A Philippic on Art of the Last Century

This article appeared in BreakPoint's Findings Journal

What distinctions do we draw between "art-as-such" and our expectations of what art should be? How do we reconcile our ostensibly ephemeral visions or our reactions to the presence of art within the contemporary Church's metaphysical walls, as well as its temporal sheetrock skin?

Despite twenty years of participating in the dialogue on the contemporary arts in the Christian context, I have to admit that the importance of making distinctions in art criticism was driven home for me in 1989 by a bullnecked Army Engineer Corpsman, during an improbable hitchhiking adventure from the Swiss Alps to Holland. Jouncing along the autobahn in the back of a battered Army transport truck, this beefy specimen yelled over the grinding din of the gears, "You bein' an art historian an' all [rrrrumble]: Do you think [bump!] tattooing is [grind!!] a commercial art [shuddderrrrr] or a fine art?" Before I could gather the appropriate decibel levels to reply, he proceeded to give a guided tour of his personal epidermal art gallery. His view was, naturally (or perhaps unnaturally) enough, that tattooing was a noble vestige of the fine arts.

Several distinctions underscored the Army corporal's assessment: For example, it was obvious that some of the tattoo artists he employed had more or less imagination, and greater or less aesthetic panache. The lines were clearly drawn between the gang name he had inflicted upon himself with ballpoint pen ink and the evident skill of the tattoo artist who had scribed the flexing Barbarella on his calf. Such considerations also ran to the level of the client's taste, which in the end, was just about as bone-jarringly stupefying as the truck ride itself. And yet, for all these reservations, a few patches of inspired disegno and colore might have attained to the level of a traditional "fine art," depending on whether one's definition emphasized historic tradition, aesthetic finesse, or conceptual vitality.

SO WHAT IS ART?
In a broad exploration of the etymological lineage of "art" as a semiotic category, distinctions between the historical definition and the present practice of art are harrying and unavoidable. Each pole views the other as heretical. Dictionaries tend to rely with prim insistence upon the traditional beaux artes definition; this art is a form of praxis that has been hotly contested and subverted by artists since Romanticism began to brew in the mid-eighteenth century. Then again, according to the Oxford Dictionary of Art, Romanticism itself "is so varied in its manifestations that a single definition would be impossible."¹ The fact that such a characterization exactingly parallels the fanatic eclecticism of our present cultural praxis has been duly noted and footnoted within the Christian discussion in many worthy dialogues, including those of the former Yale University and Calvin College philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff and the Canadian aesthetician Calvin Seerveld.

This formal dictionary definition for art describes it as a deliberate and conscious arrangement or production of various materials—e.g., movement, sound, paint, stone—intended to appeal to one's sense of beauty. It should be evident to the Kind Reader that many contemporary works are often only deliberate in their effort to reject conscious arrangement, eschew intentionality in favor of spontaneous expression, and jettison beauty as a vestige of a former sensibility. Beyond what the works look or sound like, qualities relating to deliberation or aesthetic beauty have become incidental to much of the art currently being made. The result is ultimately the creeping annihilation of what former Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes calls the "conceptual dignity" of art.²

A working definition of art that will not surface soon in any dictionary operates alongside the more formal terminology, even though it occurs daily in studios, art departments, and art educational arenas. In the words of conceptualist Joseph Beuys, the dominant motivator behind contemporary art, artistic expression amounts quite succinctly to "being and doing."³ As Hughes avers, Beuys's answer to art's incapacity to directly transform society was to extend the word artist to cover everyone—so that art would be any kind of being and doing, rather than specifically making. Art, he declared, "should be a real means, in daily life, to go in and transform the power fields of the society."⁴

This egalitarian sentiment does not relate, incidentally, to Edith Schaeffer's influential and homey approach from L'Abri Fellowship, regarding the fact that everyone can have an "art" within the home, as explained in her British release titled The Hidden Art of Homemaking. That venue requires other distinctions.

