“You are entering a religion called painting. . . . Its values are goyish and pagan. Its concepts are goyish and pagan. Its way of life is goyish and pagan. . . . Think carefully of what you are doing before you make your decision.”[65] Those are the stern words of warning that Jacob Kahn gives his pupil Asher Lev, a young Hasidic Jew who aspires to be a painter—something to which Hasidic Jews aren’t supposed to aspire. The story of Asher Lev can be read as a violent clash between two “religions”—Asher’s Judaism and art.
Somewhat similarly, my former colleague Alva Steffler speaks of Christian artists experiencing not just “alienation as artists” but also “the seeming ambivalence of their church.”[66] No doubt, Christians have often been suspicious of artists both outside and within their midst: What are artists up to? Why do they say things in such complicated ways (and why can’t they just say them more simply)? But there is a further problem that Steffler alludes to with the word “ambivalence”: Christians have often wondered about the value of art. While art that can be sung in church or used in Sunday school has a very obvious purpose, much art seems to have very little purpose, or none at all. To put this another way, in a world in which there is hunger and suffering, isn’t it simply too frivolous to create art? Shouldn’t artists be doing something that is more valuable to society? These kinds of concerns are well illustrated by the experience of one of Wheaton College’s former art students, Emily Cottrill, who says, “God made me to be an artist. He gave me that talent. He made me to be able to get excited about certain things. That’s my response to God, to his world, to his message of salvation. When you see something that’s so wonderful, you want to join in.” But not all of her fellow students saw it that way. As the writer of the article that featured her comments went on to say, “by the end of her sophomore year, she was sick of her peers’ indifference to her calling. She was fed up with comments that suggested that art is a waste of time, a field for slackers and weirdos.” In her journal, Emily had written: “I felt I had to justify myself. Not to the world, but to me. That is a terrible thing. I am a child of God. God made me a person who sees the world in a manner that is different from most perceptions. He gave me the urge to create.”[67]
Yet this raises the basic question of what it means to be an artist. As it turns out, we in the twenty-first century think largely in terms inherited from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In other words, our conceptions about art are deeply modern. So, before we can speak positively about what it means to be living works of art, we need to consider our current conceptions about art and artists. Practically, we need a kind of “deconstruction” (a taking apart and putting into question) of the dominant way of thinking about art and artists before we can begin to rebuild by putting a new vision of artistic endeavor in place.
The “Modern” or “Romantic” Discourse of Art
What exactly makes a clash virtually inevitable not just for Asher Lev but also for artists who are Christian? What is the relation of the church to the arts? In Asher’s case, the clash is inevitable because painting is simply not allowed in Hasidic Judaism. But the problem goes much deeper for most Christians. It has to do with the contours of the art world as we know it today—and here I am referring to the world of “fine art”—as well as how the art world relates (or, for that matter, doesn’t relate) to the church. As things stand, there is somewhat of an estrangement of the art world from the church. Of course, it wasn’t always this way: one has only to think of how much art in Western history has been quite explicitly Christian and even designed to be placed in churches. Yet, despite the common assumption that the way we think about art and the role it plays in society has “always been this way,” it actually hasn’t. Rather, our ideas about art are only a couple of centuries old, for the most part, even though they have their roots in the Renaissance—which means that, once upon a time, people thought very differently about art.
For the moment, we need to consider the art world as it stands today. And here it is helpful to turn to Michel Foucault’s notion of a discourse. While the term “discourse” might sound as if it’s about how language is used, Foucault has in mind how any kind of human activity operates—whether it’s the world of professional tennis or American politics or the local PTA. Of course, as we noted regarding the term habitus, “discourse” can also be replaced with the term “liturgy.” For liturgies—just like discourses—establish desired goods, authoritative texts and individuals, and appropriate rituals. A liturgy, in its most basic form, shapes our actions and desires. So, in explicating Foucault’s notion of discourse in relation to art, we are really talking about the liturgy of the art world. And that, in turn, will tell us a great deal about liturgy in general.
