There’s a controversy brewing in Tacoma, Washington because the Tacoma Art Museum may show the work of an artist named David Wojnarowicz. Specifically, they want to show a video montage he put together that was pulled by the Smithsonian because it was too offensive. The Tacoma museum’s curator responded to critics by saying, “For someone to come and have to confront this image, it’s not going to be easy but art’s not easy.”
Curious about what this non-easy art might involve, I did some searches and found a clip of the video on Youtube (it’s called Fire in My Belly by David Wojnarowicz if you’re interested, though I don’t recommend viewing it). It features images of ants crawling on a crucifix juxtaposed with flickering shots of a young man doing something pornographic.
Oddly, it was this kind of thing that helped lead me to God.
Shortly after I got married, my husband suggested that we check out an international modern art festival that had come to town. At one exhibit we walked into a large room where stylishly-dressed people wandered around rows of metal boxes, nodding and making approving comments. Were we in the wrong place? Had the organizers not had a chance to set the art out on the boxes yet? As it turned out, the metal boxes were the art.
As we walked through the other exhibits, I was amazed at what was considered art: a light bulb, a paper with some holes in it, even an entire building with some spray painting on the side. A favorite approach seemed to be to take something that traditionally symbolized purity and hope (e.g. a sacred religious object) and juxtapose it with something considered dirty and bad (e.g. excrement).
“It’s beautiful,” someone commented at one such exhibit. I recoiled at the statement. If someone wanted to say that this art was thought-provoking or interesting, I could have barely seen where they were coming from. But beautiful? No.
My husband teased me by joking, “Hey, one man’s Sistine Chapel is another man’s metal box!”
“Umm, no,” I mumbled.
At the time I was an atheist, and my husband responded with an interesting question. As we walked back through the rows of metal boxes, he said: “Are you sure that you can defend that statement from a purely atheistic perspective?”
Without thinking about it, I blurted out, “If not, then I denounce atheism. Because I know more than I know anything else that those boxes aren’t as beautiful as the Sistine Chapel.”
I meant it as a half-joke. I’d been an atheist art critic for all of thirty minutes, so I hadn’t exactly fleshed out my thesis, though I assumed that there must be a way to defend my point of view without appealing to anything supernatural. But as I thought about it in the days and weeks that followed, I found that it wasn’t as easy as I’d imagined it would be.
To make the case—from a pure atheist-materialist perspective—that that box was not as beautiful as, say, a Monet, I could say that the creation of great classical art requires more skill than other types of art, and that we get the concept of objective beauty by recognizing the work of the most skilled members of our tribes. But that argument was flimsy. After all, maybe I had no idea what was involved with putting together an aluminum box.
I went over similar lines of reasoning, considering the human animal’s evolved desires and the way we react to stimuli, but each time I came up short. Even if I had been able to demonstrate conclusively that humans do have an evolved tendency to register the chemical reactions that indicate “beauty” with some types of art more than others, I couldn’t get around the fact that there was no objective rule that would apply to each individual. Someone could walk into the Sistine Chapel and announce that he thought it was ugly. Everything within me screamed that that person would be wrong, and not just because I thought so, but because he was not recognizing an objective beauty that existed regardless of any person’s opinion. But I couldn’t get there while adhering to atheistic principles. All I could do was point to trends about what people tend to do, which proves nothing objectively.
What I sensed in my soul is that there is indeed a scale of objective beauty. Some works of art are more beautiful than others; therefore, there must be some ultimate source of beauty that the more beautiful works are more like than the less beautiful ones. (To borrow an analogy from G.K. Chesterton, if someone says one city is more like New York than another, that analogy only works if a specific place called New York actually exists.) Yet in order to supersede human opinion, this objective source of beauty couldn’t originate in the human brain, could it?
This line of thinking disturbed me. My flippant comment that I would denounce atheism before I said that a metal box is as beautiful as the Sistine Chapel turned out to have more weight than I’d expected. Because in order to defend my position that an objective scale of beauty did exist, I had to appeal to something for which there was no strict scientific evidence, something beyond the material world.