Although Hughes uses Beuys's famous 1965 "happening" to contextualize his argument—in case you have forgotten, that would be How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare—Beuys also conducted street corner foot-washing ceremonies and other liturgical ritualizations, and he took them seriously rather than sarcastically. Nevertheless, in 1977 Beuys's art fell victim to the petard of his own linguistic proposition when, as Robert Hughes reported in The Shock of the New, a bathtub in storage that was part of a Beuys installation was purportedly used as an ice chest during a Museum of Modern Art fundraiser.⁵ As the story goes, the owner sued MOMA and received a settlement of $94,000. Beuys, who died at the age of 65 in 1986 from old German Luftwaffe injuries, no doubt wryly rejoiced in the discomfit generated by this fiasco, because it proved that a) art really did have value and b) an artwork could enact its own power on society without any input on the artist's part. It also did combat with Hughes's plaint that c) the failure of conceptual art was that it could only be recognized as "art" in a museum context. Apparently not.

Despite all this, as thinking Christians, we should be acutely attentive to Beuys's statement about enacting transformation on a daily basis, whenever an opportunity presents itself. The gist of Beuys's verbiage jibes exactly with the processual motivation of evangelism, which we have with limited success enacted upon our own society. Beuys constantly evoked religious terminology and praxis without guile or apology because he knew that it could still energize a society numbed by guilt or denial. He wrote extensively on the artist's role as a shaman and prophet. He would have been on the same page, in some ways, with Ezekiel and Jeremiah, who accomplished some fairly bizarre pre-Christian performance art of their own. Simply put, Beuys recognized that a grounded, cognitive familiarity with religion was one of the few forces that could begin to counter the moral malaise affecting German national identity after Nazism. What appears to be mindless appropriation and even disrespect for Christian tradition turns out to be motivated by a redemptory urge, at least in Beuys's case, for fellow Germans still grappling with issues of self-identity and conscience because, like it or not, the Holocaust seared the Germanic soul.⁶ Beuys and the Old Testament prophets were dealing in different spheres, after all, with a heartbreaking Diaspora.

CONSIDERATIONS AND DISTINCTIONS
From the safe distance of retrospection, two contextual considerations hamper the Beuysian approach. First, by its very nature, art of the late twentieth century was egocentric rather than theocentric; the Teutonic Romanticism that Beuys's generation so fervently sought to redeem after Hitler misappropriated it was informed, to a large degree, by the unfettered ego of the artist. The brand of redemption being proffered was not rooted deeply enough. Second, within the modern context in general, artists selected particularized fragments of the Christian tradition because—in the face of the huge betrayal by humanity of itself—they were driven to dismiss the system in its entirety as an obsolete vestige of a ruptured and fading Western culture.

So the modern genesis of "being and doing" art—which, incidentally, was not limited to one individual artist but rather a generation of artists—requires our awareness of distinctions regarding historical context, the engendering of communal identity, societal redemption, and the impetus to transform all of life. How familiar these trajectories are to the example and praxis of Jesus Christ.

Recalling my encounter with the military tattoo-ee, one must also reckon with the distinction between high and low art, or fine and popular art, or aesthetic and commercial art. Frankly, this troublesome duality will never be resolved by the art world, nor will it be addressed in this forum—except to say that the distinction is an important one, wherever one draws the line. By way of example, John Berger's pithy little tome, Ways of Seeing, reveals how British advertisements in the 1970s brazenly appropriated various representational classics that were, at the time, being sacked and pilloried by the avant-gardistes.⁷ The consumer might not recognize that the wave in the cologne ad was excerpted from Hokusai's iconic woodcut from the fifteenth century, nor that a sixteenth-century Pieter Claez still life offered inspiration to the photograph puffing Pottery Barnesque wares. That Ingres's Jupiter and Thetis influenced a men's clothing ad, or that Botticelli's Venus on the half-shell touted Virginia Slims, the first feminist cigarette, is as incidental for most consumers as classical beauty is to the twenty-first century conceptual artist. But ever aware of demography, the advertising gurus knew these works proffered a conceptual hinge between the object of desire and the consumer's desire to possess all that the object represented.

In the absence of similarly compelling contemporary imagery, classical art was used or perhaps even abused as consumerism's lackey. This was, after all, the age of the see-through vinyl dress, white lipstick, polyester leisure suits, and the Day-Glo palette. Berger convincingly argues for his conviction that classical imagery—particularly the nude female figure, or the demigod flashing his buff pectorals and abs—generates the desire in the consumer to possess the beauty, manliness, sophistication, sublime confidence, and so on of the classical models by owning the objects depicted with them. How very devilish.

