The unmorality of art

The theory of the unmorality of art has established itself firmly in the strictly artistic classes. They are free to produce anything they like. They are free to write a "Paradise Lost" in which Satan shall conquer God. They are free to write a "Divine Comedy" in which heaven shall be under the floor of hell. And what have they done? Have they produced in their universality anything grander or more beautiful than the things uttered by the fierce Ghibbeline Catholic, by the rigid Puritan schoolmaster? We know that they have produced only a few roundels. Milton does not merely beat them at his piety, he beats them at their own irreverence. In all their little books of verse you will not find a finer defiance of God than Satan's. Nor will you find the grandeur of paganism felt as that fiery Christian felt it who described Faranata lifting his head as in disdain of hell. And the reason is very obvious. Blasphemy is an artistic effect, because blasphemy depends upon a philosophical conviction. Blasphemy depends upon belief and is fading with it. If any one doubts this, let him sit down seriously and try to think blasphemous thoughts about Thor. I think his family will find him at the end of the day in a state of some exhaustion.

G K Chesterton: Heretics

The toleration of evil

From James Burton Coffman's commentary on chapter 16 of Revelation, after he has pointed out how much Western society - in particular his own American culture - has become so debased.  

We do not offer this interpretation as meaning that "the end of time is upon us" or that the final judicial hardening of the race of mankind has already occurred. Nor, are the things we have pointed out intended as an affirmation [of the last days], for it is not true, that all art, music, literature, publications, entertainment, etc., are evil. Thanks to the God of heaven through Christ, there are still many wonderful, beautiful, and uplifting things available in every one of these fields; and it could be that the complete fulfillment of this prophecy lies yet a great distance into the future, or that the things we have understood as pertaining to the whole world could be merely the astounding perversions that mark the decline of our own isolated culture in America. Therefore, we make no claim whatever that this bowl of wrath, or any of the others, is totally fulfilled by the aberrations noted.

However, our interpretation is that the bowls of wrath mean exactly the type of moral and spiritual pollution of the total human environment that we have attempted to point out. It is not merely that lust, vulgarity, pornography, violence, perversion, and obscenity are present in our culture. They have always been present in greater or lesser extent in every culture. What is alarming today is the toleration, acceptance, and justification of such things, even to the extent of their being advocated and encouraged by and political institutions; and that is what signals a frightening new aspect of such wickedness today. It could be later than we think.

The real thing

Lately I have been thinking that the point must be reached when scientists, politicians, artists, philosophers, men of religion, and all those who work in the fields should gather here, gaze out over these fields, and talk things over together. I think this is the kind of thing that must happen if people are to see beyond their specialties.... An object seen in isolation from the whole is not the real thing.

Masanobu Fukuoka

The One-Straw Revolution

Grace and inspiration

Inspiration is to thought what grace is to faith: intrusive, transcendent, transformative, but also evanescent and, all too often, anomalous. A poem can leave its maker at once more deeply seized by existence and, in a profound way, alienated from it, for as the act of making ends - as the world that seemed to overbrim its boundaries becomes, once more, merely the world - it can be very difficult to retain any faith in that original moment of inspiration at all. The memory of that momentary blaze, in fact, and the art that issued from it, can become a reproach to the fireless life in which you find yourself most of the time. Grace is no different. (Artistic inspiration is sometimes an act of grace, though by no means always.) To experience grace is one thing: to integrate it into your life is quite another. What I crave now is that integration, some speech that is true to the transcendent nature of grace yet adequate to the hard reality in which daily faith operates. I crave, I suppose, the poetry and the prose of knowing. 

Christian Wiman, in My Bright Abyss, pages 3/4

Shot in the foot

For the last thirty or so years the modern church has sat itself down in public places and proceeded, with solemn and generally rather repellent insensitivity, to show the world how good it is at shooting itself in the foot. Writing, painting, dance, music ... these are things that have been regarded with deep suspicion by whole sections of the church and particularly when they suddenly find they have access to public platforms such as radio and television. Complexity and creativity are sucked out of the message ... leaving it so thin and pale, and yet so dogmatically assertive, that those who are exhorted to let it revolutionise their lives end up more annoyed than anything else.

Adrian Plass
qtd. in Art & Soul

Art and humility

There are those who maintain that you can't demand anything of the reader. They say the reader knows nothing about art, and that if you are going to reach him, you have to be humble enough to descend to his level. This supposes either that the aim of art is to teach, which it is not, or that to create anything which is simply a good-in-itself is a waste of time. Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it. We hear a great deal about humility being required to lower oneself, but it requires an equal humility and a real love of the truth to raise oneself and by hard labor to acquire higher standards.

Flannery O'ConnorMystery and Manners

Letting art be art

An important consequence of the church's approach to modern and contemporary art is that in its commentators' zeal to engage it through certain philosophical, theological, or political perspectives, they have tended to reduce art to visual illustrations of propositional truths better expressed in other forms, usually words. This kind of soft iconoclasm, which is distrustful of letting art be art, has led to an impoverished ability to experience both the aesthetic presence of much of modern and contemporary art and to write about it allusively, expansively, and suggestively, recognizing that art is a distinctive mode of cognition and knowledge about the world. As George Steiner provocatively observed, art is a dangerous thing that can take over our inner house and transform us.

