{"id":847,"date":"2009-04-27T07:41:12","date_gmt":"2009-04-27T12:41:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rreynoso.com\/blog\/?p=847"},"modified":"2009-04-24T09:47:08","modified_gmt":"2009-04-24T14:47:08","slug":"toward-criticism-of-christian-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rreynoso.com\/reysapoint\/design\/toward-criticism-of-christian-art\/","title":{"rendered":"Toward Criticism of Christian &#8220;Art&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been critical of what is usually perceived nowadays as being Christian art. Recently, I got into a conversation where some folk were defending the validity of this or that style of art and stating, quite emphatically, what right do I have to preside judgment over them (citing the Most Well Known Verse of the 21st Century: Matthew 7:1). I&#8217;ve given it some serious thought, and I think that not only do I have to be critical (in the classic sense) of such art: we all, especially Christians, should.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Art, by its very nature, is accomplishing something in its process and final expression. It seems to say &#8220;This is serious. You are touching the inner workings of Man; traversing the very realm of God.&#8221; The creative, as an outworking of the divine, screams the very image of the Being in which we&#8217;ve been molded. Historically, art poured outwards from the individual, wafted upwards and resonated within everyone watching. When expressed, it told a story\u2014from every taught muscle of Michelangelo&#8217;s <em>David<\/em> to the elongated forms of El Greco, through the violence of Caravaggio and to Picasso&#8217;s cubist vision of the nightmare in Guernica; a story was expressed.<\/p>\n<p>It was the arts that first taught theology to the layperson; that were used to turn the hearts of the people against another people for whatever cause; that made history accessible\u2014Babylon is remembered, says Herodotus, for her hanging gardens and the strange golden statue of a Man, Egypt for her pyramids and Sphinx, etc. It was the arts that experientially delved into the teleology (the study of purpose and design) of the world. Today, we find that previous cultures speak to us in their arts.<\/p>\n<p>But art has, currently, become too accessible:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong> Firstly<\/strong>, that is not to say that in ancient Greece, a jaunt to the local temple resulted in a failure to interact with art\u2014not at all. The ancients were exposed to art, but in the ways I described above. In a society where the common man may have been illiterate, or at the very least didn&#8217;t have access to papyri or scrolls, the arts spoke.<\/li>\n<li> <strong>Secondly<\/strong>, this accessibility is directly related to the Industrial Revolution. After Guttenberg&#8217;s Press, the arts no longer had to speak: that was the realm of writing and anything else was woefully redundant. Art started to function as garnish\u2014by no means the main course, it was to be thrown on top for color and that&#8217;s about it.<\/li>\n<li><strong> Thirdly<\/strong>, the Protestant Reformation, in rejection of many  practices in the Roman Catholic Church, threw art out of her sanctum. The back-to-the-Scripture campaign was surely necessary but the overreaction added to the empty accessibility we have today.<\/li>\n<li> <strong>Fourthly<\/strong>, the American Revolution, in underscoring the freedom of speech and the availing to all individuals ( molded in God&#8217;s image) the right to pursue happiness, added to the shift from the arts speaking outwardly to the arts only addressing the inward and doing so equally.<\/li>\n<li> <strong>Fifthly<\/strong>, commercialization. Yes, art always had a commercial component attached to it but the Printing Press made it possible for the arts to be mass reproduced and sold.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So with this accessibility, the modern world has become painfully egalitarian and individualistic as the mass mantra becomes &#8220;I can do it just as well as anybody else&#8221;.  The very tight relationship of Master to Pupil is a ridiculous notion when <em>Michaels<\/em> is down at the shopping center and has everything anyone needs to Do Art. The arts then suffer from the same things that affect many of our scholarly pursuits today: commercialism, anti-intellectualism, internalization, individualism, egalitarianism and entitlement.<\/p>\n<p>The Critic (especially of Christian Art) finds that his (or her) judgments are no longer perceived as commenting on the so-called arts, but rather an attack on individuals. In shock, that someone dares traverse on the holy ground of the Personal Opinion, the Anti-Critics stand tall and condemn the Snobs.<\/p>\n<p>If the arts always document culture&#8217;s story, and people know it, the people doing it will automatically feel the burden of what it means to invoke The Arts.<\/p>\n<p>People don&#8217;t get this. In all honesty, People don&#8217;t <em>want<\/em> to get this. Dare hold someone responsible for what they paint and it&#8217;s not a hobby anymore. This kind of Critic is stating that the importance of the Arts has not been outright forgotten; they have been rejected and all that remains is that empty husk.<\/p>\n<p>So, I want Christians to look at the modern Christian Art print on their wall (or sofa, or ashtray or desk calendar) and honestly tell me that they want it to speak to future generations about the theological content of the Church, commentary on the world, and a record of Today&#8217;s culture. Then I want Christians to go to a Museum (or a Greek Orthodox church) look at a wall of Byzantine Art: struggle with what&#8217;s being said, reject whatever theological content they think is wrong and walk away knowing that although they disagreed with what the Art had said, they knew that it had spoken.<\/p>\n<p>We have to move from this very bad area, which ultimately dabbles (if not invokes) Gnostic expressionism, and rediscover the Arts for what they were; not what they currently are. Our society, like the rest of human history, is heavily driven by traded commodities, but even so, we should strive to reclaim the importance of the Arts in our culture and future history. That necessitates being Critical (in the classic sense) and it should be Christians, molded in the image of the future humanity, who should realize that they&#8217;ve always led this charge even if they&#8217;ve currently stopped.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been critical of what is usually perceived nowadays as being Christian art. Recently, I got into a conversation where some folk were defending the validity of this or that style of art and stating, quite emphatically, what right do I have to preside judgment over them (citing the Most Well Known Verse of the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,8],"tags":[65,311,309,310],"class_list":["post-847","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-design","category-rants","tag-art","tag-christian-art","tag-kincaid","tag-kinkade"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rreynoso.com\/reysapoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/847","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rreynoso.com\/reysapoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rreynoso.com\/reysapoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rreynoso.com\/reysapoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rreynoso.com\/reysapoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=847"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/rreynoso.com\/reysapoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/847\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":849,"href":"http:\/\/rreynoso.com\/reysapoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/847\/revisions\/849"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rreynoso.com\/reysapoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rreynoso.com\/reysapoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rreynoso.com\/reysapoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}