I'm not really sorry that I own a bull terrier. We adopted her from a shelter this Christmas. It's the first time either of us has owned a owned.
People who otherwise like us will say that she probably will be to rip its face off. The inevitable violent streak in those dogs that make them somehow evil by nature. Never mind that every single year thousands of bull terriers do not rip people's faces off.
Never mind places to argue for nature for behavior rather than nurture. music. I've noticed a lot of Christians, when they come across Christian music they like, will tell friends "it's Christian music.
.. but it's good.
" Because you're a lot more likely to buy a Christian There are exceptions of course. There is some brilliant Christian music out there because a rule needs exceptions to prove it. I'm not hearing about the Michael English scandal of the early 1990s.
Dove Award winner (yeah, I didn't know they had an award ceremony either) Michael English was a Christian musician who, in the early '90s, had an affair with one of his backup singers. Hypotheses are that he must have done it in the Town Square, or had extraordinarily bad accountants, or had a record news media. Either the money or the desire to keep it covered up wasn't there.
I guess some people have better publicists than others. This is not the important part of the story anyway, even though it's the more sensational part. The lives of the artists can inform how we experience the art, but the art is what it is regardless of if we know how Picasso paintings.
If the art is good and the artist is terrible, the art remains good. And if the art is terrible and the person is terrible we write columns like this one. I'm talking about Michael English instead because he couldn't break into secular music.
I guess because he wasn't good enough for secular music. Which is what I want to talk about de-volution in religious art. I could say The Church used to have Dante, J.
S. Bach, the Wesleys, Handel, Michelangelo, and on and on. Some would argue T.
S. Eliot. Some would point out more recently Tolkien and C.
S. Lewis (I'm one that would point out all three) and then lament LaHaye today. Wouldn't be terribly original an observation, but it is one I could make.
I won't because I don't believe crap is a new thing. I'm sure most art in general throughout history was crap. I'm sure some forgotten to make room for the next wave of crap.
It is easy going ages of nothing but great art that never existed. Looking at contemporaries is a lot like if my dog, who craps a lot, had eaten a pile of extremely I should probably define my terms. I know sometimes one man's crap is another man's fedora.
I'm not going to try to give a working definition of art. I could say some very vague things that most communication. One could try to say that good art pushes an artform forward and sparks a palpable reaction of some kind in the audience, someone who takes exception to some part of the definition.
They have every right to. I have a friend who is immovable that art need not communicate anything to an audience. After having that discussion, artist, but I've learned to clip my wings and soften my ways.
I don't try to define art in general for all anymore. It's like trying to find a definition everyone agrees on for "life," "love," "fair," or "beauty." As soon as you try to build walls you keep some things out Having said that, I do believe in universal quality.
I think there is stuff that is slipshod and poorly executed. I've made some myself. I've made some myself in this there.
I think there's a function to religious art in general and I do genre. Religious art is an act of devotion and a way of spreading a message. Why, then, is the largest religion in America mired in of great turmoil.
I see a lot of great art coming from times of comfort and joy. But I do think that the state of the church in modern America is complacent in its comfort. St.
Paul says "So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God" (1 Corninthians 10:31 NIV of all things.) said that he was ruined. St.
Paul was blinded. Daniel was exhausted and understanding. It doesn't actually say that the shepherds watching their flocks pooped their robes when angels showed up, but the normal reaction to seeing angels in scripture is stark terror.
Scripture says that the almighty, sovereign God created everything. Humankind fell from their relationship with that God, and God provided a sacrifice of Himself, killed by His creation, all of the appropriate wrath for all sin poured out on Christ nailed on the cross. That's the story in the Bible.
I have a really hard time understanding how that translates into on beneath it. I have a hard time understanding how a pastel figurine of a beautiful, calm, librarian looking woman in robes with fluffy the almighty that make people mess themselves on sight. And I'm not sure how the comfy is to the glory of God.
sale. "Let my ceiling go, you damned dirty ape!") my fiancé and I went about.
I got on this by reading Franky Schaeffer's fantastic book Addicted to Mediocrity: 20th Century Christians and the Arts religious art 27 years ago, and by realizing things have only gotten Donor Saved My Life" comes to mind. As does the David and Goliath action figures which, even worse, were sold separately. There was a candy colored, round edged Noah's Ark for babies but it did not include the rest of the world of round edged, candy colored sinners drowning beneath the waves.
) Mainly the place was 80% books with people with find out. There was a section of films. One had Eddie Murphy in it and had nothing to do with anything spiritual.
It had to do with animals making snide remarks with the voices of sitcom stars. Look, I know wall of art prints. Afterward we both commented on how we weren't offended by anything on that wall.
In fact everything would look very nice in our house. They'd look nice in your house. They'd look nice anywhere.
They were nice. They would lull the squirreliest of fourth graders into listening to their math lesson. The colors made it almost as though there was no picture there at all.
They were completely muted and neutral. The art had been fixed to prevent breeding. I thought about that kind of God, how impotent, how gentlemanly, how lukewarm.