In stark contrast to the appropriation of classical art in ads, or the appropriation of religious tropes in conceptual art à la Beuys, Berger reports that actual attendance figures showed that "live" art was far less attractive to the buying public. A 1969 survey polled Greek, Polish, French, and Dutch respondents, inquiring which other types of buildings most reminded them of a museum. The overwhelming majority of those polled admitted that museums reminded them most of "church" by a wide margin. Sixty-six percent of manual workers, 45 percent of white-collar workers, and 30.5 percent of professionals in the survey chose "church" ahead of "libraries" or "department stores."⁸ Ironically, while actual church life in Europe at this time dissipated, the museum store business began to flourish.

By the 1990s, cultural commentator Suzi Gablik and others predicted that contemporary art would be viable only as the authentic expression of a particular communalized culture. Latin American art, street art, folk art (e.g., santos from Guatemala), and even art from the loose community that constitutes Christendom became fashionable sites for academic critique, drawn into the sanctum of academia from their former position on the lunatic fringe. In sum, a distinction arose between what the individual adjudged as a valid site for meaning in art, and what the prevailing critical climate decided to acclaim, reject, or engage. In the midst of this, as phenomenologists have long noted, distinctions also arise in the level of reception that different percipients bring to the interaction of viewing art.

Depending on one's familiarity with art or the artist, the preferences of the viewing audience do not always jibe with the goals of practicing artists, and the goals of practicing artists are open hunting season for a stable of critics who are paid, after all, to be contentious. Moreover, there is a certain religiosity about the viewing act for serious purveyors of art. In Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Museums, Carol Duncan explains how museums can function like a sacred space, providing a zone between quotidian concerns and the "different quality" of a concerted viewing experience.⁹ She goes so far as to parallel curatorial strategies in exhibit design with traditional ritual practices, indicating that both pursue a result of "enlightenment, revelation, spiritual equilibrium or rejuvenation."¹⁰

All of this may explain why, as an artist, Russian émigré Alexander Melamid decided to affect a rapprochement with the viewing audience. In 1994, Melamid found funding to conduct an unprecedented survey of 1,001 Americans from proportionately diverse income categories, regions, and educational levels in order to ascertain what "American People's Art" might look like. The editors of The Nation, who provided a forum for the survey's conclusions, reported that Melamid discovered that 88 percent of the 1,001 Americans he surveyed agreed that design and beauty mattered, regardless of their race, income, locale, or educational level. Once again, however, a distinction between the general concept of "design" or "beauty" and what actually hangs on the walls of American homes must be entertained. For example, only 20 percent admitted to caring for religious art, while 3 percent claimed to want nude imagery in their living space. And after all, what "kind" of religious art are we talking about here, and are the nudes people claim to want classic nudes or lewd nudes? It all bodes rather ill for poster sales in museums that own works by Rubens, the caravaggistes, and Titian, certain Rembrandts, and depictions of Adam and Eve—who might never find a place within the average American home.

Even less positively, the Melamid survey unsurprisingly affirms most artists' suspicions that popular taste is fairly pedantic, and far removed from the art museum milieu. Based on the poll, Melamid discovered that 44 percent of respondents favored the color blue, that a whopping 88 percent preferred outdoor scenes, and that approximately 60 percent would rather display traditional realism in their own homes—or art, in the survey's wording, "that makes me happy." Evidently, Thomas Kinkade may have been reading The Nation in the mid-1990s. (There was, however, no question related to glow-in-the-dark paint.) As the editors concluded:

[T]he use of a poll on art can be interpreted as a cri de coeur of the alienated painter, seeking to escape an artistic cul-de-sac by asking the public to tell him what it wants. But isn't it the artist's job to defy the mass (conventional) taste, to create novel forms that will someday be appreciated by the many, as Matisse and Picasso now are? Then again, is it really the masses who are conventional these days?¹¹

MOST WANTED?
Melamid moved to New York by way of Israel with his collaborator, Vitaly Komar, where the two artists founded the School of Bayonne in Bayonne, New Jersey. If you know Bayonne, you will understand the inherent irony backing this choice; if the irony alludes you, consider it a working example of yet another distinction arising from the percipient's level of awareness. In response to the survey's directives, Melamid and Komar created a painting in the idiom of a "People's Art." Melamid reasoned that he could up his commercial ante if he could simply reiterate the preferences of the American taste in a visual format. As anyone who has designed by committee knows, democracy is not necessarily the most efficient path to the achievement of artistic genius, since everyone has an equal say in the matter regardless of their personal percipient savoir faire.

