees them as something which is something like a ‘collective unconscious’ in which the artist seeks to connect. you therefore do not create beauty it is already there, preceding you. I think he would argue that successful artists (i.e. those who create beautiful or spiritual work, are those who manage to connect with that ‘unconscious’). Moreover, my tidbit did no Bhabha justice, he does speak about Kapoor quite a bit more. I just took that one line because I felt it encapsulated something that i felt about kapoor’s work. on an aside I bought Levinas entre nous on your recommendation about useless suffering. I have been meaning to get round to reading him, thanks for the prod.

#6 – I am also not a big fan of that image, except seeing it and being able to move around it is a completely different experience. I am going to his exhibition at the royal academy tomorrow so I will let you know about the red paint, but I sense that it will be quite a powerful image.

Beauty, of course, doesn’t necessarily mean *comforting* beauty. A Kathe Kollwitz print or a Yeats poem can have a certain terrible beauty about it — because truth is beauty, even painful truth. And there is beauty in an artist’s skill, when the art requires it (which is why shooting cans of red paint at a concrete wall leaves me relatively cold).

This is a bizarre comment, many artists set out to achieve beauty and spirituality and they do succeed. Aesthetic and formal beauty are rather easy to achieve. As for the spiritual, it is more difficult but the great one’s such as Ozu, Bergman and Tarkovsky among others set out to create spiritual works and were often successful. If Kapoor is speaking about beauty or the spiritual in a more personal or unique way, that should be addressed. Granted many want to create spiritual works and fail but there is nothing intrinsic to art about such failure, its just what happens with average or flat out bad art.

‘you are always on the edge between what you know and what you don’t know’

As smart and innovative as H.K. Bhabha is, this is a fairly pedestrian comment. This is not unique to the artist under discussion, in one way or another any significant work is going to have this kind of impact on the viewer. Being on that edge is not, in itself as important as how the artist gets us there and what the impact of occupying that space is upon the viewer.

I agree about the Joseph Smith connection. In fact I have writtena longer version of this article and sent in to the MR. I deal with this dichotomy in Mormonism between searching and certainty that Terryl Givens discusses. I think that it is a good thing that we do not have a codified theology. I believe that it gives us space to examine and explore our spirituality and our relationship with God.

‘making work is about daring to go where I don’t know and hoping that in going to where I don’t know, you, the viewer, can go somewhere you don’t know either’.

This statement got me thinking about Joseph Smith, and how many of his later discourses seemed to be exploration and speculation.