In his lecture titled “The Order of Discourse,” Foucault points out that discourses (and thus liturgies) are ordered by (1) what they exclude or prohibit, (2) how they separate themselves from other discourses, (3) what they take to be their primary texts and what sorts of “commentary” upon them is acceptable, and (4) how everything is guided by ritual and by those who make the decisions as to what can and cannot be said or done.[68] In other words, we all know that there are some things you can or can’t do or say, depending on a given context. We also know that, again depending on the context, there are certain authoritative texts (such as the US Constitution) and persons (such as judges) that state and enforce “the rules.” I take Foucault’s account to be an excellent description of how discourses actually work. It is always the case that discourses have their rules and authorities and rituals.
So how might we apply this to the world of art?
Exclusion and Primary Texts
Let’s start with what is excluded or prohibited in the art world. At first glance, it might seem that virtually nothing is prohibited. After all, contemporary artists are known for such outrageous “art” as placing crucifixes in urine (Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, 1987) or including elephant dung on a painting (Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary, 1996).[69] Indeed, it would be safe to say that the art world particularly prizes innovation or originality, so much so that artists sometimes turn to extreme tactics to be recognized as truly “innovative.” Thus, one thing that is generally excluded or else marginalized in the art world is art that is highly imitative and unoriginal. Such work would either be considered “bad art” or “popular art.”
Why is innovation so important? Here it is helpful to turn to the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804),[70] since he was one of the most influential thinkers in framing the modern paradigm. In fact, most of us don’t know how much we’ve been (usually indirectly) influenced by Kant’s thinking about art. A phrase we can use to unpack his account is his claim that “beautiful art is the art of genius.”[71] To get to what he means by fine (beautiful) art, let’s consider Kant’s conception of “genius.”
But first, a couple points of comparison on the notion of “genius”: In 1746, the French theorist Charles Batteux (1713–80) had argued that art was all about imitating nature, and the “genius” is the one who is a superb imitator.[72] This conception of genius is easy enough to understand, for such a genius is essentially someone who has learned the techniques of a given type of art form and has become a highly developed craftsman. Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) seems to have held such a view, given his comment: “I worked hard. Anyone who works as hard as I did can achieve the same results.”[73] Bach is surely overstating the case (in a very modest and humble sort of way), but his viewpoint is clear enough: one becomes an artist by becoming a craftsman. Yet consider how different is the following description of the genius, given by William Duff (1732–1815) in 1770:
A man of genius is really a kind of different being from the rest of the species. The bent of his disposition, the complexion of his temper, the general turn of his character, his passions and his pursuits are for the most part very dissimilar from those of the bulk of mankind. Hence partly it happens that his manners appear ridiculous to some and disagreeable to others.[74]
Here, in contrast, we have a portrait of the artist as rather different from you and me. The artist is some rather strange person—either “ridiculous” or “disagreeable”—who isn’t like “the rest of the species.” Someone like Vincent van Gogh comes to mind. Or how about the German artist Joseph Beuys (1921–86)? His performance art includes How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965), in which his head is covered in gold leaf and honey, one foot covered in felt and the other in iron: for two hours, he walks around an art gallery carrying a dead hare and explains to it the meaning of the art. Another of his performance pieces is titled I Like America and America Likes Me (1974, René Block Gallery, New York City), which consists of him spending several days in a gallery with a felt blanket (note: felt is a recurring theme in his art), a flashlight, a live coyote, and copies of the Wall Street Journal delivered daily. In the case of Beuys, it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that he’s not quite like the rest of the species.
As it turns out, Kant gives us a picture of the genius that is a lot closer to Duff’s than Batteux’s. According to Kant in his Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), “the genius is a favorite of nature, the likes of which one has to regard as only a rare phenomenon.”[75] But what is genius? Kant tells us that “genius is a talent for producing that for which no determinate rule can be given . . . consequently that originality must be its primary characteristic.”[76] Whereas Batteux had stressed being a good imitator, Kant goes in the radically opposite direction: being as original as possible. You might say that the “rules” don’t apply to the genius.[77] As Kant puts it, “everyone agrees that genius is entirely opposed to the spirit of imitation.”[78] Thus, the genius’s artworks become examples for lesser artists (poor saps!) to imitate, while great artists somehow just come up with great ideas. Kant’s concept of genius gets even more interesting when he claims that “the author of a product that he owes to his genius does not know himself how the ideas for it come to him.”[79] This clearly separates the genius artist from the scientist, at least for Kant. Whereas the genius artist has absolutely no idea of how she came up with her ideas, says Kant, a scientist like Newton can explain each of the steps that led him to his theory. So creating for the genius is a kind of mysterious process that even she does not understand, unlike Bach’s view in which it can be more or less explained by the techniques of a craftsman who’s at the top of his game. To sum up Kant’s account, then, (1) true geniuses are original, (2) what they create is exemplary for everyone else, and (3) they are unable to explain how they created their masterpieces. Accordingly, the true primary texts of the art world are those that are original and thus exemplary. They are first and foremost innovative. Other works of art—works that are derivative in one sense or another—count more like secondary texts or as commentaries on the primary texts.