The result, reproduced in Arthur Danto's After the End of Art, is titled America's Most Wanted.¹² It is represented in a paint-by-number format version on the cover of The Nation issue devoted to Melamid's survey, inviting the viewing public or the professional artist or the critic—as equally skilled participants—to fill in the colors. The painted version is a heartwarming river landscape rendered in the style of Thomas Cole and the Hudson River School, slightly more than 50 percent of it done in the requisite and favored blue, and populated with the requisite figures of a woman reading in the distance, a triad of urchins, two deer, and George Washington.

In After the End of Art, from 1997, Danto reported that Melamid and Komar were industriously conducting the same polling process for a series of "Most Wanted" and "Least Wanted" compositions from France, China, Kenya, and Russia. Danto says that the visual results, which have yet to be seen in print, "really must represent what people like who 'don't know much about art but know what they like.' "¹³ With a sinking heart, this writer must admit to the Kind Reader that such an audience quite faithfully represents the majority of churchgoers and their leaders in American Christendom. In my case, this observation is buoyed by twenty years as a public educator in the arena of art and Christianity. Danto puts his finger on the dilemma as he explains:

What is striking about America's Most Wanted is that I cannot imagine anyone really wanting it as a painting, least of all any of the least-common-denominator population its taste is supposed to reflect. No one who wants a painting of wild animals or who wants a painting of George Washington wants a painting of George Washington and of wild animals. Komar and Melamid have transformed disjunctions into conjunctions, and the conjunction can be displeasing even if the conjuncts are pleasing, taken one by one. Everyone, to use a political parallel, would like tax cuts, the elimination of the federal deficit, efficient government services with few government regulations, but it is not clear that you can have all these things at once. . . . Had they been questioned whether they preferred coherence over incoherence in a painting, the Most Wanted Painting might never have been painted.¹⁴

Although C. S. Lewis rarely commented on the visual arts, he revealed the depth of his understanding in "How the Few and the Many Use Pictures and Music," also published in An Experiment in Criticism. "Nearly all those pictures which, in reproduction, are widely popular are of things which in one way or another would in reality please or amuse or excite or move those who admire them," Lewis writes. Whether or not his own rubric, the "widely popular," included the museum reproductions of Constable's Haywain or van Gogh's Sunflowers, which hung in his own home at The Kilns, near Oxford, Lewis does not say.¹⁵ He does bracket the "widely popular" as

Hunting scenes and battles; death beds and dinner parties; children, dogs, cats and kittens; pensive young women (draped) to arouse sentiment, and cheerful young women (less draped) to arouse appetite. The approving comments which those who buy such pictures make on them are all of one sort. . . . The emphasis is on what may be called the narrative qualities of the picture. Line or color as such, or composition are hardly mentioned. The skill of the artist sometimes is. But what is admired is the realism and the difficulty, real or supposed, or producing it.

Lewis confesses,

This attitude, which was once my own, might almost be defined as "using" pictures. While you retain this attitude you treat the picture—or rather, a hasty and unconscious selection of elements in the picture—as a self-starter for certain imaginative and emotional activities of your own. In other words, you "do things with it." You don't lay yourself open to what it, by being in its totality precisely the thing it is, can do to you. To be moved by the thought of a solitary old shepherd's death and the fidelity of his dog is, in itself, not in the least a sign of inferiority.