And that’s why I always see a silver lining when controversies like the one in Tacoma come up. Because it makes people wonder: “What is true art? What is true beauty?” And, as I know, when you start asking those questions, you’ve taken the first step down a path that leads to the living Source of all that is beautiful.
Comments
Post a Comment
Reminds me of a comment our then-preschool son said as we walked through a modern art exhibit. “I don’t think they’re done with this yet.”
Great article. True art springs from true beauty which is our God.
I find most modern art pretty hideous. Seeing watercolor blotches on notebook paper in a museum, or dirt from the artist’s floor smeared on paper is quite demoralizing; any toddler can do that in a couple of minutes. But I don’t think you thought it through all the way - sensing in your soul that something is beautiful doesn’t make it so, and someone saying that a metal box is beautiful could mean any number of things (maybe they do mean it’s pretty, maybe they mean it evokes a strong response, maybe they mean it has a thought-provoking significance). Keep in mind that humans are naturally more attracted to people than objects, and scenes of nature are beautiful because humans have spent much of their history in nature. It doesn’t make evolutionary sense that we would find inanimate objects more beautiful than people and wildlife and scenery - sure, some people might, but I’m willing to bet they’re in the minority.
Either way, I think your premise that there is an objective beauty is faulty. “What I sensed in my soul is that there is indeed a scale of objective beauty. Some works of art are more beautiful than others; therefore, there must be some ultimate source of beauty that the more beautiful works are more like than the less beautiful ones.” A gut instinct that something is true doesn’t make it true! How can anything be intrinsically beautiful? We can find things repulsive or attractive, but when you really think about it, there’s nothing inherently beautiful or ugly about anything.
Evolution couldn’t explain beauty to you, ergo souls are real.
Makes sense to me.
Ms. Fulweiler is not claiming an objective proof for God, she is claiming that her quest for a standard of beauty showed her a limition of science and pointed her to parallel limitations in a science-based atheism. I am often moved deeply by modern art. I burst into tears when I emerged from the garage at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels and saw the fountain. Many would see it as a round slab of stone covered in water and say “Huh?” If we assume that an artist’s faith is as capable of being a source of artistic inspiration now as it was during the Renaissance, then contemporary art can lead a viewer toward God in a positive way as well as along the “via negativa” outlined in the article. The Vatican Museum of Modern Religious Art contains 55 galleries of art created between the 1890s and the present. The Museum of Contemporary Religious Art (MOCRA) in Saint Louis is much smaller but changes its exhibitions often. I am happy that Ms. Fulwiler found a path to God in a work of art in which she did not find beauty but I don’t read her as condemning all contemporary art. There are contemporary liturgical artists doing some very powerful work and they should not be tarred with the brush of the metal boxes.
I completely agree. See, science hasn’t yet explained a great many things. Filling the holes in with God/souls/magic is a great solution.
Could somebody please explain to Andy the difference between a logical argument and a sneer?
“To borrow an analogy from G.K. Chesterton, if someone says one city is more like New York than another, that analogy only works if a specific place called New York actually exists.”
The redwood forests of California are more like the forest moon of Endor than Newark Airport, therefore Ewoks are real?
Doesn’t the idea of an objective standard beauty cheapen beauty far more than the atheistic version?
In your model, God can perfectly assess the beauty of something. This is horribly reductive - he can measure beauty like we measure weight. He would have to have, in fact, one list which ranks every single work of art in the universe. Sistine Chapel - fourth best piece of art; metal boxes - four millionth.
The subjective version is far more complex - we look at the context, the message, the truth value, the craft, the politics, the personal. Approach things and relate them to each other.
A work of art might speak *to me* very powerfully in a way it wouldn’t to God.
So ... might not my daughter’s picture of the family cat mean more to me than the Sistine Chapel?
