Two Recent Posts on Art:  One and Two (and Here’s a Third from Further Past)

Art says both a lot about you, but it also influences you.  Some of what is called “art,” as I’ve written recently, really isn’t art, but that you call it “art” also says a lot about you.  Like everything else on earth in the realm of the world, the flesh, and the devil, men want what they want.  They like the “art” that they like.  Modernism and then postmodernism shifted art from the object to the subject, so that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  However, liking the “art” is not what makes it art.  It does though say something about it, when you like it, and it’s something contradictory to God.

You say, “I like this” or “I really like this,” and don’t think there should be any criticism, because art is only a matter of personal taste.  It isn’t, but you want it to be, because you want what you want without criticism.  The “art” abides in its own domain, not to be touched by God’s authority or scriptural thinking.  The teaching of scripture is not just an item of belief, but it functions as a unified, overarching system of truth that applies to all other subject areas.  It applies to science, business, sociology, history, art, and everything.

God rules everything in a believer’s life through scripture — it gives the truth about the whole of reality, the interpretation of every subject matter.  The purpose of Christianity is not just the salvation of the soul and the sanctification of the life, but to provide an interpretation of the world.  God doesn’t want us to turn over everything to the secular, except for Bible studies and prayer meetings.

Turning art to personal taste conforms to the development of a two track system between truth and taste, so fracturing the Christian life.  Believers are told to be salt and light, except it’s off limits to the actual world, which then allows or influences professing Christians toward the acceptance of secular values.  Being controlled by the Holy Spirit means nothing is off limits, but this bifurcation between the sacred and secular says that God is boxed out of that of the subjects’ choosing.  This is a form of idolatry or loving the world.  The ungodly art can’t be forsaken, so really neither is the self forsaken.  Following Christ requires forsaking self (Luke 9:27).

This is our Father’s world.  God created it.  Nothing has an identity separate from the will of the Creator and everything in creation must be interpreted in light of the relationship with God.  People want to keep their “art,” because of its interconnection to feelings.  The painting, sculpture, music, or architecture seduces with feeling that results in the subject operating according to his lust.  Lust is not an allowed way for a believer to judge anything.

For awhile now someone likes how he looks liking “art.”  If others like it, he has to look like he understands what makes it good.  He can’t say he likes something godly, because it most often isn’t popular, that is, it isn’t pop art.  Association with popular art gives the sense of rubbing off on the one who likes it.  He likes it too.  To God, it’s dung, to use the term that Paul uses in Philippians 3:8 to explain his unconverted life.  He counted his former life as dung, but  he can’t call the popular art dung, because it’s so important for him to fit into the world.

“Art” should not get a pass.  It isn’t neutral.  Nothing is neutral.  All of art, like everything else in life, should be judged against the beauty of holiness.  When someone doesn’t, his value changes.  It moves from God to self.  The highest value is what pleases himself and not God.  God isn’t a deistic god standing by as his creation administers itself.  He isn’t ignoring choices.  The personal taste that circumvents God expresses value different than God’s.  Here’s a person not following after God.  He doesn’t like what God likes.  God is cordoned off this life, except where He is allowed.  Someone truly saved doesn’t do this.  He doesn’t dictate to God what and where God functions in the world.  This is liking a God who saves him but isn’t the Lord of His aesthetics or art.

More than any facet of a man’s soul, his feelings cohere to his body, where sin indwells.  Paul writes that sin dwells in a person’s body parts, which is why salvation from the presence of sin occurs with the glorification of the body.  “Art” connects with feeling.  Does the feeling though arise from the right thinking, that is an ordinate affection, or is it the byproduct of lust?  Ungodly art that displeases God follows the allurements of depraved flesh.  The feeling of the subject justifies the object of his pleasure.  The bifurcation of that object into the mere secular, outside of scriptural judgment, completes the seduction.

As I describe aesthetic value, a right feeling, so that someone loves God and others according to godly values, some might consider it a matter of liberty.  Paul commanded, be not conformed to this world (Rom 12:2), which is not to accommodate, comply or harmonize with the spirit of this age. This is not relegated to pornography or something with such associated meaning as a swastika.  This is all aesthetic not in accordance with God.  It can be the gritty, trashy, urban murals of the modern inner city.  Often the decoration mirrors the subjective expressions of the tattoo “artist.”  It doesn’t have to be “wrong,” just violating the objective beauty of the nature of God manifested in His creation.  That is wrong, because it conforms to the world, not transformed by a mind renewed by the Word of God.

The ungodly art disorders the loves.  God Himself through scripture commands love God.  He can’t love God, because the world has bypassed God.  The profanity stains his conscience, disabling his ability to discern.  Others then are influenced by his wrong choice, multiplying the destructive lie of art as personal taste.