Friday, January 06, 2006
God And Art
On Wednesday, OpinionJournal carried a book review and summarized it this way:
Which is why I read this post at Common Grounds Online by Aaron Menikiff with great interest. Aaron calls the post "All Art Is Moral" - he looks at DH Lawrence and Walt Whitman and the shift in art from celebrating the higher to celebrating the immediate and the fleshly. Then he concludes this way:
Art is not a form of arguement. Frankly, it is because so many Christians that do art attempt to argue in their art that I think so much of it is so bad. Christians should do art, there is art with Christian subject matter (say a painting of the crucifixion) but I am not sure there is such a thing as "Christian art."
Art is expressive and it is creative. It celebrates the Creator because it imitates Him by creating. What God made was good; therefore, what Christian artists make should likewise be good, but there it ends. Christ shines through the art of His people because they are transformed by Him and their expressiveness will express that transformation. But arguement is a different thing, frankly it gets in the way of the art itself.
Indeed, pick up pen, pick up brush, pick up camera, pick up chisel, but don't argue - make beauty, and in that beauty express the blessing that God has granted you.
Christine Rosen's complaints about Christian fundamentalism are mainly aesthetic onesThe rest of the review is not really on point for this post, but the summary caught my eye, because frankly, I think many Christians lack in the aesthetics department.
Which is why I read this post at Common Grounds Online by Aaron Menikiff with great interest. Aaron calls the post "All Art Is Moral" - he looks at DH Lawrence and Walt Whitman and the shift in art from celebrating the higher to celebrating the immediate and the fleshly. Then he concludes this way:
The great challenge facing Christians is to make a counterclaim in our writing and painting and music and sculpture. We are called to argue in diction and form and color that there is a sovereign, everlasting God and that His creatures?made in His image?are immortal and accountable to Him. Christians are called to pick up the pen and the brush because art is not neutral, it is moral.That quote presents me with one of thse agree/disagree dilemmas. I agree wholeheartedly with his last sentence, but I sort of get that fingernails-on-blackboard sensation with his penultimate sentence.
Art is not a form of arguement. Frankly, it is because so many Christians that do art attempt to argue in their art that I think so much of it is so bad. Christians should do art, there is art with Christian subject matter (say a painting of the crucifixion) but I am not sure there is such a thing as "Christian art."
Art is expressive and it is creative. It celebrates the Creator because it imitates Him by creating. What God made was good; therefore, what Christian artists make should likewise be good, but there it ends. Christ shines through the art of His people because they are transformed by Him and their expressiveness will express that transformation. But arguement is a different thing, frankly it gets in the way of the art itself.
Indeed, pick up pen, pick up brush, pick up camera, pick up chisel, but don't argue - make beauty, and in that beauty express the blessing that God has granted you.