Daniel Siedell
God in the Gallery

Giving birth to art

To paint a picture or to write a story or to compose a song is an

incarnational activity.  The artist is a servant who is willing to be a birthgiver.  In a very real sense the artist (male or female) should be like Mary who, when the angel told her that she was to bear the Messiah, was obedient to the command. Obedience is an unpopular word nowadays, but the artist must be obedient to the work, whether it be a symphony, a painting, or a story for a small child. I believe that each work of art, whether it is a work of great genius, or something very small, comes to the artist and says, "Here I am. Enflesh me. Give birth to me." And the artist either says, "My soul doth magnify the Lord," and willingly becomes the bearer of the work, or refuses; but the obedient response is not necessarily a conscious one, and not everyone has the humble, courageous obedience of Mary.

Madeleine L'Engle
Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

Art and artists

Art's necessary illusions serve to expose the illusory character of the experienced world.... Artists of necessity refer to the given world, yet to be art their work must imply (refer to) a whole new world of unrealized possibility.

James William McClendonWitness

Day of the artist

I want to suggest to you that the day of the artists has come. That there are things about symbols and the genuine indirectness of art with integrity that can speak into a lost and stuck imagination.... We are awakening the imagination of people who have become cynical about the old "grand stories" that have done so much harm. We are sowing the possibility that there might be one which could actually set them free.

Graham Crayqtd. in Art & Soul

Art for our times

We cannot make art apart from the time in which we live. We must know what is going on, and understand our environment if we want to understand anything of relevance to our times. We must also know the spirit of the times in order to know where it is wrong and should be challenged and fought.... We can never just follow the past: the battle and means of creativity were theirs, for their own situation. And God, in placing us in another period, has given us our own calling: to be "salting salt" today, to hunger and thirst for righteousness in the here and now.

Hans RookmaakerModern Art and the Death of a Culture

Is Art only to be produced to challenge and fight?  Certainly some art is, but can Rookmaaker's statement be applied to all art in any period?  (Note that one of Rookmaaker's books was called, Art Needs No Justification.)

A poet's life

An interesting quote from Matsuo Bashō, on the life of a poet:

In this mortal frame of mine, which is made of a hundred bones and nine orifices, there is something, and this something is called a wind-swept spirit, for lack of a better name, for it is much like a thin drapery that is torn and swept away at the slightest stir of the wind. This something in me took to writing poetry years ago, merely to amuse itself at first, but finally making it its lifelong business. It must be admitted, however, that there were times when it sank into such dejection that it was almost ready to drop its pursuit, or again times when it was so puffed up with pride that it exulted in vain victories over others. Indeed, ever since it began to write poetry, it has never found peace with itself, always wavering between doubts of one kind and another. At one time it wanted to gain security by entering the service of a court, and at another it wished to measure the depth of its ignorance by trying to be a scholar, but it was prevented from either because of its unquenchable love of poetry. The fact is, it knows no other art than the art of writing poetry, and therefore, it hangs on to it more or less blindly.

The extract comes from Journal of a Travel-Worn Satchel (translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa) and quoted in the opening of Jane Hirschfield's book, The Heart of Haiku. 

I perhaps should be grateful that I don't feel that writing poetry is my 'lifelong business', nevertheless I understand Bashō's comments. 

Bad art

I’m convinced that bad art derives, like bad literary theory, from bad theology. To know God falsely is to write and paint and sculpt and cook and dance Him falsely. Perhaps it’s not poor artistic skill that yields bad Christian art, in other words, but poor Christianity.

Tony Woodlief
"Bad Christian Art" from Image

The task of art

The task of art is enormous. Through the influence of real art, aided by science, guided by religion, that peaceful co-operation of man which now maintained by external means -- by our law-courts, police, charitable institutions, factory inspection, and so forth -- should be obtained by man's free and joyous activity. Art should cause violence to be set aside.

Leo Tolstoy
What Is Art?

Art as answer

Tired of pat answers and mere preachiness, more and more believers are turning to art to experience truths that cannot be reduced to a paraphrase. God promises that we will be changed when we see Him. This pursuit of what film critic Andre Bazin calls "holy moments" becomes an exercise of transformative recognition of God in the everyday world. You could call it "practice," the art of becoming ready for the day we see Him in His fullness. Such discipline carries over in the humdrum of daily existence, in walks at the park, in unexpected moments of eye contact between friends and strangers.

Jeffrey Overstreet
Through a Screen Darkly

Works of art

Let me say, right off, that I believe a work of art is primarily concerned with the creation of beauty, whether through words, colors, shapes, sounds or movement. But it is impossible to read serious novels, poetry, essays, and biographies without also growing convinced that they gradually enlarge our minds, refine our spirits, make us more sensitive and understanding.

Michael Dirda
Book by Book

Andrew Wyeth

I do an awful lot of thinking and dreaming about things in the past and the future -- the timelessness of the rocks and the hills -- all the people who have existed there. I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show.

Andrew Wyeth
“Andrew Wyeth: An Interview” by Richard Meryman
in LIFE Magazine (May 14, 1965)

To-do list

Plant seeds. Host potlucks. Make art. Greet warmly. And in so doing: practice resurrection. That's a to-do list I never hope to finish.

Kirstin Vander Giessen-Reitsma
"This is what we are about" in catapult magazine