Should there be a difference in the art a Christian produces and art of the general culture? I’ll narrow the question more specifically. Should Christian artists make a conscious effort to produce art that is in a fundamental way an ”answer” to culture and distinctly different from pop culture.?
Good art represents the artist. We don’t have to think consciously about what we’re producing to have our art represent our thought. An existentialist artist doesn’t sit down and say, “I’m going to make existential art.” It is in the air he breathes, so it naturally comes out.
Making art of any form is more than just an artist being a product of his culture and producing art. Art reflects where the artist is as a person. Gauguin’s noble savage shows where he was. Gauguin believed that man was better off outside the realm of society, and that if we returned to a “savage” state we could be free from greed, murder, you name it. He tried to return to a less civilized situation himself and it failed ultimately.
If as Christians we are going to study art or try to be artists, we need to understand what is going on in our culture. In Christianity, we have made the mistake of thinking that art is in a totally separate category from the rest of life. Since the Romantic period of the 18th and 19th century, the arts have been elevated away from the normal thinking of men, so that an artist can create a really atrocious piece of work, but if they are considered great artists, the work is excused. The Romantic period had a very skewed view of the nature of art. To the Romantic man, good art was really only produced by suffering people, and art had to communicate the confusion of life. Romantic art failed because it couldn’t show the beauty and glory of the reality that existed all around them. Men in their deepest thoughts know that the world contains great beauty. For the same reason, the Grunge movement and the Gothic movement of the 1990’s arose. They saw only emptiness and brokenness and showed only that in their music and art. Romanticism, Grunge, and Goth all developed conventions of what art should be, instead of allowing the art to come out of who they really were. In reality, art should encompass all aspects of life, good and bad, because it is a reflection of the artist and his innermost person.
An example of how art is separated from the artist is Sylvia Plath. The writer Sylvia Plath committed suicide. She had a fantastic ability to communicate the condition and dilemma of man, that we don’t know who we are or why we’re alive, or anything really. Critics of her writings will say that it is not necessarily bad that she killed herself, since her writing was so fantastic and that was what was really important about her. This is terrible. It would have been much better that she had been just a mediocre artist and known the answers to her questions. We’ve separated the art from the artist, and have dehumanized him or her into a production machine. The humanness of the artist has been removed from his creation.
If a Christian decides to produce art, he will often say, “I am a Christian, I am an artist, this is how I will work.” This is a misunderstanding of the nature of art. Because art really does express what we believe and where we are, (I’m not speaking of superficial art. Drawing a picture of a doggie or a kitty is not what I’m talking about.) we can’t just consciously apply Christian conventions to our art to make it look Christian. If we are Christians, then our art, be it paint, marble, film, poetry, novels, or whatever, will contain the characteristics that define us as Christian humans, not Christian robots.
We should never set out with the goal of painting a Christian picture, or writing a Christian book, or making Christian music. That is dishonest. The life that truly reflects Jesus Christ will not have to put on fake methods to force his art into Christianity. Christ lived on this earth as a genuine man. He never had to wake up in the morning and remind Himself, “Okay, today I’m going to act like a Messiah.” That’s absurd. He behaved like the Messiah because He was the Messiah. He never consciously “acted” like the Messiah. He never changed His behavior to live up to the cultural conventions of what made a good Messiah. Christian art is art that is produced by Christians, not art that looks like Christian art.
January 11, 2008 at 2:08 pm
I strongly agree with this post. The superficiality of Christian music, literature, and visual arts comes from striving to make a point, rather than showing an aspect of life with emotional power. Significant art comes from a deep understanding of culture and craft, not “message.”
I thought your comments about Romanticism were exactly right. Thanks!
January 11, 2008 at 2:47 pm
Another great post Aaron! We seem to be developing quite a theme of art and culture on the blog
. I think that the reason “Christian” art tends to be so bad is that much of it isn’t art at all; rather it is the hijacking of art by well-meaning people who seek to impose a message upon it. I suppose it is to be expected in our consumer-driven, marketplace Christianity.
Your stuff about Romanticism as compared to 90s music and culture was great. I have one little quibble, though. I would take out “Romanticism” and insert “Modernism” because nearly everything that you say about the former is actually a perfect description of the latter.