Think about some of the primary artists of the art world: poets like Homer or T. S. Eliot (1888–1965); playwrights like William Shakespeare (1564–1616) or Samuel Beckett (1906–89); painters like Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) or Picasso (1881–1973); composers like Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) or Gioacchino Rossini (1792–1868); sculptors like Michelangelo (1475–1564) or Auguste Rodin (1840–1917); photographers like Edward Weston (1886–1958) or Ansel Adams (1902–84); filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980) or François Truffaut (1932–84). What are the “primary texts” of the art world? Homer’s Odyssey, Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1600/1601), Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1948–49), da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (1503–6), Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (1804–8), Rossini’s The Barber of Seville (1816), Michelangelo’s David (1501–4), Rodin’s The Thinker (1902), Weston’s Pepper (1930), Adams’s Clearing Winter Storm (1935), Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959), and Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959). That is a mere sampling of some of the “great” artists who have become exemplary for others, a list that is hardly inclusive or exhaustive.[80] There are certainly other artists who could be added to this list of primary artists and their “texts.” And then we would need to begin the somewhat messy process of deciding who counts as a “primary” artist and who is a mere “secondary” artist. But getting all that exactly right hardly matters here.
Now, there is something right about Kant’s idea of the genius: one somehow gets ideas, and it is not always clear where those ideas come from.The literature on creativity or innovation (and whether they are one phenomenon or two) is vast and, understandably, contradictory. For creativity is hardly easy to explain: there is something mysterious about it. At least as far back as Plato (428–348 BC), in the dialogue Ion, there has been the question of exactly where artists (or, in this particular case, poets) get their ideas. Speaking to the poet named Ion, who has just returned from Epidaurus having won first prize for reciting Homer, Socrates suggests that his “skill” really results from his being “out of his mind.” Socrates says, “This gift you have of speaking well on Homer is not an art; it is a power divine . . . so the lyric poets are not in their senses when they make these lovely lyric poems.”[81] Ion is not at all convinced that Socrates is right,[82] but this idea that poets are divinely inspired has been widely held, as has been the notion that somehow artists just get ideas in some sort of magical way. No more influential expression of this idea of creation exists than that from a famous letter attributed to none other than Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–91).
Concerning my way of composing . . . I can really say no more on this subject than the following; for I myself know no more about it, and cannot account for it. When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer—say, travelling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep; it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence and how they come, I know not; nor can I force them. . . . When I proceed to write down my ideas, I take out of the bag of my memory . . . what has previously been collected into it. . . . For this reason the committing to paper is done quickly enough, for everything is, as I said before, already finished; and it rarely differs on paper from what it was in my imagination.[83]
There is something so gloriously “romantic” about this account that it is almost painful to discover that it is a pure fabrication by Friedrich Rochlitz, who was both a fan of Mozart and had been deeply influenced by Kant’s notion of the genius. Rochlitz’s account of Mozart’s composition process is how he wanted it to go. It is as if we want artists to be capable of something like magical power. The contemporary philosopher Jerrold Levinson goes so far as to say that
the whole tradition of art assumes art is creative in the strict sense, that it is a godlike activity in which the artist brings into being what did not exist beforehand—much as a demiurge forms a world out of inchoate matter. . . . There is a special aura that envelops composers, as well as other artists, because we think of them as true creators.[84]
While we have already seen that it is far too much to say that “the whole tradition of art” has held this view, it clearly has held sway for more or less the last couple of centuries (that is, during the “modern” or “romantic” period).
