The Modern Art Culture

Well. I said I'd post on something interesting. At the moment I'm at a loss for interesting things, so I'll just post on a verse. The verse is this, James 4:4, and my NASB reads:

You adulteresses, do you not know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.

Boy. That hits you hard doesn't it. By trying to be a friend to the world, you are making yourself an enemy to God. Powerful. I don't think I can really 'preach' on this, but I think you can probably see for yourself where that verse applies to you.

The book of James is sure packed with powerful stuff for such a short book. You should read through it sometime.

I'm reading this book called "It Was Good Making Art to the Glory of God". It's a bunch of collected essays on making art from a christian worldview. One of the big questions is what should our art be about, or what should it depict, etc. Basically, it should depict all things beautiful. If you think about it, mainstream art and media go for shock value. But when you see something shocking over and over again, you become desensetized. So to be shocked, the artist has to crank up the shock value another notch. The world's art arena has been cranked pretty high up there on the shock value. And that's not a good thing.

So to be a good artist, you have to shock people. Now that's all good and well (actually it's not, but I felt like saying that), but you can only get so shocking. And the things that shock people are a pretty bad lot. I mean come on, do you think extreme language, gorey grisly violence, graphic depictions of sex... do you think those are glorifying to God? Fine. Maybe you do. but I don't.

So now the question becomes what should we depict in our art? The first thing that comes to mind is beauty. The problem is, when I say beauty, roses, happy smiling people, children playing merrily, a pretty sunset... these are the things that come to mind. Now I think we should focus more on beauty as opposed to chaos, unorderliness, revolting things etc, but we can't just focus on the beautiful, because we live in a fallen world. We live in a world where evil is rampant, so it looks corney and false and goody-goody when people depict a perfect world in their art (By the word 'art' here I don't just mean paintings... I mean music, literature... the creative arts in general).

To make art that resonates and gives the consumer a sense of beauty, you have to depict truth. You have to depict the world as it is. But there's a fine line here, because some people will say there's no hope and everyone's evil and we're all gonna die (unfortuneatly I think I kind of conveyed that in my song Dark Illusions... I rather regret that now. But look on the bright side, the music's cool [if a bit repetetive]). This is not I repeat not conveying the truth. Yes there is sin, and yes we're all evil, but there's an overlying sense of hope and redemption to creation. God is loving, kind, and merciful.