Art as a Common Gift

Cinema & New Media Arts | On Apr 18, 2013

Tony Woodlief defends the democratization of art over at Good Letters. This is a great point of discussion for cinema as filmmaking becomes cheaper and more accessible than ever before.

A casual traipse through Tumblr—an Internet miscellany of photography, found art, confessional essays, and often painfully sentimental teenage poetry—indicates Barzun may have been right that the means of producing art “is populistically distributed to all or nearly all.”

Toss in the explosion of self-publishing, add the pastiche of comedy, jeremiad, and layman picture-snapping that permeates Facebook and Twitter, and logic suggests that if one were tasked with tallying people creating art, it might be faster to subtract from census statistics the people who don’t draw or build or write or play.

Barzun’s opposition to the democratization of art didn’t spring from puritanism. He praised not only “traditional” works, but also cubism, surrealism, and even the modernism he faults for inaugurating the Art of Everyman.

What he decried was the fact that the growing number of lesser artists means more bad art—a bitter tonic for someone with demanding aesthetic tastes.

• • •

Genius is rare. Barzun is right about this, but he is wrong about what it means. When it comes to art, at least, he appears to worship, as St. Paul might observe, the created thing above all.

Perhaps it seems illogical to criticize an anthropocentric view of art. Art is, after all, created by humans as an expression of our fears, our exaltations, our wonderment, our despair. Though we differ over individual works, most of us likely join Barzun in calling praiseworthy what pierces us with truth.

We might even agree with Barzun that there’s too much bad art, too much ineptitude and untruth and poor expression that only obscures the vision of hearts yearning for beauty.

We who believe man is created in the image and likeness of God, however, view art as something more than a struggle to perfect self-expression. It is a striving to express the Godlikeness within oneself, which means that it is the fruit of searching and calling and finding something divine.

Art is communion.

The fact that wide swaths of people endeavor to create something—a poem, a photo collage, yes, even another teen paranormal sci-fi thriller novel—ought then hearten us. In these imperfect endeavors we have proof that the spark of divinity has not flickered out.

Yes, much of what we make is dreck; yes, it’s often driven by narcissism and psychosis and all manner of dysfunction. It’s twisted because we are twisted, but it still pours forth from children of God who are striving to imitate the Father, even those of us who have stopped believing in him.

Imagine that. Millions of people, many of them knowing not the first words of orthodox praise, harboring scant knowledge of theology, yet all of them whispering back to the whisper within their spirits, imitating the God they may only know, many of them, as the urge to arrange words in verse, the craving to strum a power chord with the amp cranked up high, the yearning to dance because sunlight has come pouring through the windows in a slant that overwhelms our adult insistence on having a reason for joy.

What ought to make us weep are not scores of sentimental poetry blogs, but the crowds of teenagers who neither read nor write, who consume one another in gossip and scarcely articulate conversation, who create nothing and feel no yearning to create.

It’s far better to have a nation of sculptors scarcely capable of making a workable paperweight, than a nation of consumers who have lost touch with the divine impulse to create.

Barzun recoiled from the common man as artist, but I say: embrace him. We carry in our inept hands, after all, the very heart of God.

Read the full post here.