The Transformation of the Status of the Artist
Seeing the artist as genius has consequences, and quite problematic ones. First, the genius myth has promoted the idea of the artist as some sort of “lone creator” who neither needs nor wants the influence of or interaction with others—the artist off alone in a garret. Augusto Boal speaks of “the solitary author locked in his study, to whom divine inspiration dictated a finished text.”[85] Second, whereas artists had generally been seen as craftsmen (Bach’s view of himself was largely the view held throughout Western history), now they became “godlike.” For instance, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder (1773–98) and Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853) speak of artists as “a few chosen men whom [God] has anointed as His favorites.”[86] Composer George Bizet (1838–75) goes so far as to say that “Beethoven is not a human, he is a god.”[87] Composer Carl Maria von Weber demands that the composer become “free as a god.”[88] Lest one think that this way of thinking is simply one common to musicians or to the nineteenth century, one need only consider what two more recent artists have said of themselves. When Henri Matisse was working on his famed chapel for Benedictine nuns in Vence (France), one of the nuns asked him for whom he was building such a structure. He replied that he was doing it for God. Later, Matisse said to that same nun: “I am doing it for myself.” She responded, “But you told me you were doing it for God.” And Matisse answered, “Yes, but I am God.”[89] Or consider how the playwright and Broadway director Arthur Laurents describes writers: he calls them “the chosen people,” a phrase reminiscent of Kant’s idea of the genius as nature’s favorite.[90] In any case, artists take on an exalted status, becoming something like special agents of God or else simply gods themselves. The contemporary Christian composer Rory Noland puts this as follows:
Artists were now more than mere mortals. For the first time in history, a successful artist was more likely than a scholar, priest, or scientist to be labeled a genius. The artistic temperament was viewed as a wild-eyed, mysterious, godlike quality bestowed on a chosen few who were then capable of doing superhuman things. Artists were not of this world, people thought, but above and beyond it, which explains why all sorts of eccentric, antisocial, and immoral behavior on their part was not only overlooked, but was actually celebrated.[91]
One could cite Beethoven, Picasso, or a variety of other artists whose behavior—either scandalous or unreasonable—was tolerated by patrons and friends because these artists were considered to be above mere mortals. Of course, it’s one thing to say that God is the giver of talents that allow us to make art; it’s quite another thing to say that the artist is thereby somehow like or equal to God.
Yet this idea that artists are like God in some way deserves further inspection. What would it mean to say that an artist is like God? In effect, Kant’s genius is a godlike character, for the genius creates seemingly out of nothing—creatio ex nihilo. Where nothing exists, suddenly a masterpiece comes into being. The genius, then, is like the God of Christianity. I will return to the theological aspect of this change more fully in the next chapter. Yet here we need to consider how much this idea alters our conception of the artist.
In effect, the resulting conception is that of a highly exalted figure. This move puts the artist in a difficult situation: suddenly the artist is now greatly above the audience. Given such a lofty perch, artists sometimes do not feel any need to speak to a general audience. Instead, artistic practice becomes something that one does for oneself. Of course, the problem was that artists have sometimes wanted it both ways in terms of being understood and appreciated. A lack of understanding or appreciation by the audience has come to be interpreted as a sign of greatness: according to the myth that started to take shape in the nineteenth century, innovative artists are those whose genius is not sufficiently appreciated. Thus, art that is immediately and universally enjoyed has come to be seen as somehow aesthetically inferior. Today this “myth of the unappreciated genius” has gained such a hold that we tend to assume that it has always been the norm for great artists not to be sufficiently appreciated by their contemporaries, despite the fact that there is ample evidence to suggest that this is only true in certain cases.[92] We tend to assume that—by definition—a truly great work of art is one that initially meets with great resistance or else is simply ignored. Again, Van Gogh is the poster boy for that idea. In any case, this way of thinking about the artistic genius has proved extremely useful: artists who have not been popular (or at least have felt that they did not receive the attention they deserved) could always take solace in the idea that such is the lot of great geniuses, and that artists who happen to be popular are simply “selling out.” Of course, no doubt there are artists who “sell out” in some sense or another. We’ll consider this phenomenon in chapter 4. Moreover, artists are not always fully appreciated in their time, and those of us who consider ourselves to be “artists” in the more exclusive sense of the term are often bothered by that. Yet, with some notable exceptions, the great artists of the past that we celebrate today were generally celebrated as great artists by their contemporaries.