And isn’t my subjective experience looking at that picture of a cat richer than God just checking his objective list to see how it scores on the Beauty-o-meter?
When someone makes a logical argument I will reply in kind. Although Jemima Cole just did a pretty good job, not that anyone deserved it.
“In your model, God can perfectly assess the beauty of something.”
I think you make the mistake of assuming that because there is such a thing as “objectivley beautiful” that it is somehow quantifiable. Given that God is the infinite that would mean that all beauty can be appreciated by God even more that by us, because we are limited. Which would mean even the beauty that we miss shows up on God’s radar.
Your argument collapses at that point.
Note to moderator: I’m not sure where my previous comment went. If I was out of line I apologize. I was trying to make a point while being funny. If it came across as offensive that was not my intention.
“Which would mean even the beauty that we miss shows up on God’s radar. Your argument collapses at that point.”
It doesn’t. Here’s what Jennifer said:
“there is indeed a scale of objective beauty. Some works of art are more beautiful than others; therefore, there must be some ultimate source of beauty that the more beautiful works are more like than the less beautiful ones.”
So in Jennifer’s view, it’s a ‘scale’. God is ranking works of art. 1. Sistine Chapel, 2. Metal boxes. But if that’s the case, you have to start slotting in more works of art - Guernica’s better than the Sistine Chapel, Piss Christ is worse than the metal boxes, the Mona Lisa is not as good as the Sistine Chapel but better than Metal Boxes. There’s an inevitable conclusion: God has a chart, a hit parade of art:
1. Guernica
2. Sistine Chapel
3. Mona Lisa
4. Metal Boxes
5. Piss Christ
He won’t let us see this list, of course, but nevertheless, if we think the Mona Lisa is more beautiful than the Sistine Chapel and God disagrees, we’re objectively wrong.
It could be argued that God can see all the beauty in every work of art, squeeze out every last drop, or whatever. But that’s not what Jennifer is arguing. And the end result is the same - he would be putting a value on beauty.
*More* beautiful, *less* beautiful - these are numerical values, there’s no way round that. I can’t say something weighs ‘more’ or ‘less’ than something unless there’s some scale of weights.
Now, I don’t think art appreciation works like weighing at all. It think it has to be subjective. I think the Mona Lisa is prettier than the women in Guernica, but I think Guernica is a great deal more powerful, says a lot more. If I wanted a nice picture for my wall, Mona Lisa every time. If I wanted to show the power of art to make a statement, Guernica.
It’s the old argument - I don’t have to find *your* spouse beautiful, I have to find *my* spouse beautiful. Say two men both think their wife is the most beautiful woman in the world. No competition, no big deal, they agree to differ. Then God comes along and points to the first man’s wife and says ‘no, she’s objectively more beautiful’ - what should the second man do, change his mind?
And let’s break this down to the point of absurdity. The second man says ‘God, OK, taken as a whole, the other guy’s wife is more beautiful. I accept that. But you can agree that my wife’s breasts are more beautiful. My wife has 42D breasts. I happen to know that my friend’s wife has 34A breasts. Which are more beautiful, big breasts or little breasts?’.
And God, being the ultimate authority on objective beauty can, of course, answer the question and makes a definitive ruling, which is ... [please complete this sentence].
The other man says ‘My wife, as you have noticed, is black. His wife is white. Which, objectively, is more beautiful, black skin or white skin?’. And God, being the ultimate authority on objective beauty has no need to hedge or waffle, he has the only correct answer, it has to be either ‘black’ or ‘white’ and it’s ... [please complete this sentence].
Now - the idea that God can make those calls is utterly absurd to me. But if there’s an objective scale of beauty, he necessarily has to be able to. Or, in other words, the idea of an objective scale of beauty is absurd.
Combox
[kom box]
– noun
1. Worthless masturbatorial exercise.
2. Waste of digital space.
God gave us free will which allows us to decide what is beautiful which is based on our own reality.