A God you would bring home to mother. We were offended in how little we were offended. It’s like living on a diet of only unbuttered, unsalted mashed potatoes and dying of malnutrition.
I don’t want to start any blasphemous rumors, but I’d take a busload of Piss Christs, Ecce Homo exhibits, or Corpus Christi productions any day of the week. There’s fire in the opposition. There’s milquetoast decorations in the faithful.
I'm not saying all modern Christian art is like that, but I am saying that this was the most accessible outlet I could find. This was the mainstream store in a mid-sized college town somewhere in America. I in other spiritual paths.
four years ago for a Tibetan Buddhist exhibit. Monks came and made one of those sand mandalas. They had rooms upon rooms of didactic images of enlightenment.
Some were a little obscure but mostly they were images that I, western boy in 2007, could understand or at the very least get something from. It was exciting and there was a devotion to some difficult concepts in it like sacrifice, compassion, generosity, and death to self. I have a Wiccan friend who makes paintings that make my hair stand on end.
I like art that makes my hair stand on end. I like art that makes me uncomfortable. The kind of painting you would put in a room by itself.
The kind of painting where the artist puts their blood and other fluids into it. Literally. If you put it in your living room it would draw focus more than the television.
I feel robbed in my own faith's modern art. off the hook. It should place you firmly in the teeth of angels.
You have to be careful around angels. They'll be fine and then one day without warning they'll rip the face off of your two-year- old. went to register for our wedding gifts, which I highly recommend even if you're not going to get married.
They give you a price gun and you scanning. We were in one of those warm, homey type stores. The kind where colors match for the clueless (like me.
) I love the kitsch of art prints. Well, love is a strong word. I'm amused by their presence.
I their prints being sold because they match the sheets on the daybed. I Chapel. It was The Creation of Adam but it was cropped to just the hand of God reaching to touch the hand of Adam.
It was huge. It would only when you walking into the room. It would be striking.
And it would cost as much as the espresso machine. I kind of like everything about it. Where the image comes from, the story of its creation, the image of creation, the fact that it's a framed print that was never meant to hang on the wall of a house, the fact that what was meant doesn't make a bit of difference in this world, the fact that I would still be overwhelmed by it daily.
I would love to have that in my house. I would rather have the espresso machine. I'm aware of what that says about me.
I am a framed print of the times I live in. the Eden Tree and new as the new-cut tooth. Art, and especially religious art, reflects the highest aspirations of humankind.
We try to express correctly. We try to communicate the storm raging in our guts and skulls. We try to connect with the everlasting on page, canvas or tongue.
And we fail. We fall hard back to the earth, and while the art artist, everything is temporary. Humankind needs to continue to aspire divine.
In the end, me sitting and writing against mediocrity is no kind of solution and no kind of help. It's pompous. The solution to the floods of safe, mediocre, decorative art is simple.
You and I need to make good art. And lots of it. The sacred space of art is the place where mediocrity should not be suffered.
Somehow we find ourselves in the opposite, where the sacred spaces are where the mediocre put their feet up. You're right in that there is so much mediocrity in Christian art, and that somehow Christian artists "get away" with it more, basically because the competition isn't as tough. There are some very wonderful examples of Christian art out there, though, mixed with the mediocrity.
It seems to be symptomatic of many aspects of our faith these days, does it not? Joel Osteen, Rick Warren..
.on and on. The messages and the art are mediocre, painfully dumbed down, with about as much passion as a pacifist on Valium.
The music business is fickle at every level, regardless of whether it's secular or Christian. I agree with many of your sentiments. However, the same arguments you make regarding Christian music could equally be applied to any other small genre.
Only a few artists get "huge" in the mainstream music industry and then manage to stay that way indefinitely. In fact, the best artists in music are often too complex for mainstream radio to accept. Bruce Hornsby can play rings around Elton John or Billy Joel, but his success on secular radio dwindled when his recordings began to more closely resemble jazz.
As for Michael English, if he wanted a secular career, he sure went about it in a funny way. He began in a gospel group with his brother..
.moved from there to sing with the Happy Goodmans..
.then sang with the Singing Americans..
.then the Gaither Vocal Band..
.and used that success to launch a solo career. It was only after his affair that he attempted to record secular music, but by that time, the spectres of his affair and unstable personality were hanging over his head.
It really had nothing to do with how "good" he was. He was as good as any other blue eyed soul singer on secular pop radio. But pop music, just like all other forms music, is fickle about which artist make it and which artists don't.
"Making it" in that genre has less to do with talent and more to do with which songs the promoters with the power decide to push to the top. Britney Spears/Jessica Simpson anyone? I rest my case.
go easy on these artists.. many are trying to serve God to the best of their ability.
Read the Parable of the talents. Matthew 25:14-30 in the Message Bible. It says one was given 5 units.
. one was given 2 units..
and one was given 1 unit...
Based on their ABILITY.. The issue here isnt how much they were given.
. its what they did with it..
The drive to serve God with our talent we've been given is strong. Now that doesnt mean we should not strive for excellence..
we should in all things.. Your writing is pretty harsh and judgemental.
. Ill ask you..
what are you doing with the talent you have been given?
News RSS