Artistic Ritual and Authority in the Art World
Yet what about the other half of the phrase “beautiful art is the art of genius?” For Kant, what distinguishes both fine art and judgments about fine art is purity. Perhaps the most important idea of artistic purity is that both art objects and our judgments about these objects are connected to neither purpose nor rationality. This is not just a minor break with the previous conception of art, but one of cataclysmic importance. According to Kant, when we make aesthetic judgments (like “this object is beautiful”), we must do so in a way that is purely “disinterested.” Kant gives us a rather politically incorrect example of what he is not talking about: in 1666, a group of Iroquois visited Paris, and instead of enjoying the beauty of the grand buildings and artwork on display, they were drawn to the rotisseries full of meat.[93] Or, to give a different example, there’s a Dutch still life of a banquet of food in the Art Institute of Chicago that’s located in a place I often reach around lunchtime (assuming I arrive when the museum opens). It’s called “Still Life” and was painted by Pieter Claesz (1597/98–1660). As long as I admire and appreciate that painting for its form (and that alone), I am making a purely aesthetic judgment. However, if the food looks particularly attractive to me, then I’ve moved away from a purely aesthetic judgment to one that is interested in the subject matter—I’m now enjoying it because the food looks tasty. So here we have a very strong prohibition: according to Kant, a true aesthetic judgment can have nothing to do with any practical desires but must remain pure. This means that art can be put to only one “use”—the purely aesthetic use of contemplation.[94] My gazing at that painting (no matter how hungry I am) must be “merely contemplative” and “devoid of all interest.”[95] That purity even extends to reason: if we consider an art object to be “good,” then we are applying a rational category to it and assuming that it has some kind of end or purpose. Thus, a vase can be “good” if it works well for holding flowers (it fulfills its function). But, if we look at it “aesthetically,” our aesthetic judgment regarding the vase can’t take its function into account (and one could argue that a vase is inherently compromised as an art object because it can have a practical use). Kant insists that works of art must have no purpose: they are to be created for no other purpose than to be admired aesthetically. This is why he says that “flowers, free designs, lines aimlessly intertwined in each other under the name of foliage” are particularly exemplary as works of art, for it is hard to see any “purpose” in a flower, which just is.[96] In effect, Kant removes art from the world of wants and desires, the world of ethics, and the world of rationality. An artwork must not be created for any purpose except that of being an art object: something to look at and admire. To explain this rarefied sense of “use,” Kant gives us the idea of a purposiveness that is “without representation of an end.”[97] What he means by this is that artworks should only have the “purpose” of being art and that means being something that is pleasant aesthetically.
Practically, the implications of Kant’s move here are highly significant. If art is not connected to rationality, then it literally has nothing “to say.” Although it was not Kant who claimed that art was about expressing emotions or even “expressing oneself,” it is not hard to see how Kant’s insistence that art be detached from rationality could very easily lead to those very typical ideas of the romantic or modern paradigm. The role of the artist is to create, not to make moral judgments. In the famed preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde states a number of things that naturally follow from Kant’s insistence that art have no ethical “point” to make.
The artist is the creator of beautiful things. . . . There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all. . . . No artist desires to prove anything. . . . No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. . . . All art is quite useless.[98]
Although not all artists would go as far as Wilde does, the freedom that Kant’s view brought has been generally welcomed. Of course, a particularly problematic historical aspect of Kant’s view is that art, having been entirely severed from reason, could no longer say anything that could be called “true.” Unlike philosophy or science, then, art could no longer be taken seriously as rational.
But this also meant that there was now a tension between the art world and the church. Almost from its beginning, the church has employed the arts. True, the arts have been appreciated by the church for being beautiful, but those stained-glass windows of Chartres were designed to tell the Christian story. The church has a long history of using art for very practical purposes. Later, we will consider the extent to which this is acceptable, for there is an opposite worry: does the church tend to view art from a purely utilitarian perspective? In any case, the purity of art and its disconnection from both the good (ethics) and the true puts the art world and the church at odds, and complicates things for any artist who is a Christian.