“God gave us free will which allows us to decide what is beautiful which is based on our own reality.”
In which case, we use our own subjective judgment, it’s not some imperfect fumble towards ‘the right answer’ that God possesses, or a navigation where the needle of our compass points to the pole of perfect beauty.
‘Beauty’ is a slippery word. Something can be physically beautiful but morally ugly. Or true but aesthetically displeasing.
The Sistine Chapel, for example, is ‘false’ in the sense it depicts events that only someone very ignorant would think ‘happened’. But that’s true of a lot of art - the point of art might be said to be that it’s NOT true to life. The Sistine Chapel, to modern Western eyes at least, is undeniably beautiful, and obviously is an important and enjoyable work of art.
As for science not seeing beauty:
http://xkcd.com/877/
“God gave us free will which allows us to decide what is beautiful which is based on our own reality.”
Assming this was not said sarcastically (I am bad on picking up on that), and with all due respect, this is a deeply un-Catholic way of thinking about reality. Catholicism is deeply realistic in its understanding of art and sacrament (they are not totally unrelated). It is a deeply modern and Protestant way of thinking to make the individual subject the standard of all reality.
Our free will is no more relevant to whether something is objectively beautiful than to whether the law of gravity is true or not. God is Absolute Being, and (to badly echo the Scholastics) Being, Truth and Beauty are convertible. All things are more or less beautiful insofar as they reflect and participate in God’s beauty, goodness and order. In other words, God does not “judge” things beautiful so much as He is the standard by which things *are* beautiful and the source of their beauty.
Thanks to everyone (especially Jennifer) for a provacative article and discussion.
Good grief. Jennifer’s point is rooted in a personal reflection and she is simply sharing it with us along with some musings on aesthetics. She isn’t trying to produce a watertight logical argument for God’s existence, so enough with all the childish sneering already. You are critizing her for failing to do something that she isn’t even attempting. Honestly, as a former naturalist myself, I can say that this kind of behavior really made me want to distance myself from nonbelievers. Everywhere they go atheists leave behind interminable streams of arrogant, juvenile, abusive language. You all are doing a lot more to hurt your case than to help it.
The Divine Command theory of goodness, truth, and beauty is indeed a feature of Protestant reform theology. It isn’t found in Catholicism. Criticizing fundamental Protestant theology is too easy.
In the Enlightenment, man places himself in the position of the Protestant conception of God, and so the great politician, the artist, and the scientist declares what is good, true, and beautiful for the mass of humanity. This leads to a bureaucratic police state, political correctness, and contemporary art which you must like otherwise you are a marginalized as a philistine. This is in sharp contrast to the Catholic conception of a good ruler, scientist, and artist being humble and subservient rather than proud and arrogant.
The traditional Catholic view of art is shaped highly by the old Roman idea of education, deriving from the teachings of the Pythagorean and Socratic schools. Vitruvius speaks of this education in his book on architecture. From the Pythagoreans we understand the importance of music and most particularly the fundamental harmonies from which derive the proportions much used in traditional art. Of very great influence was the later Platonic school, from which we get much of our mystical language and theology: here we find that God *is* beauty, is goodness, is truth, and we see a great unifying oneness to all of reality. This oneness and unity is very obvious in physics, and we claim that this unity extends to all of reality, whether empirically measurable or not.
I ought to note that this mystical philosophy is found quite widespread over the ancient world, and the Catholic acceptance of much of it leads us to be called ‘pagan’ by Protestants—even though orthodox Jews accept it too. But we accept it because it is plausibly true, just as we accept plausible scientific findings produced by atheists.
God portrayed in Catholic art as an old man on a throne in the clouds is an archetype and not a literal presentation. Catholic psychology claims that the human intellect is bound to understand higher truths in terms of these archetypes, since we cannot conceive of ultimate reality directly. For this reason, Catholic art varies the use of these archetypes in a culturally relative manner. Catholic art is also highly symbolic and not literal or naturalistic, and persons and events portrayed are identified by the use of conventional symbolism.