The real objection to that way of enjoying pictures is that you never get beyond yourself. The picture, so used, can call out of you only what is already there. You do not cross the frontier into that new region which the pictorial art as such has added to the world.¹⁶

ARTHUR DANTO AND THE END OF ART
Most readers in this forum would more likely side with Lewis's views on society than with Danto's, but like Lewis, Danto is uniquely equipped to engage the paradoxes that drive his own culture. Since 1984, Danto has served The Nation as arts editor, which explains how "Painting by Numbers: The Search for a People's Art" came to see the light of day. Between 1978 and 1992, he chaired the philosophy department at his alma mater, Columbia University, while contributing to The Nation, the Journal of Philosophy since 1965, and Artforum on a regular basis. Concurrently, he managed to garner several Fulbright scholarships and a Guggenheim fellowship, co-direct Columbia's Center for Human Rights, publish more than half a dozen books on analytical philosophy, as well as a dozen books on aesthetics and art, and compose monographs on the art of Robert Mapplethorpe, Mark Tansey, and others. Moreover, one could say that his commitment to the arts is holistic, since he is married to the artist Barbara Westman.

In a 1991 essay, "Description and the Phenomenology of Perception," Danto appropriates Paul Klee's words to explain why visual art should matter so deeply to philosophers:

Art has the power of thought, and what makes something a work of art rather than a mere thing is that it gives embodiment in a sensuous idiom to a thought, the grasping of which is like understanding a proposition.¹⁷

In Danto's orbit, the propositional nature of art provided a hinge between Ludwig Wittgenstein's analysis of art as a "seen" or inherently grasped form of language, and Hegel's prescient observation that the metanarratives that shaped historical art in the past began disintegrating as early as the late eighteenth century. An avid patron of contemporary art, and an elegantly articulate philosopher, Danto deeply understands the tension between an art practice that is post-historical, as he calls it, but simultaneously translated by each of us on a visceral, subjective, Wittgensteinian level. Danto insists that even a post-historical, or pan-historical art praxis constitutes a moment in the history of art. "The unimaginability of future art," he writes in After the End of Art, "is one of the limits which holds us locked in our own periods."¹⁸

Attracted to the inherent, internal structure present in art historical studies, Danto decided that art merited a philosophy of its own history. Historical shifts might be represented by a number of modalities. Three examples of these modes include a) prefiguration, the theory that artistic praxis prefigures changes in the history of thought; b) causation, the theory that artistic practice causes change in philosophy; and c) emblemization, the theory that artistic praxis ups the spirit of its age. In After the End of Art, Danto essentially gathers all the historical collusions between the development of philosophy and the history of art, and melds a vast body of knowledge into a densely packed, yet comprehensible review of Western thought.

There is no doubt that Danto owes his cogency, in part, to a personal epiphany precipitated by an encounter with Andy Warhol's Brillo Box in 1964. The author admits that Warhol's silk-screened replica of a Brillo pad carton remains his favorite example of linguistic subversion. In 1992 Danto devoted the entirety of his book Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective to a review of the implications underlying Warhol's appropriated commercial imagery.¹⁹ Beyond the Brillo Box saliently records one philosopher's reaction to a moment of juncture between Wittgenstein's language propositions of art as "seen" language and the perceptivistic model of art as "being and doing."

Rather than dismissing works like Brillo Box that signaled, for some, the end of "real" art, Danto translated the intentioned linguistic premises of Warhol's appropriated commercial imagery into the language of philosophy, concluding, for instance:

What makes Brillo Box a work of art is that it incarnates, expresses, whatever idea it does express, hence is idea and mere thing at once, a box transfigured if only into the idea of a box. The Brillo boxes of routine use in the shipping and storage of soap pads incarnates no such idea, though of course Plato would suppose they must, just to be intelligible as boxes at all, whereas we might simply suppose they satisfy the criteria of cartonhood and incarnate nothing at all. . . . There is even a sense . . . in which Brillo Box is about the viewer of it.²⁰

In the lineage of modernism, Danto recognizes that Marcel Duchamp, engaged with early Dada and Surrealism, preceded the linguistic alchemistry of Warhol's Pop Art. As Danto admits, "I owe to Duchamp the thought that from the perspective of art aesthetics is a danger, since from the perspective of philosophy art is a danger and aesthetics the agency for dealing with it."²¹ As a connoisseur of linguistic propositions, he often alludes to Duchamp's exercises in subversion. For example, Duchamp exhibited a readymade installation in 1915 at the Yale University Art Gallery titled In Advance of a Broken Arm. The "artwork" was merely a snow shovel imported directly from a neighboring hardware store, propped against a wall sans fanfare, avec price tag.²² Danto refers more often to the better-known work consisting of a store-bought urinal, which Duchamp titled Fountain. Because Duchamp conspicuously signed it with a nom de plumbing, and dated it, he brought attention to the conventional artistic transaction of validating a manmade object as a work of art. The signature validated the work's heritage in the history of art, and the date validated the introduction of a new linguistic proposition into time.

