A Tradition Transfigured: Art and Culture in Reformational Aesthetics.

Zuidervaart, Lambert. "A Tradition Transfigured: Art and Culture in Reformational Aesthetics." Faith and Philosophy, 21 (July 2004): 381-92.

This essay discusses reformational aesthetics as a religious and intellectual tradition that is distinct from Evangelical and sacramental traditions. It uses debates among Hans Rookmaaker, Calvin Seerveld, and Nicholas Wolterstorff to point this tradition in a new direction, one that replaces modern notions of worldview, artworks, and aesthetics with an emphasis on public interaction, cultural practices, and interdisciplinary studies.

Artistic Truth: Aesthetics, Discourse, and Imaginative Disclosure

Zuidervaart, Lambert. Artistic Truth: Aesthetics, Discourse, and Imaginative Disclosure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004; paperback 2008.

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It is unfashionable to talk about artistic truth. Yet the issues traditionally addressed under that term have not disappeared. Indeed, questions concerning the role of the artist in society, the relationship between art and knowledge, and the validity of cultural interpretation have intensified. Lambert Zuidervaart challenges current intellectual fashions by proposing a new critical hermeneutics of artist truth that engages with both analytic and continental philosophies and illuminates the contemporary cultural scene. People turn to the arts as a way of finding orientation in their lives, communities, and institutions. But philosophers, hamstrung by their own theories of truth, have been unsuccessful in accounting for this common feature in our lives. This book portrays artistic truth as a process of imaginative disclosure in which expectations of authenticity, significance, and integrity prevail. Understood in this way, truth becomes central to the aesthetic and social value of the arts.