“*More* beautiful, *less* beautiful - these are numerical values, there’s no way round that. I can’t say something weighs ‘more’ or ‘less’ than something unless there’s some scale of weights.”
You also need gravity. Weight doesn’t mean anything in the absense of such. Mass however might be a closer analogy.
“God has a chart, a hit parade of art:”
1. The Universe. God is the original author of art. Thus anything we do is simply next to nothing compared to the awe and majesty of what God created.
In fact one could argue that art is simply the real beauty of the world reflected within a particular medium (paint, for example). This idea that beauty can not only be quantified by metrics we use for physical properties, but that the comparisions “more” and “less” mean the same thing is highly suspect.
Jennifer, thank you for this article. I feel very uncomfortable when Catholicism starts to flirt with modern art because that is a declaration to the the world that beauty is essentially subjective. We as Christians know that beauty is not only objective, but it is a Person. It is THE Person. Your article was a breath of fresh air for a lover of beauty who feels lost amidst all the ugliness both inside and outside the Church.
Beauty is subjective, because it has a human subject judging it. But that doesn’t mean that it does not also have an objective component, as well as a relative component to it. A problem with Academic art in the 19th century is that beauty was considered to be determined from following certain rules, and undoubtably the artistic reformers were justified in their opposition to this form of legalism. But pure subjectivism is also to be denied as counterfactual. Take numerous artifacts, created in multiple civilizations, and display them to a broad selection of people from various cultures, and let the people rank them in beauty. If I had the means, I would be willing to wager that certain artifacts—those that correspond to classical principles of beauty—will be highly rated across cultures. An experiment like this will likely show that ‘more’ or ‘less’ beautiful has objective meaning.
Even if we think that these beauty preferences are determined by evolution, we simply can’t view evolution as being “whatever”. If a bird flies, it is because its wings conform to the laws of aerodynamics. We find the same thing in the Catholic understanding of beauty—a beautiful thing pleases the eye because, at least partially, it is good and fitting, which is close to the evolutionary view of fitness.
I think that a lot of people use the word ‘beauty’ too loosely. One aesthetic word, ‘sublime’, has fallen out of favor in the past century, but it useful and typically means something other than beauty. Likewise, the aesthetic concept of ‘terror’ is often ignored in the fine arts, although it is otherwise is used much in the popular arts.
The purpose of art is to reveal truth. Modern art does reveal a kind of truth - the ugly truth about what happens to the human soul in the absence of God. It’s empty, meaningless, and does nothing to inspire us.
@Nora: You’re right. I’m being narrow minded. I am basing my statement on my limited experience, just as you are basing yours about me on your limited experience. It’s possible I am wrong, just as it is possible that I know more about the subject than you think I do.
@Nora: I did indeed make a definitive, blanket statement. I did not deny that. I also did not deny that I am being narrow minded based upon my limited experience. However, I know art always reveals a truth about the artist and their view of the world. When the work is empty, so too is the person behind the work. When the work is meaningless, that is because the person behind the work views their existence as meaningless. When an artist is filled with the Holy Spirit, it shows in their work. That’s what inspired means - filled with the Holy Spirit.
@Nora: Thank you for correcting me, and for challenging me. Thank God that I don’t have to be right all the time.
“When an artist is filled with the Holy Spirit, it shows in their work.”
Objectively and measurably, presumably. Shouldn’t it be possible to look at a work of art, listen to a piece of music or whatever and tell if it was made by a Catholic or an atheist? Is there a hierarchy, and is it based on denomination or level of belief - does a devout Muslim produce better art than an indifferent Catholic? If a novelist converts or lapses, does the quality of his work suffer?
I’m not trying to sneer, I’m trying to understand. What doesn’t help is that this argument just sounds silly to me. It’s making big claims, and claims I think ought to be testable. So where’s the harm in testing them?
