Fellowship focus 5 - August 1998
Art for Arts sake?
My mind was completely boggled because images had been listening to John Piper preaching on "Enjoying God, the Great Obsession".
I asked myself the question, "What is an engineer doing squelching through the Caister quagmire to attend a seminar about the Christian and the arts? Anyway, the room was dry and full of trendy looking Christians. Soon we were treated to a multi-media audio-visual presentation about how we should regard what people think of as works of art.
The presentation was given by one David Porter, who writes a controversial arts column in Evangelicals Now. He said that we should ask three questions:
- Question 1. Has the supposed work of art been well crafted? As an example, he showed us a square spiral painting that he thought was well crafted.
- Question 2. Has the work got internal integrity in terms of what it is trying to communicate? In other words, has it got something to say, or is the author just trying to make money? To illustrate this, he played us some music by Carl Jenkins called Adiemus. This, he said, was well crafted but as a piece of music was entirely hollow; even the title "Adiemus" was a non-existent word that Jenkins invented because it had a religious ring to it! Listeners to Classic FM will have been able to form their own opinions.
- Question 3. How does the work stand up when it is compared with absolute truth as revealed in the Bible and elsewhere? As a good example of this he played us part of Stainer's "Crucifixion", a setting of "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son". Enough said, I think.
Some-one asked about the pile of 22 bricks that was exhibited in the Tate Gallery recently at a cost of £55,000; how could this be considered art? At this point I began to understand where art and engineering converge: the aim is to flog a piece of cheap junk for as much money as possible in both the arts and engineering! Porter countered that the problem with the 22 bricks was not whether they together constituted a work of art; the problem was the £55,000 price tag. I was convinced.
Dave Legg.