It was the Modernists (Late 19th early 20th century) that revolted against the perceived unrealistic (sappy happy) idealism of the Romantics. And the Modernists were the ones who sought to redefine the conventions of what good art should be (remember Marcel Duchamp and his urinal). In fact, the artists mentioned in your post – Gaugin and Plath – would both be considered Modernist (Plath) or Pre-Modernist (Gaugin). If I had to find a modern couterpart to Romanticism and Modernism I would say that the idealistic 1980s are a good representation of Romanticism and the angst-ridden 1990s are a perfect representation of Modernism.
Indeed, I would consider the Romantic/Late Victorian era to be a high point of artistic expression. It produced musicians such as Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner, artists such as the pre-Raphaelites (especially Waterhouse), and writers such as Blake, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Dickinson, Melville, Coleridge, etc.
I only wish that we could return to such a time. And perhaps we will, when Christians stop (as C. S. Lewis said) writing more little books on Christianity and more little books on other subjects with their Christianity latent within them.
January 11, 2008 at 4:03 pm
Thanks Josh! By Romantics, I was thinking more along the lines of Poe, Hawthorne, Shelly, Irving, Melville, and James Fenimore Cooper and their broken heroes. These heroes are generally contrasted with society and usually struggle with internal battles rather than traditional external battles. Usually the heroes are depressed or broken in some way. The literature is fantastic, but it did “fail” in the sense that it eventually faded away and could not developa complete view of man as not only fallen and broken, but beautiful because of the imago dei.
January 11, 2008 at 7:17 pm
I appreciate your outlook on “Christian” Art. The example I use is there is no such thing as “Christian” pluming. However you could be a plummer who is good at what they do and believes in Christ. Check out http://www.viaaffirmativa.com or http://www.iamny.com ~ regards, darin
January 13, 2008 at 1:40 pm
Yeah, I can see what you mean with the author’s that you list (with the exception of Melville – Moby Dick is a fundamentally Christian novel). However, the spirit of the Romantic movement at large tended toward unrealistic idealism. Modernism responded to this precisely in the way that you describe in your post.
As to the “failure” of Romantic art, I take a different stance. I don’t believe that an artistic movement has failed because it fades away; that’s just the ebb and flow of culture. Two of my favorite authors, Lewis adn Tolkien, wrote during the transition between Romanticism and Modernism and actually had more in common with the Romantics then the Modernists.
As to Romanticism’s failure in developing a “complete” view of man, some of the Romantics succeeded while other individuals works did indeed fail. The same could be said of every artistic tradition (even Modernism as Faulkner demonstrates wonderfully).
January 14, 2008 at 8:22 am
Maybe “fail” is a strong word. What the Romantic period did was show (as of course all forms of art will because we’re fallen) man apart from his full Biblical understanding of himself. In this way, Romanticism did not survive as a true way to live, just as modernism eventually had to turn to postmodernism because it could not compete with reality, Romanticism faded because man could not live on the basis of the Romantic ideals. The literature is absolutely fantastic, and it’s some of my favorite, but many of them, not all of course, had a very tainted view of man.
January 14, 2008 at 10:52 pm
I wonder why Christianity never developed a traditional art like classical Indian music, or Zen calligraphy, where the creation of the art itself is neither personal expression in the narrow Romantic sense, nor a shallow marketing of values like modern Christian art, but instead an act of worship and contemplation.
I think the closest it ever came was Gregorian chant — which is indeed top notch stuff, but it never evolved.
January 14, 2008 at 11:05 pm
Yeah. Gregorian chant is beautiful stuff. I’ve got a collection of it myself.
Have you considered the visual arts of the Greek Orthodox tradition? Although I do not agree with some of the theological underpinnings surrounding it, it certainly is beautiful work.
January 15, 2008 at 5:50 pm
There certainly is great beauty in both of those traditions. I wish that 21st century Christian would take note of its beauty and begin to imitate not its style but its value of aesthetics.
I think a primary reason the church has never developed a tradition of art is because of the doctrinal struggles throughout its history. Everytime we started something artistic, along comes some big heresy to deal with. I am being very general, of course.