We have no idea what motivates artists. Many of the paintings of the Renaissance were created in workshops, to very strict formulae. They were on a production line. What most often motivates professional artists? Well, the clue’s in the question.
Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, for example. We’re all agreed it’s beautiful? I have a copy up in my house. There are art critics who have noted that, even given Botticelli’s personal style, Venus looks very like his paintings of Mary. He may simply have been using the same model, but some critics have suggested that it was commissioned specifically as a blasphemy - an erotic picture of Mary, disguised with a pagan theme.
If that was right, and it was knowingly painted in secret defiance of the Church so that his patron could lust over an image of Mary, has that affected the ‘beauty’ of the painting? Is it closer or further away from God?
If we learn that a work of art we thought was beautiful was created by someone unpleasant, does that affect its ‘beauty’? I used to like Eric Gill’s work. He was a devout Catholic. He raped his children, had a affair with his sister and had sex with the family dog. I took down my Eric Gill print when I found that out. Objectively, though, surely the print was exactly as beautiful as it had been the previous day?
Here’s a question - if subjectivity has no place in art ... how can the ‘intent’ of the artist have any possible bearing?
The idea that the more beautiful something is, the closer it is to God means artists aren’t doing anything sophisticated, they’re only playing boules - they toss their ball, and hope it lands near the jack. Except the jack is invisible. And most artists don’t consciously understand the rules of this game.
This, to me, seems far more reductive than the ‘scientific’ position which is something like ‘science isn’t very good at aesthetic judgements, but there are obvious biological reasons why we find smooth skin more beautiful than diseased flesh, and there are certain things like symmetry and the Golden Ratio that many cultures find pleasing’.
As I told Nora, I was in error. My statement, after thinking on it, was what my English teacher would call a glittering generality. That’s why we all need community - to help correct us when we go off the track.
There are some cases where you can certainly tell in my own work, for instance, that I’m Catholic. Mentions or drawings of Mary, of the rosary, and of the Eucharist are dead giveaways. You typically don’t draw, paint, or write about subjects you don’t like unless you’re being paid to, and even here whether you choose to do so or not is influenced heavily by how offensive you find the request to be. I would never paint or write about, for instance, something that depicts Mary in a lewd way because I find that offensive and I don’t care how much money I was paid to do it.
Anyone painting the human form with any degree of accuracy and painting nature with any degree of accuracy is going to create something beautiful because that’s the truth - the human form and nature are beautiful. God intended them to be so.
“If a novelist converts or lapses, does the quality of his work suffer?”
Well, a good example of the answer to this question is Anne Rice. Her work when she was away from the Catholic Church was filled with subtle and not-so-subtle jabs at the Church. When she returned to the Church, she couldn’t help but write about Christ and her love for the things she knew of the Church. Now that she’s away again, I suspect that she will not be writing with that same love since she has expressed a deep hatred for the Church. What is in your heart comes out of your mouth and on the page. If you love Christ, you aren’t going to write things that offend Him.
This is just a thought, but I think it is possible to tell whether a writer is Catholic by examining closely how they handle their characters. Are they behaving in an evil way but have inside them a core of good? That’s a very Catholic perspective, since we believe all men are created good though they struggle with weaknesses due to original sin. A Calvinist would depict even the hero as being totally depraved no matter how good the behavior might be, because that is their belief. A man who believes that angels and demons are superstitions might write about them - but is not likely to write about them in any serious manner.
Both art and writing evolve and change with the writer or the artist. As their feelings change, so too does the art they choose to create. That’s really more of what I was trying to get at than anything. Is there truth to be found in art that dips a crucifix in urine? Yes. It’s the ugly truth about sin. Would I ever create such a work when in love with Christ? No. I would consider it a betrayal of everything I love.
Beautifully put, Brandy.
Post a Comment
By submitting this form, you give The National Catholic Register permission to publish this comment. Comments will be published at our discretion, and may be edited for clarity and length. For best formatting, please limit your response to one paragraph and don't hit "enter" to force line breaks.