There is a further aspect in which aesthetic judgments are to be pure, and it is one that is, at least at first, a little hard to grasp. Kant insists that anything that is truly beautiful not only must be liked (aesthetically) but will be liked by everyone. Says Kant: “the judgment of taste ascribes assent to everyone.”[99] This is almost the equivalent (said, of course, with a pseudo-German accent) of, “You vill look at zee painting, and you vill like it!” Kant’s insistence here is odd in more than one respect. According to him, the reason we judge something to be beautiful has nothing to do with the object and everything to do with us. In other words, we pronounce something beautiful on the basis of what happens in us, not on the basis of the object itself. So our pronouncement is purely subjective. Yet, since Kant thinks that all human beings have similar rational powers, we should likewise all agree regarding the beauty of any given piece of art. Thus, Kant’s view is that our judgments about art are subjective but are still universal and necessary. That is, we fully expect others to agree with us. On Kant’s view, if I think a particular painting is beautiful, you should agree with me (assuming, of course, that our sensory systems are operating correctly).
It’s not hard to see that there is a problem with Kant’s idea of what it means for an object to be beautiful. On the one hand, Kant’s theory makes beauty purely subjective rather than objective: the beauty of an object doesn’t depend on the object itself but only on the person perceiving it. C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) makes reference to a school textbook that, out of charity to the authors, he simply refers to as The Green Book. The authors of the text tell the familiar story of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), who hears two tourists describing a waterfall. One describes it as “sublime,” the other as “pretty.” Although Coleridge agrees with the one who calls it “sublime,” the authors of The Green Book make the point that both statements simply reflect the feelings of the persons, not the waterfall itself. Such is Kant’s view. Even the authors of The Green Book realize that this view in effect trivializes aesthetic judgments. As they put it: “We appear to be saying something very important about something: and actually we are only saying something about our own feelings.”[100] This is a view that is deeply at odds with the entire history of theologians who have thought and written about beauty, not to mention what most people have traditionally meant in saying, “This painting is beautiful.”
On the other hand, aesthetic judgments are quite unlike typical judgments. Whereas we generally make judgments about things on the basis of their purpose, Kant explicitly says that purpose has nothing to do with art. As long as one is committed to the idea that human experience of aesthetic objects is universally the same, it is possible to hold that aesthetic judgments are universal and necessary. But, in our time, such an assumption seems very hard to hold. It might be easier to hold if we were to say that there is something about the object that makes it beautiful, but placing everything upon the subject very quickly leads to a kind of aesthetic relativism that can either be somewhat limited or full blown.[101] Although aesthetic relativism is quite common in our era, it is profoundly at odds both with what the Bible itself says and with the Christian tradition. We may not always agree on the beauty of any particular object (a subject to which we will return), but it seems strange to say that the beauty (or value) of art is purely relative to whoever happens to behold it.
Art “Experts” and the Highbrow/Lowbrow Distinction
Consider what all this means practically in the art world. Given the problem of aesthetic judgments being subjective, it is not hard to see why the art world relies on “experts” to “declare” the value of art. That world of experts is a relatively small one, composed largely of art critics, museum curators, gallery owners, art teachers, and the artists themselves. Tom Wolfe (1931–) calls such experts “culturati” and says:
If it were possible to make such a diagram of the art world, we would see that it is made up of (in addition to the artists) about 750 culturati in Rome, 500 in Milan, 1,750 in Paris, 1,250 in London, 2,000 in Berlin, Munich, and Düsseldorf, 3,000 in New York, and perhaps 1,000 scattered about the rest of the known world. That is the art world, approximately 10,000 souls—a mere hamlet!—restricted to les beaux mondes of eight cities.[102]
One might find this a crass oversimplification of the art world and exactly who belongs to it. One might quibble with the numbers or the exact set of cities. Yet it’s rather hard to argue with the overall point, that there are a relatively small number of “experts” in the art world who decide who’s in and who’s out. I’m very sorry to say this, but you—gentle reader—are probably not (and how can one say this nicely enough in our politically correct age?) in the in-group. Of course, I know I’m definitely not in there either, so we’re in the same boat (it’s a very big boat, with ample room for all the “non-culturati”). So there are those who are “in,” those who are “out,” and those “on the fringe.” What camp a given artist is in can be defined by where her artworks are exhibited. Do they make it to one of the major art galleries (in New York City, they’re mainly in Chelsea)? Do they make it to one of the major museums in the world? Are they played by major orchestras or noted ensembles or at important music festivals? Are they screened at important film festivals (like Cannes or Sundance)?
