Michael Krahn : The Ascent to Truth

I will quote here (at length) from Doug Wilson’s recent piece called “Humbling the Arts”, but you really should read the entire thing for yourself here.

Money quotes:

We have come to the point of high circularity where our culture defines art as anything done by an artist, and an artist as one who has the right and authority to produce art. The detritus of this approach can be viewed at a tax-funded gallery near you.
***
Once on a trip I was struck by a particularly beautiful bit of graphic design, and it was doing nothing but decorating a restaurant at an airport. Musing on this, it occurred to me that while contemporary painting is in a wretched state, the aesthetic value of contemporary graphic design is light years ahead of the advertising of a century ago. Compare Vermeer with Jackson Pollock and you get half the point. The other half can be seen in a comparison of an ad for shoes a century ago and an ad for shoes today. Taking one thing with another, mutatis mutandis, current advertisements are aesthetically far superior to anything being done back when serious painting was still worth displaying on the wall. I mentioned this to a friend who pointed out an obvious connection—

ads today are the work of a “guild.” Look at any striking ad and you are looking at the work of a team of twenty people. No tortured genius signs it. It was done for money, plain and simple. No misunderstood soul thought up the ad with the back of his hand pressed against his fevered brow. Intelligibility is prized since the company actually may want to sell their product while intelligence is also prized because the ad has to stand out. Creativity can and does flourish under such conditions. In a similar way, the best creative work being done in television is in the world of commercials.

***
We should want to learn how to serve others outside the guild by means of painting, poetry, music, short story writing, and all the rest of it. Of course there are obvious dangers in this—establishing a gallery in order for people to watch us try to be aesthetically humble has some obvious snares. But nevertheless, we really do not want to be monks of high art. Rather, we want to be puritans of all artisanship, high, middle and low.
***
Attempts to thrust ourselves forward will result in humiliation. He [Jesus] taught us that the first will be last, and the last first. The one who exalts himself will be humbled and the one who humbles himself will be exalted.

Despite the clarity of this doctrine, Christians persist in wanting to become rich, recognized, feted, honored, awarded, and flattered. They imagine that the teaching of Christ would of course have to be obeyed by them in an invisible spiritual sense, deep in the recesses of their hearts.

They would have to make sure the success did not go to their heads. Like the self-deceived, would-be philanthropist who daydreams about winning the lottery and imagines how much good he could do with the tithe, so Christians have wanted into the big time—so that they could then make a mark for Jesus. Along this line, Christians want to be actors and screenwriters and novelists and producers and poets and directors and painters, and then what a grand testimony we shall all have! But it never seems to occur to anyone that perhaps Jesus meant what He said in a more earthy sense. No one wants to be that nameless servant of Christ who did some of the spectacular wood carving on the north side of a 12th century cathedral—the anonymous fellow with the same social status as the 12th century butcher. As the blues song has it, everyone wants to go to heaven, but no one wants to die.
***
This [being "puritans of artisanship"] involves three basic tenets.

First, the incarnation and humiliation of Jesus Christ is the arch-typical pattern for all who would be artisans—death is always followed by resurrection, and all resurrections must be preceded by death. Modern art is fruitless precisely because it refuses to die to self—it is a form of art that is all about self, barbaric yawp and all.

Secondly, an artisan always works with his materials, not against them, and since all materials are created by God and declare His glory, it is most necessary for all the works of our hands also to declare His glory.

And third, the world is filled with glories that none of us has yet seen.

***

MK – Wilson is a splendid writer whom I am pleased to have discovered by way of Collision, a documentary film about his conversation tour  with Christopher Hitchens.

Michael Krahn (michael.krahn@gmail.com) is a husband, father, Pastor, writer, and recording artist who enjoys books, theology, technology and the Ottawa Senators.
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