Art Wednesday: Christian Art & Academia (2)

Last Wednesday the post about Christian art and academia left many questions unanswered. One unexplored area was the idea of aesthetics. An aesthetic in art, in short, is a way of seeing art, a certain set of questions to ask of a work of art, a set of convictions about what makes good art and what makes bad art. It is a body of ideas that shapes a body of art.

To make an abstract idea more concrete lets take some concrete examples of other aesthetics in the art world. Impressionism, in the history of painting, is an aesthetic. The Impressionists had certain convictions about what made good paintings and what made bad paintings and then took out their canvases and made art in line with those convictions. Paintings made in line with the Impressionistic aesthetic have visible brush strokes, emphasize the changing qualities of light, often choose ordinary things as their subjects. It is a body of work that is all unified by a common body of ideas.

Aesthetics generate art.

An aesthetic is a canopy under which new art can grow. It is a frame which gives a structure for new artists to build on. It is a worldview. And all of our creations are simply products of our worldview. Impressionism was an idea created Impressionistic artists, as people came to share the convictions of the first Impressionists they in turn created Impressionistic art, which in turn fed the cycle all the more. The feminist aesthetic provided the resources for artists to create work in line with the priorities of feminist criticism. And so on. The Black Arts Movement gave rise to Amiri Baraka and Maya Angelou. Ansel Adam's convictions about what made a good landscape photograph spawned a generation of Ansel Adams photographers. There is a reason why every fantasy novel has echoes of The Lord of the Rings. People make creations in line with the ideas that have shaped them.

If there is to be robust Christian art there must be a robust Christian aesthetic. Christian artists must have the resources to come to any work of art and say something about it from a Christian perspective. And this something must go beyond the level of "it doesn't have a clear moral" or "this poem is not about Jesus." Those considerations do not make good art. When there is a thoughtful, informed aesthetic to unify Christian artists there will be thoughtful, informed Christian art.

This is why the question of how Christian art came to be as it is is so complicated. It not only a question of changing the art itself, but of changing the ideas behind the art. It is a question of scholarship and criticism. It is changing the way we answer the question "What makes for good Christian art?" to reflect the depth of Creators creativity and all the powers he has given artists to say something true about this world we find ourselves in. Until we can achieve that good Christian art will be only for those artists who have the wit or luck to figure out what it means for them to be a Christian and an artist on their own.

If this is the fate of Christian art then the Church will leave huge fields of the world God has made barren of the seeds of redemption that may arise when Christian artists pour themselves into the world for the sake of the world's flourishing.