Later, in the 20th century, there was a split between the modernists and the Biblicists. The Biblicists, in an effort to separate themselves from the appearance of “worldliness,” walled themselves in a subculture where artistic expression was all but forbidden (in some cases it was). Not until relatively recently have Bible believing Christians taken a keen interest in the artistic world outside of our subcultural superficial art. Thank God for progress!
February 19, 2008 at 12:40 pm
I believe that to define something like art means that you attach to it what is generally true. This can be done, believe it or not.
1.) Art is always created and defined by people. (Creation is made by God. It exists apart or in harmony with human arts, but is not dependent on the existence of human arts)
2.) Art is always a form of language. (Language has repetition, symbolism, rules, and is informed by more than one person. Language can exist among very few people or many.)
These two points are always true of art no matter what groups or individuals produce it. Styles and cultures of artists speak to a variety of issues. As Christian artists, we speak to many topics. Some of these topics are literary, some about the Bible, some about our immediate culture, some about what we look forward to in a heavenly culture. Christian art reflects all of these aspects at different times. There is necessity in all of these topics of discussion in the arts of Christians. A healthy Christian artist’s community doesn’t leave out tradition or new ideas, but addresses all possibilities in order to share Christ in our lives with others.
February 19, 2008 at 5:37 pm
I bet you think that I would never read this or even think on it, but I did. I really like what you wrote. Since learning about art in our class it really caught my eye. Sometimes I think that Christian’s must put on a front. We go to school, work, even church, and we create these faces. Faces that define us, depending on where we are. Just like you said, Christ didn’t have to remind himself to be the Messiah. Being a Christian shouldn’t be a job, its a lifestyle, in which if you are an artist or not, should and can be reflected in many forms and fashions. Art is a way of expressing yourself. When Josh preached about or “consumer driven Christianity”, as he mentioned above as well, it is almost another way to “display” Christianity. Another way to catch the publics eye while at the same way disguising what being a Christian is really about.
Little nervous writing what i thought (being I’m not a scholar at this like some people).
February 19, 2008 at 10:12 pm
I think Kathy makes a good point when she says all art is art if it is “generally true”. If I write a novel that has Christians in it or because it is written for a Christian audience I am not wrong in doing so. However, if I call it “Christian” and somehow change it to reflect what I think a Christian audience wants to see I have succombed, I think, to the pressure of our society to categorize everything. Modern commercialism and marketing likes to label every “product” in order to sell it. Maybe we do this subconsciously here in the 21st century. Again, what really matters is that we are truthful as we express who we are, who people are, who God is and how we see reality. Its OK to create art for a Christian audience, as long as its real. But I think its better to create art for any audience. Why not express oneself to anyone who will listen?
February 19, 2008 at 10:38 pm
Rachel,
Thanks so much for stopping by! What makes you think I didn’t think you’d read the article? I have full confidence in my students. Don’t ever be nervous about writing what you think. This, by the way, is what the article is all about- Christians truly creating from within themselves an artistic expression. This is what you have done. Don’t believe me? You used linguistics symbols of faces, and creating faces to mask ourselves. This is metaphor, this is art. Everything you said was true. I’m so proud of you and your new found interest in the arts. Nothing makes me happier than to hear (or read in this instance) a student say that since we studyed something, she’s been thinking about it. When I hear that, I can say, “Mission accomplished.”
February 19, 2008 at 10:39 pm
I can’t believe I spelled studied wrong.
February 29, 2008 at 1:31 pm
[...] What is Christian Art?: Is there such a thing as “Christian” art and how does one recognize it? [...]
March 5, 2008 at 12:30 pm
[...] with posts on a North Carolinian art museum, the value of fantasy literature, and the validity of “Christian” art. Sadly, as the last post demonstrates, modern evangelical Christianity is woefully out of touch [...]
April 27, 2008 at 5:07 pm
Hi there,
Just to say I’ve found this blog really interesting and very useful as I have been pondering these things lately and your writing sums it up nicely. I agree that as artist the one thing we can aim for is to be true and that in doing that our faith and how we see the world and ultimately some of God will shine through whatever we create. It is not always easy and takes a certain amount of fearlessness but once we know what we are aiming for then that is half the battle.
Thanks