Where Have All the Artists Gone? (Part 3)

World Magazine Blog linked yesterday to a fascinating analysis of art in America. The author, Camille Paglia, wants us to know,

"I am a professed atheist and a pro-choice libertarian Democrat."

Nevertheless she says,

"The state of the humanities in the US can be measured by present achievement: would anyone seriously argue that the fine arts or even popular culture is enjoying a period of high originality and creativity? American genius currently resides in technology and design. The younger generation, with its mastery of video games and its facility for ever-evolving gadgetry like video cell phones and iPods, has massively shifted to the Web for information and entertainment.

"I would argue that the route to a renaissance of the American fine arts lies through religion.... Knowledge of the Bible, one of the West's foundational texts, is dangerously waning among aspiring young artists and writers. When a society becomes all-consumed in the provincial minutiae of partisan politics (as has happened in the US over the past twenty years), all perspective is lost. Great art can be made out of love for religion as well as rebellion against it. But a totally secularized society with contempt for religion sinks into materialism and self-absorption and gradually goes slack, without leaving an artistic legacy."

Please don't take this post, or especially the linked article, just as an argument for the value of religion in the arts, though. In particular, Paglia is not saying (though I could wish she had) that "Art Needs God," as World Magazine titled their blog entry. She doesn't believe in God; she's speaking of the value of religion. Anyway, the article is more wide-ranging and informative than a mere defense of religion for the sake of art. It presents a history of art in Europe and America, which, while brief, is nevertheless valuable and interesting. The author has a most sensible perspective on the National Endowment for the Arts and its recent controversies: truly avant-garde art should not be publicly funded, and it's sad that the value of the arts in general has diminished in many conservatives' eyes because of events like the Serrano and Mapplethorpe controversies. She correctly notes a double standard in how religiously-connected art is presented and received.

Near the close she writes,

"[T]he avant-garde is dead. It was killed over forty years ago by Pop Art and by one of my heroes, Andy Warhol, a decadent Catholic. The era of vigorous oppositional art inaugurated two hundred years ago by Romanticism is long gone. The controversies over Andres Serrano, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Chris Ofili were just fading sparks of an old cause. It is presumptuous and even delusional to imagine that goading a squawk out of the Catholic League permits anyone to borrow the glory of the great avant-garde rebels of the past, whose transgressions were personally costly. It's time to move on.

"For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center. Profaning the iconography of other people's faiths is boring and adolescent."

And her final word, while I might disagree with a phrase or two in it, is very close to the mark:

"To fully appreciate world art, one must learn how to respond to religious expression in all its forms. Art began as religion in prehistory. It does not require belief to be moved by a sacred shrine, icon, or scripture. Hence art lovers, even when as citizens they stoutly defend democratic institutions against religious intrusion, should always speak with respect of religion. Conservatives, on the other hand, need to expand their parched and narrow view of culture. Every vibrant civilization welcomes and nurtures the arts.

"Progressives must start recognizing the spiritual poverty of contemporary secular humanism and reexamine the way that liberalism too often now automatically defines human aspiration and human happiness in reductively economic terms. If conservatives are serious about educational standards, they must support the teaching of art history in primary school—which means conservatives have to get over their phobia about the nude, which has been a symbol of Western art and Western individualism and freedom since the Greeks invented democracy. Without compromise, we are heading for a soulless future. But when set against the vast historical panorama, religion and art—whether in marriage or divorce—can reinvigorate American culture."

Related Posts: Where Have All the Artists Gone? Part 1 and Part 2.

Posted: Fri - August 3, 2007 at 04:26 PM |

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Where Have All the Artists Gone? (Part 3)

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson