Life at the Crossroads: Perspectives on Some Areas of Public Life Art Living at the Crossroads Chapter 9

Two Erroneous Starting Points  Art is only good if it’s high art  Art is only good if it serves a “sacred” purpose like evangelism

Roots for the arts  Art rooted in creative potential of humanity  Creative potential arises out of creation

Art Needs No Justification  “Art needs no justification” (Hans Rookmaker)  Art justified by: ♦ Way God made us ♦ Task God has given us God created us with his own capacity for creativity, the “possibility both to create something beautiful, and to delight in it.” (Abraham Kuyper)

Creativity as a gift  Genesis 4: Development of music and poetry  Psalms as poetry with headings instructing director of music regarding instruments and dance

What is art?  Human experience or world presented to us for consideration

Presenting real and important world Over and over when surveying representational art we are confronted with the obvious fact that the artist is not merely projecting a world which has caught his private fancy, but a world true in significant respects to what his community believes to be real and important. (Nicholas Wolterstorff)

Role of the Artist To become an artist means that you become a professional imaginator in order to help your handicapped, unimaginative neighbour. Our artistic profession is meant to give voice, eyes, ears and tactile sense to those who are underdeveloped toward such rich nuances of meaning in God's creation (Cal Seerveld).

Function of art and artist My task [as novelist]... is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel— it is, before all to make you see.’ (Joseph Conrad) The function of the arts is to heighten our awareness and perception of life by making us vicariously live in it.’ (Leland Ryken)

Role of art  Human experience or world presented to us for consideration  Human experience or world is simplified

Art presents reality to us The world of the literary imagination is a highly organized version of the real world. It is a world in which images, characters, and story patterns are presented stripped of distracting complexities (Ryken).

Imaginative form Art does not try to give a photographic copy of life; it rearranges the materials of life in order to give us a heightened perception of its qualities. Art is life at the remove of imaginative form (Ryken).

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is the lie that makes us realize the truth. (Picasso) The imagination... plays the game of make-believe. It simplifies and heightens reality.... The artistic imagination is a window to reality. (Leland Ryken)

What is art?  Human experience or world presented to us for consideration  Human experience or world is simplified  Human experience interpreted

Artists aim to make the audience share their vision—to see what they see, feel what they feel, and interpret life as they do.’ (Ryken) The artists... can transmute... reality into the order of significant form only in accordance with what are his most fundamental beliefs about what is radically significant in life. (Nathan Scott)

Literary reality is a carefully framed and controlled kind of actuality, with every element displaying the artist’s own beliefs, his own values. His choice of subject matter and his treatment of it are evidences of his attitudes. (Keith McKean)

What is art?  Human experience or world presented to us for consideration  Human experience or world is simplified  Human experience interpreted  Shaped by artistic techniques

Art takes real life as its subject, but the imagination of the artist transforms those materials in keeping with the conventions of art.’ Art does not try to give a photographic copy of life; it rearranges the materials of life in order to give us a heightened perception of its qualities. Art is life at the remove of imaginative form.’ Method of art is to incarnate meaning in concrete form, signs, images, symbols. We enter the world of our imaginations.’ -Ryken

Battle for the Arts Our leisure, even our play, is a matter of serious concern. There is no neutral ground in the universe; every square inch, every split second, is claimed by God and counterclaimed by Satan.... It is a serious matter to choose wholesome recreations. (C.S. Lewis)

Role of art  Delight, enjoyment, entertainment That is how it is with poetry: created and developed to give joy to human hearts.’ (Horace) The arts tell us a lot about human experience, but they also exist to be delightful in themselves.’ (Ryken)

Role of art  Delight, enjoyment, entertainment  Deepens and broadens an understanding of ourselves, world, others

The grand power of poetry [also other arts] is its power of so dealing with things as to awaken in us a wonderfully full, new, and intimate sense of them, and of our relations with them. When this sense is awakened in us,... we feel ourselves to be in contact with the essential nature of those objects... (Matthew Arnold).

Imagination enables us to understand world in way reason does not! The world of literature is a world where there is no reality except that of the imagination.... The constructs of the imagination tell us things about human life that we don’t get in any other way.’ (Northrop Frye)

Role of art  Delight, enjoyment, entertainment  Deepens and broadens an understanding of ourselves, world, others  Enlarges our experience

‘We seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves. Each of us by nature sees the whole world from one point of view with a perspective and a selectiveness peculiar to himself... We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own.... We demand windows.... This, so far as I can see, is the specific value or good of literature....; it admits us to experiences other than our own. (C.S. Lewis)

‘When we are at play, or looking at a painting or a statue, or reading a story, the imaginary work must have such an effect on us that it enlarges our own sense of reality.’ (Madelein L’Engle)

Role of art  Delight, enjoyment, entertainment  Deepens and broadens an understanding of ourselves, world, others  Enlarges our experience  Encourages our sense of play

Nourishing the imagination and the arts  Recognize possibilities for creativity in all of life  Take seriously calling of some to be artists ♦ Support Christian art and artists!  Develop discernment in viewing and interpreting art