That last question, the one about films, leads us to a further difficulty, since most films don’t, by this definition, fall into the category of fine art. Note that the art world is composed of “fine art” rather than “popular art.” One could just as well use the distinction of “highbrow” and “lowbrow” art. But both of these distinctions are more problematic than they might seem. Consider Lawrence W. Levine’s conversation with a scholar who had just seen and come to admire some films by Buster Keaton (1895–1966). When Levine exclaims that “Keaton was a great artist,” the scholar immediately corrects him by saying, “A great popular artist.”[103] As a kind of test case, Levine shows how William Shakespeare had—as recently as the nineteenth century—been part of everyday, working-class American culture. Particularly telling is the illustration of Huck and Jim’s decision in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn to make some money by performing parts of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Richard III. As Levine puts it: “That the presentation of Shakespeare in small Mississippi River towns could be conceived of as potentially lucrative tells us much about the position of Shakespeare in the nineteenth century.”[104] In other words, Shakespeare would have needed to be seen as “popular” literature—and well known to everyday folk—to make performing him even remotely financially successful. Moreover, Shakespeare was performed at that time in all sorts of bowdlerized versions with names like Julius Sneezer, Hamlet and Egglet, and Ye Comedie of Errours, a Glorious, Uproarous [sic] Burlesque, Not Indecorous nor Censorous, with Many a Chorus, Warranted Not to Bore Us, Now for the First Time Set before Us. And I’d be willing to wager that it didn’t bore the audience. Think of Shakespeare’s place today. The various Shakespeare theaters may do a thriving business, but it’s not because they are appealing to the masses. While many high school students are introduced to Shakespeare, their normal response is not that this is exciting reading material but that it is simply something they must learn to pass a test. By the twentieth century, Shakespeare had become a rarefied author who had gone from lowbrow to highbrow. But this change was not accidental: it was largely engineered. For there were those in high society that thought Shakespeare should be kept from both the lower-class audiences and the actors who would dare take liberties with his texts like the ones mentioned above. As A. A. Lipscomb noted in 1882, Shakespeare “is destined to become the Shakespeare of the college and university, and even more the Shakespeare of private and select culture.”[105] Such was the deliberate takeover of Shakespeare from being the property of the masses to that of the elite. And one can only conclude that this move—certainly a “hostile” takeover—was eminently successful.
While the Shakespeare example is rather telling, there are others. It’s common knowledge that opera began as a popular and even “vulgar” art form, though it’s about as far away from that today as could be imagined. One reason for both Shakespeare and opera becoming high art is simply the fact that they are so removed from their time that it takes a certain knowledge and sophistication to appreciate them. In other words, they simply can’t occupy a space in popular art because so few people can easily “get” them (either in terms of understanding or, especially with opera, in terms of affording them).[106] What about the Beatles? They are clearly popular art, but many people with high artistic sensibilities would see many of their songs as great art. Bob Dylan is even more problematic, since his song “Desolation Row” is included in The Oxford Book of American Poetry. Just to clarify things, most “popular” singers are not included in such an elite text. That the editors chose to include Dylan’s work in a “highbrow” sort of collection is remarkable, but even more remarkable is what they say about him: “The lyrics in three of his record albums from the mid-1960s—Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde—particularly reward close analysis of the sort given to demanding examples of modern poetry.”[107] High praise indeed for what is normally classified as “folk music.” But this only serves to show that our distinction between highbrow and lowbrow is somewhat artificial and, I would contend, largely created because of snobbery. It serves those who consider themselves and their art to be “highbrow,” for it gives them license to dismiss certain kinds of art as “beneath them.” I would very much like to say that there is a much less sinister motive at work in making such a distinction, but I simply don’t see any such “neutral” motive.[108] We may need something like the highbrow/lowbrow distinction, if only to designate art that has limited appeal from that which has much broader appeal. But we need to realize the implications of this distinction.
