n a city plaza near you, there is a sculpture. It was commissioned by the town, and paid for with local tax money. The consensus of most passersby is that it was meant to represent a terrible automobile accident, or perhaps a meteor landing in a bumper factory.
On an trendy street close by, there is a coffee shop that hosts literary readings. Judging from the styles worn by the people going in, you guess that housewives and car salesmen do not make up the majority of the audience on a regular basis. As the crowd exits the shop after a reading, the words used to praise the evening's fare seem more appropriate to a psychoanalysis session than a poetry reading: "disturbing," or "deeply anarchic." The poem consists totally of prepositions and obscenities.
Your local university houses a student radio station. Its disc jockeys pride themselves on playing the very latest in cutting-edge music. Although it is an advertiser's nightmare, many claim to enjoy the "music"; still, many more suspect that the music was meant to represent a terrible automobile accident, or perhaps a meteor landing in a bumper factory.
What is wrong with modern art? Although the above scenarios do not represent all of modern art, they are only the extreme end of elements that are pervasive in what is known in the western world as "modern art."
In the last issue, we argued that over the past two hundred years the church has abdicated its duty of teaching the authority of the Word of God over all human endeavors, including aesthetic pursuits (visual arts, music, and literature). The result is that the church has now been forced to agree, in large measure, with the world that God has nothing to say about art beyond the requirement that it not be obviously sinful. That is, although God's people object strenuously when public displays include pornography, there is very little else they will object to on the basis of the God's revelation in Scripture. There is a great deal of truly bad art in modern society, but Christians refuse to apply biblical standards to it, having succumbed long ago to the notion that it's all really just a matter of taste.
Because of the church's abdication, the world has developed its own definitions and standards, and as a result we have the sculpture, the poetry, and the music by which so many culturally conservative Americans are offended without knowing why. In the light of the revelation of God's Word, however, the definitions and standards of modern art can be analyzed and judged.
Most current theories of art resolve themselves into the following familiar statement: "Art is self-expression." Few modern artists would deny that certain organizing principles must be adhered to in producing their art: the musician must follow rules of musical composition, the poet must use words meaningfully. Though radical artists may reject even these constraints, the very nature of the result removes them from the realm of comprehension, and thus from consideration.
However, the common element in almost all non-Christian art (and because of the degenerate condition of the church, a great deal of Christian art as well) is that the artist's primary motive in producing his work is "self-expression." The first problem with this is that the primary motive of every human in everything done should be the glory of God. Self-expression, when it is a primary motive, is self-glorification, and therefore sin. If an artist expresses himself simply because he is himself, he is an idolater.
The second problem is closely tied to the first. Apart from the regeneration of the Holy Spirit, the self is corrupt; anything it expresses is antagonistic to God. Insofar as the non-Christian artist's expressions truly reflect his self they are without worth. I say "insofar as they truly express his self" because no artist will be able to eliminate all reflections of God, since as a creature in God's world, he must use and reflect that world. To the extent that God's work shows in the artist's, it has value. It is also true that the Christian may be reminded by the work of what is to live apart from grace.
In the scenarios at the beginning of this essay, self-expression meant chaos. The sculpture of twisted steel, the deranged poetry, and the jarring music are chaotic because rejecting God results in chaos. Yet some order can be found in the sculpture's ability to reflect light, or in the meaning that words still retain in the poem. But these elements of order are only there because the artist could not keep them out, could not help but spend (or more precisely steal) the capital of God's reality.
Now it is true that in the history of man, non-Christians have created very beautiful works of art, literature, and music. But in all those ages, the artist recognized absolutes of some kind upon which principles of beauty could be founded, or they had been trained under those principles and, though theoretically rejecting them, used them to practice their art. This was the case with the Romantics in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These men believed that all the organizing structures of society should be thrown off. So why did they write (for the most part) such beautiful poetry? In spite of their theories, they had a great deal of social, artistic, and moral capital to spend, and (inconsistently) they spent it. The beauty of their poetry consisted largely in their highly artistic use of the very techniques and structures that they railed so vehemently against.
Enough time has elapsed now so that very little capital remains. The idea of absolutes, something outside of man, has been used up; all that can replace it is man himself and what is in him. This leaves nothing to bind together the multitude of particulars called "man," no higher appeal than individual "taste" in judging beauty, and nothing higher than man to glorify.