As Danto points out in various essays, whether or not anyone actually desires to exhibit this work nowadays, or even whether the work displayed is a replica because the original was lost, simply doesn't figure into the conceptual transaction behind the work. The work's value is anchored in its originality as a serious linguistic proposition about the meaning that humans assign to the rudest of objects by calling them "art." While we can easily scoff at the absurdity of Duchamp's challenges from a superficial perspective, in their time they constituted a serious insult, as only a Frenchman can level, against the pretensions of the classical stance.

Danto's arguments throughout the 1980s reinstated Duchamp because art criticism—at best, always a fickle mistress—had spurned him in the 1940s, favoring the new wave of unfettered expressionism. Clement Greenberg and other self-appointed keepers of the culture fought passionately against what was perceived, in turn, as the straitjacket of linguistic propositions. By the 1980s, performance and installation artists invited Duchamp back into the house as one of the great innovators of conceptual art. Yet in 1962, even Duchamp admitted that his subversive experiments went awry, explaining that "I sought to discourage aesthetics. . . . I threw the bottle rack and the urinal in their faces as a challenge, and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty."²³

Danto respects Duchamp's effort to think beyond the question, "What is art?" to the more incisive inquiry: Why is one thing a work of art when something exactly like it is not? Certainly, C. S. Lewis did not engage the visual and plastic arts as passionately as Arthur Danto, and we can be certain that he would have grandly dismissed most contemporary art, had he been alive to see it. But his insistence that an "extra"-ordinary effort is required to really "see" art is a valid one, and it is also most often what we as amateur viewers protest. "The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender," Lewis insists in Experiment in Criticism. "Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.)"²⁴

When Lewis alludes to the idea of getting beyond "self," or crossing the frontier into a new region of art appreciation, he makes a distinction between reliance on our own self-perception, and reliance on the ultimate Self—the God whose self-description reduces to the "I AM that I AM." The implications of this Selfhood, which logically meld with our image as beings made in the image of God, can offer an argument that the self-expression that characterizes this age is not entirely evil, but rather, becomes the root of evil in excess. The Self that informs and extrudes from contemporary art practice is not only excessive, but it also emanates from a Selfhood that is usually stifled. Robert Hughes really put his finger on the pulse when he concluded:

Is the Self automatically interesting in art? Or can it only claim our attention to the extent that it produces ordered and lucid structures, full of articulate meaning? . . . Few cultures in history have been so obsessively preoccupied with the merely personal as ours, and the last twenty years are littered with the debris of attempts to claim for the exposure of the self—unmediated except by its presence in the "art context"—that conceptual dignity which is the property of art. Every kind of petty documentation, physic laundry list, and autistic gesture has been performed, taped, pinned up, filed, and photographed.²⁵

But the subtext for the Christian does not end at a rigorous nodding of the head and cries of "Bravo!" In fact, the subtext never ends. We are called to enact redemption upon the world and ourselves, in emulation of Jesus Christ. So the "I AM" in us is also the sacrificial Lamb. Moreover, we have additional help from the Spirit, who communicates for us in groans too painful to comprehend—a free connection, incidentally, that requires no monthly fee for simultaneous transmissions (called Prayer). And our history in the West, which Danto and Lewis and others obviously love so dearly, maintains a connection to the "ever present, ever ancient."