Art as Religion and Ritualistic Behavior
Another important—though complicated—aspect is fine art’s relation to religion (and thus to the church). If we go back to when the romantic or modern conception of art was forming—around the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries—we find that theorists are beginning to see them as connected. Consider what the composer and writer E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776–1822) says about instrumental music:
No art arises so directly from man’s spiritual nature, and no art calls for such primary, ethereal resources, as music. Sound audibly expresses an awareness of the highest and holiest. . . . By virtue of its essential character, therefore, music is a form of religious worship . . . and its origin is to be sought and found only in religion.[109]
Now, music may well be “a form of religious worship,” but Hoffmann is hardly speaking of religion in any traditional sense. What replaces ancient church music for Hoffmann is the instrumental music of Joseph Haydn (1732–1809), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–91), and Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827), composers who are not less religious but instead evidence the religiosity of a “modern age striving for inner spirituality.” In other words, their music (at least according to Hoffmann) was not “religious” (in the sense of being dedicated to Christianity or any specific sort of religion) but was somehow connected to “spirituality.” Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) speaks of the kinship of art and religion, which he claims “stand beside one another like two friendly souls whose inner affinity, whether or not they equally surmise it, is nevertheless still unknown to them.”[110] Though he never quite explains exactly how, Schleiermacher believes that art leads us (or at least has the capacity to lead us) to the religious.
For many, however, art was not seen as an aid to religion but as a replacement for religion. In his Kalligone (1800), Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) claimed that music was set free when it was shown “religious awe [Andacht].”[111] Andacht suggests the kind of religious reverence and veneration one might show a holy object. By suggesting that music should be accorded the same sort of Andacht that would previously have been reserved for holy texts or relics of a revered saint, Herder in effect transfers religious expectations onto aesthetic objects. While talking about music in this reverential way would have been considered highly unusual by most of Herder’s contemporaries, it is interesting that only two years after the appearance of Kalligone, Johann Nikolaus Forkel, in his biography of Bach, suggests that some of Bach’s works could be mentioned “only with a kind of holy worship” (a claim that Bach—who wrote the initials S. D. G., standing for Soli Deo Gloria [For God’s glory alone], on his scores—could never have imagined making).[112] Wackenroder ultimately goes so far as to claim that “music is certainly the ultimate mystery of faith, the mystique, the fully revealed religion.”[113] These were not merely theoretical claims; instead, they began to affect artistic practice. Put bluntly, art took over, almost wholly intact, many of the behavioral expectations of religious experience and worship. Consider both the design of concert halls and museums and the behavioral expectations (ritual) that accompany them. Both are places that are dedicated to the religion of art or culture and are designed to create the appropriate sentiment in the visitor—something not so far from pious devotion. It was completely intentional that many art museums and concert halls were given facades vaguely or explicitly reminiscent of Greek temples, for their function is clearly that of a shrine. It was also no accident that concert halls tended to be decorated with the busts or at least the names of the demigods of classical music, giving them the feel of a musical pantheon. What a concert hall provides is a kind of hallowed space that calls for silence. Of course, the sort of silence expected is also important. Wackenroder (along with his friend Ludwig Tieck) tells us that “the appreciation of sublime artworks is akin to prayer.”[114] Thus, when the character Joseph Berglinger (the art-loving friar) would attend a concert, “he would sit down in a corner . . . and would listen with the same reverence as he did in church—just as silent and motionless.”[115] Thus the kind of behavior expected of the concertgoer became that of the devout at mass. And the same could be said of behavior in art museums: even today, one can often almost feel a kind of devout reverence when one visits them.
Conclusion
While there are more features to our current liturgical practice of the art world, these are the most important ones. Having both considered and, in many cases, deconstructed many aspects of that liturgy, it’s time for reconstruction. How should we think of the status of art and artists? What does it mean to make art? What we need is a paradigm for the arts that better reflects art’s true nature and how it can be—indeed, should be—central to the church. I do not believe that art is some kind of “add-on” that we “indulge” when we happen to have the time and money. Instead, I think art is central to who we are as human beings. God intends us to be artists. Art is part of our being—and should be part of both our individual lives and the very life of the church. Reconstructing an appropriate paradigm for that centrality is what we turn to in chapter 3.