Maybe I'm generalizing from my own limited experience, but it just seems that eccentricity and moral ambiguity seems to be directly proportionate to serious art, and it makes me wonder...
Edit:
On further thought, I applied this to audio-visual media: entertainment, movies, books, music... and the prognosis isn't good. Art in general does not deal with the righteousness of God. Having realized the secular-humanistic (and therefore godless) perspective of the entertainment industry as a whole, it becomes obvious that the morality present in these art forms will be fatally flawed. Not because it is always necessarily immoral or amoral (as many times is the case) but because even any morality that is sourced in humanism is limited by its very man-centeredness. Holiness is not the measure, and therefore God is not the standard; social relationship is.
In sum, be it the most inane work of art, what is presented about love, about romance, about human relationships, about service, about politics, about violence, about peace, about sexuality, about business, about anything you can think of, even religion, all this is ensconced in a man-centered world-view. Man is the focus of the universe. The godlessness of it all is not explicit, but subtle.
The themes of good vs. evil, or the goodness of man, or the love between human beings all become a facade that subtly encourages the ignorance of God's perspective and ultimately the abandonment of true religion. Morality by itself is damning, a religion that in reality despises God.
All that to say guard your heart. Protect the gates. Know what you watch, read and listen, and don't inform your morality or practice from entertainment or art, ultimately, set God at the center and inform your life with His Word at the center. Let that center inform all pursuit of art.
I will ponder the way that is blameless.
Oh when will you come to me?
I will walk with integrity of heart
within my house;
I will not set before my eyes
anything that is worthless.
I hate the work of those who fall away;
it shall not cling to me.
Psalm 101:2,3
7 comments:
We agree with your observation and you are not alone. It is very true with the artsy world.
Carol is presently working in a design college and she's given a similar picture of what u talked about in the post.....It's a tragedy of sorts.....
eccentricity and moral ambiguity seems to be directly proportionate to serious art This I agree too.....
Interesting. It is sad. But I guess in truth "serious art" in the sense that is defined secularly requires a devotion at a level that a devoted Christ-follower might see as idolatry.
I don't know. It would be interesting to hear a perspective of a "serious Christian artist" rather than my ramblings as an outsider.
Hmmm....Are there such Christian artists around?? I do know of a Christian who's studied in such a college...neat gal...should have a dialogue.....
does it seem that the more immersed an artist (regardless of field) is in a particular art, the further away from truth about God that artist seems to get?
Depends on what it means to be "immersed ... in a particular art." I'll come back to this, but quippy answer would be that artsy dilettantes are rarely immersed in a particular art, but rather voluptuate in artsy-ness. They read the write-ups next to the paintings and grunt inspiringly, but can't write a poem or play a song worth the excrement proper to a Duchamp piece.
First I want to suggest that that first way you pose the problem is not necessarily the same as the second:
it just seems that eccentricity and moral ambiguity seems to be directly proportionate to serious art
Here's what I'd like to suggest before you let "eccentricity" and "away from truth about God" seem too similar to you: re-read the prophets. Let's go with Ezekiel for a heavy hit first off. He lay on one side for 30 days. Then switched sides. Pretty eccentric.
Now, if aesthetics is about hope (as I argue in my criticism, and seek to embody in my poetry when I can pull it off), in roughly the way that doctrine is about faith and morality is about love, then it follows that art's impulses are truest to God's work among us when they strike into our lives with desire for the coming glory, fear of our unfitness, hunger for the parousia, dissatisfaction with our condition, and all those unsettling, not-at-all-complacent things that go along with Christian hope. As this often happens in the unwitting hands of people created in imago dei but living averse to God, who shape their lives in spite of God, there is often a shocking unfitness of the good, hopeful, desire-cultivating, material of aesthetic experience and the intentions of the artist. Therefore we must both be able to recognize the good as such, and as from God, even when the artist hates God and does not intend it so, and should not be received as good, or praised; in order that we may reclaim and re-use what is good, in our development toward the Christ-image in us and before us.
Doing so often requires judgments in the form of "H.P. Lovecraft's efforts to evoke fascination reveal the shape of God's glory in human hearts, even in those who seek to gaze upon that glory only through the moral inversion of their fear and loathing of that God and all which draws them to Him, which upsets their order and 'adjustment' in the cosmos here-and-now." That's roughly what my MA thesis argued. Because simply calling these "good and true" stories or "wrong and false" ones would endorse the God-hating anti-hope intentions of Lovecraft (as his primary biographer S.T. Joshi does) or risk leaving unclaimed the good, indeed the reluctant evidence of man's persistent and active suppression of God, which we find in horror literature.
And one can scarcely fail to notice the affinities between horror literature and the prophets. Or the differences.
So, let me say this. Someone who becomes "immersed ... in a particular art" is as likely as someone highly specialized in any area to find it difficult to explain to others, or to justify to his friends or nonspecialists, or to understand things outside his ken, well. Emphasizing that the worst "artsy" people are rarely the actual supreme craftsmen of art (sadly, that lot falls to we critics--but even more to promoters of the visual arts), still there is no doubt that being "immersed" is a danger as well as a gift; one needs the guidance of the Spirit and a strong sense of the Body life, with Biblical teaching about the right priorities and how to deal with the demands and expectations of family, ministry, work, etc.
I would say that "eccentric" therefore is nothing very bad of itself. "Moral ambiguity" in the sense of suspending or deferring one question (is this the most morally sound way to accomplish this aesthetic aim?) while considering another (does this accomplish its aesthetic aim?) can happen; a sound Christian artist will be willing to consider both questions, but may have to do so separately, and should acknowledge the tensions there. Negotiating those often challenging things is the path to great art, which is honed by acknowledging such tensions, and finding the skills to achieve greatly in BOTH rather than compromise either. (if the mystery of Christ and the Church is supremely portrayed in marriage, not at all excluding the sexual, in what ways could a sculptor portray that? which ways would be most aesthetically sound? which ways would be most morally sound? if these do not have the same answer, what do we learn about ourselves by working through these problems?)
My first book-length collection of poetry certainly has some "moral ambiguity" from a certain point of view. I do not think those who read it through, with care, will find it remains so, though in places it certainly has some fairly frank and foreign thoughts: those, I hope, have their place in the movement of language toward the Consummation devoutly to be wished....
clarification: "that lot" would be "[being] the worst 'artsy' people" and not, as grammar dictates, being "supreme craftsmen." Alas, we critics rarely are. :-)
*** the worst "artsy" people are rarely the actual supreme craftsmen of art (sadly, that lot falls to we critics--but even more to promoters of the visual arts) ***
Thanks for the comment... that's a lot to digest. I think you're right, I should not have placed eccentricity and moral ambiguity side by side, or at least defined myself more. I'm a bit eccentric myself, but that means nothing to this argument.
I guess my basic problem, and I am no critic of art, just an observer from the "outsidest" circle... is the necessity for openness to anything that seems to pervade artists. That's why I think I appreciate guys like you who pursue art within a worldview and boundaries that find their definition in scripture. In this case, I would have no problem with apparent ambiguity because to a certain extent I can trust that those boundaries will not be breached.
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