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A theologian friend recently asked me, Why does art matter to you? It was late, and I was tired, so I said that it simply does, and that I didn’t feel the need to enquire any more deeply into that particular question. The next morning, I found an email in which my friend said that, while my answer was all very well, the real question was, “Why should art matter to anyone else?” My friend went on,

I’ve done a little art and I like it. I’ve looked at some art and felt stirred by it, and not just beautiful art but also [disturbing] art . . . Still art clearly does not matter to me in the same way it matters to you. Are you writing just for yourself or are you writing for people like me? If for me, then I need some windows into your world.

This book is an attempt to open up those windows, not just for my friend and me, but for others—especially others in church communities—who are, like us, trying to find a way to talk about art that doesn’t pit experts against neophytes, or lovers of high art against those who never step foot in a gallery, museum, or concert hall.

One of the problems in conversations like this is that artists are often tongue-tied when asked to explain what seems self-evident to them. So, it took a while for me to find the right words, but eventually I was able to say to my friend two, quite different things.

First, my answer to the question, “Why should the art in a museum or gallery matter as much to other people as it does to me?” is, “Maybe it shouldn’t.” Because of my life experience, or simply because of how my mind works, or how my body responds to color and form, I happen to have a taste for certain kinds of high art, much as I have a taste for chocolate. Just as I wouldn’t try to argue my husband into liking chocolate when he prefers vanilla, I have no need to convince anyone to spend time in an art museum when they would prefer to walk on the beach or listen to rap.

On the other hand, an awareness of what is in museums, concert halls, and theaters, and the ways that certain paintings, pieces of music, poems, stories, and other artworks have affected the overall cultural, theological, and spiritual discourse, is part of being an educated human being. Much of what can be known about the church, as well as society at large, in earlier eras is available only through the medium of the arts. To ignore that evidence is to ignore a large part of human experience.

The second thing that I said is that, despite the statement to the contrary, I am aware that art—defined more broadly, at least—does matter to my friend the theologian, as well as to most other churchgoers. To take the most obvious example, the music used in worship is a matter of passionate debate in many congregations. Whether the congregation should sing hymns, praise choruses, or chants from the Taizé community is not simply a matter of taste, but is profoundly formative on individual piety as well as how (or whether) worshippers understand themselves as interdependent members of the Body of Christ. Somewhat less obvious, but nonetheless real, is how the quality, presence, or absence of various kinds of arts within the worship space and the church building overall affects people’s relationship to one another, to the church, and to God.

Beauty and Theology

While my friend was aware that not all art is beautiful, many theologians tend to talk about art and beauty in the same breath. For them, of course, God is both the source and the measure of all Beauty—which they tend to capitalize along with those other transcendental virtues, Truth and Goodness. But it is often a short step for theological aestheticians to move from assertions of the absolute beauty of God to declare that this or that piece of art, or this or that type of art, is not only beautiful, but a sanctified manifestation of the beauty of God.

It wasn’t always so. For nearly 500 years, visual art was suspect in most Protestant churches; drama was largely absent; and dance was considered virtually synonymous with seduction and sin. Music (mostly in the form of hymnody) and poetry (mostly in the form of prayer) were the only arts that were encouraged. Even in those churches that commissioned expensive stained glass windows or elaborate furnishings and decorations, the imagery was largely conventional and the artistry subordinated to the message. Although Roman Catholic churches continued to use statues and paintings as the focus of devotional and worship practices, by the late nineteenth century these had become mostly mass-produced plaster copies of a few accepted forms. While there were, of course, exceptions, by and large Christian worship offered no place for contemporary art by living artists. In the late twentieth century, that began to change.

For a variety of reasons, including but not limited to an experimental attitude toward worship sparked by the Second Vatican Council and the liturgical renewals that followed in both Roman Catholic and Protestant worlds, the arts began to find a new—if still somewhat uneasy—acceptance in Christian life. Much has been written in the last few years about this renewed relationship. Nearly as many books have been written on theological aesthetics in each of the last ten years as in the previous 100 years taken together. Theological seminaries are adding courses on the integration of the arts into Christian education and worship, as well as rewriting courses on Scripture and church history to include the use of the arts as evidence of attitudes and understandings in a variety of historical periods. At the same time, many Christian artists have found a new boldness in using their faith as the basis of their work, seeing their artistic process as spiritual journey and their product as evangelical witness.

What is missing from this growing attention to the arts in Christian circles has been a critical discussion of what art does and does not do, and why we think so. Art has been lauded as a means of apprehending the holy; as a form of prayer; even as revelation, however imperfect, of God’s own beauty and truth. In many ways, the arts, once vilified, are now sanctified; what was once feared as a tool of the devil is now embraced as a means of grace. This volume is an attempt to look at these and other claims that have been made about art, identify the sources of these claims, and consider them in the context of Christian devotion, corporate worship, and theological study so that both artists and the church may take one another seriously as partners in conversation.

Art and Aesthetics

For a variety of historical reasons, the fields of philosophical and theological aesthetics have come to center on the notion of beauty. This is especially true in much current writing on theological aesthetics, which (as I read it) seems to center on the understanding that God is the source of beauty and that any standard of beauty ultimately derives from God. While I have no dispute with these formulations, my own understanding of aesthetics comes less from philosophy and theology than from my practice and education as a visual artist.

When artists speak of aesthetics, they are not usually speaking about beauty, but of the relationships (harmonious or otherwise) among the various elements of an artwork, and of how those relationships express ideas or emotions. The root of the word, aesthetic, after all, derives from a Greek word meaning “perceptible to the senses.” In the singular, an aesthetic is a particular attitude, or set of values, which affects such diverse qualities as color palette, subject matter, medium, attitude, and more. Aesthetics, for artists, is about what can be perceived with the senses, and the effect that such perception has on both emotion and meaning.