MOMENTS IN ART
In Towards a Christian Poetics, Aberdeen professor Michael Edwards describes how all artistic endeavor in every discipline is tied to three seminal moments in time. The first is Creation, New Beginning, and Genesis, which has its tradition in all the arts. The second, which endlessly fascinates the modern, unredeemed imagination, is the moment of rupture, alienation from meaningful existence, and great pain. Many Christians call this moment the Fall. The third moment, which appears more rarely than the other two, represents transformation, redemption, and restitution. Even as early as the thirteenth century, Dante Alighiere found his formidable intellect somewhat stifled by Paradise in the Divine Comedy. Of what interest to a full-blooded human is a realm of light, where theologians and great spiritual leaders float about? Somehow, human imagination is much more attuned to inferno and purgatory, because these offer a picture of reality that is closer to actual life. Very few artists can stretch their creative iterations into a zone where all is completed, all is restored, all is made whole again, all is . . . redeemed.

Yet these moments in time, of Creation, Fall, and Redemption, emerge in all forms of art whether or not the artist adheres to the Christian canon. God will use anyone who is willing to communicate, even if it is Balaam's ass.

For award-winning Russian film director Andrey Tarkovsky (1932-1986), the division brought about by distinctions are joined together in a paradox sanctioned by God. As he wrote in Sculpting in Time:

Art is born and takes hold wherever there is a timeless and insatiable longing for the spiritual, for the ideal: that longing which draws people to art. When I speak of the aspiration towards the beautiful, of the ideal as the ultimate aim of art . . . I am not for a moment suggesting that art should shun the "dirt" of the world. On the contrary! Hideousness and beauty are contained within each other. This prodigious paradox, in all its absurdity, leavens life itself, and in art makes that wholeness in which harmony and tension are unified.²⁶

Karen Mulder is pursuing a doctorate in architectural history at the University of Virginia. Since 1981, she has been called to serve as a liaison between artists of faith, the world, and the Church. She has taught art history internationally and has been published in a variety of venues.

Notes

1. Ian Chivers, Harold Osbourne, and Dennis Farr, The Oxford Dictionary of Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 430.

2. Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New: Art and the Century of Change (London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1980). This is an excellent primer on the shift from modernism to postmodernism, although many of Hughes's fellow critics reject its dogmatism. For more recommended reads on art, see the Bibliography section at http://www.karenmulder.org/.

3. Hughes, 400 (New York: Alfred Knopf Publishers, Inc., 1991, new edition).

4. Hughes, 400.

5. Hughes, 384. For whatever reason, Hughes excised this anecdote in his 1991 reissue.

6. One excellent essay on this matter appears in Yule Heibel's "First Voices, Initial Assessments," in Reconstructing the Subject: Modernist Painting in Western Germany, 1945-1950 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 11-43.

7. John Berger with Sven Blomberg, Chris Fox, Michael Dibb, and Richard Hollis, Ways of Seeing (London: BBX and Penguin Books, 1972).

8. Berger, 24; survey by Pierre Bourdreil and Alaine Darbel, L'Amour de l'Art (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1969).

9. Carol Duncan, "Art as Ritual" in Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Museums (London: Routledge, 1995), 20.

10. Ibid., 20.

11. "American Pop," The Nation, 258:10, 14 March 1994, 328.

12. Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 214.

13. Ibid., 215-216. Results can now be viewed at www.diacenter.org/km.

14. Ibid., 215-216.

15. I know this because I have been involved with Lewis's home, The Kilns, since 1991. After a twelve-year restoration project, it is slated to become a center for Christian scholars. For more information, contact the C. S. Lewis Foundation, 1-888-CSLEWIS. To see some of the images of The Kilns, or inquire about slide surveys regarding it, see http://www.karenmulder.org/.

16. C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism. 1961. (Cambridge University Press, 1992.)

17. Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey, editors. Visual Theory: Painting and Interpretation (Oxford: Polity Press/Blackwell Press, 1991), 201-215, 211.

18. Danto, After the End of Art, Preface, xiv.

19. Danto, Beyond the Brillo Box (New York: Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 1992).

20. Danto, The Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 178, 180.

21. Danto, After the End of Art, 84.

22. Duchamp signed Fountain "R. Mutt, 1917."

23. Danto, After the End of Art, 84.

24. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism.

25. Hughes, Shock of the New, 268.

26. Sculpting in Time: The Great Russian Filmmaker Discusses His Art, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 38.