A Life in Art

So this book grows out of my life history. While many of the details are quite ordinary, certain particulars will illuminate the source of the concerns that this volume addresses. I have been an artist in my own right for over thirty years. For ten years before I claimed that identity, I was married to a painter. I have worked at various times as craftsperson, fashion designer, graphic designer, and seamstress. I come from a family of musicians, dancers, actors, screen-writers, and artisans. One grandfather designed embroidered skirts for starlets and sequined shirts for Hollywood cowboys; the other was a clarinetist who left the Borscht Belt Klezmer circuit to found the first music store in Southern California. My mother’s mother worked as a mill girl in Poland and became a milliner in the Bronx. I have always made things with my hands. One way or another, my life has always been connected with the arts. For the last thirty years or so, I have been a working artist with an active exhibition schedule and occasional liturgical commissions,

In 1965, the year that I turned eighteen, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art opened its new building on Wilshire Boulevard, not far from where I was living. The first exhibition that I recall was of large, flat planes of color; canvases full of splashed and poured paint; and the silk-screened repetition of giant soup cans. It was all a very long time ago, and my memory may be conflating this with one or more later shows, but what I recall was that I was transfixed by my first sight of works by such artists as Barnett Newman, Kenneth Noland, Willem de Kooning, and Brice Marden. The Andy Warhol works probably came later, some time after the scandalous Back Seat Dodge ’38 by Edward Kienholz, shown to much controversy in 1966. The precise chronology doesn’t really matter. What does matter is the effect these works had on me and my subsequent understanding of what art is, what art does, and why so many people care.

Up until those shows, I probably had a rather conventional understanding of art. To the extent that I thought about it at all, I thought that art was about representation, about drawing things as convincingly as possible. I was never singled out at school or anywhere else as “the artistic one,” even though I was always making things. But sewing up gypsy outfits for my parents to wear to a costume ball, carefully lettering a ten-foot banner for a science project, inventing new plaiting patterns for lanyards at summer camp, or even helping to lay out the junior high school yearbook were not considered “art,” either by me or by anyone else that I knew. Artists were people who drew and painted, effortlessly, with no instruction, as naturally as birds sing.

Drawing wasn’t effortless for me. It was, however, a challenge that I was determined to overcome. In my sophomore year in high school, I nearly failed all my classes because I was drawing, incessantly and obsessively. Mostly, I drew hands. Since it was always available, I would draw my own left hand, over and over, in a variety of poses, trying to make the result as lifelike as possible. Sometimes, if they would agree to sit still long enough, I would draw someone else’s hands. Hands seemed to me somehow more revealing than faces. A face could lie, but a hand was honest, no more and no less than itself. In drawing the same subject repetitively, I was training myself to see, to make may own hand record the small irregularities, the minute, yet infinitely differing relationships of knuckle and nail, of joint and ligament, of palm and finger that make one hand clearly belong to me, and another belong to you. Thinking back on this period now, I think that I was trying to understand both the difference and the connection between self and other. It was a way of knowing something that could not be known in any other way.

Yet even in this year of compulsive drawing, I never thought that I was, or could be, or even wanted to be, an artist. The only art class I had ever taken was one that was required in the seventh grade. Although I secretly longed to know the mysteries taught in the studio, I could not allow myself to admit it. Instead, I filled my schedule with the heavy academics that would lead to college. I worked hard at the things I was interested in, like Latin and geometry, and skated by with low Bs in the subjects that bored me, like biology and civics. Although I knew that I liked to make things, girls weren’t allowed to take drafting or print shop, and somehow I had internalized the message that art classes were for slow learners, those who couldn’t make it through the college prep curriculum. I listened with longing to other students’ tales of what they were learning in art appreciation class, but never could allow myself to admit that that was where I wanted to be. It was only in my thirties that I was able to confess that I wanted to go to art school.

What I learned when I finally got there, besides the technical mysteries of watercolor and lithography; of stretching canvas and kneading clay; of color theory and the elements and principles of design; was that art is a form of discourse, a means of communication, and a record of what humans believe about the nature of the world. Art, the historians in the department taught me, is visual philosophy. Today, I would add that is also visual theology, a way of thinking about the nature of God and the relationship of that God to humankind and to all creation.

Eventually, I earned an MFA and went on to teach art at a state university. Later, I also earned a master’s degree in Theology, and a doctorate in Liturgical Studies. For fifteen years, I was the Curator of the Dadian Gallery at Wesley Theological Seminary, where I now teach and serve as the Director of the Henry Luce III Center for the Arts and Religion. In addition, I am an active member of a small, local church where the arts are an integral part of our worship life.

A Few Definitions

It is this immersion in both the world of art and the world of faith that leads me to question the ways that art is thought about in the church and its related institutions. As I read what theologians, liturgical scholars, church historians, and even self-professed Christian artists have been writing about art, I am frequently struck by the disjuncture between what Christian authors claim as the virtues of art, and how the art world itself views and values its own products and processes.

In saying that, I realize I need to provide some definitions. First, I need to clarify that when I say “the church.” I do not mean any particular church or congregation, or even denomination. Rather, I am referring generically to Christians and their institutions, primarily in the United States. I realize that such a generalization skates over a great many particular differences, but the arguments for and against the arts in worship and other moments in Christian life tend to transcend denominational lines. Influential writers from a variety of disciplines and denominational backgrounds who write about the arts and the church include Frank Burch Brown, Don Saliers, William Dyrness, Jeremy Begbie, Robin Jensen, and the late Doug Adams, just to name a few. While each of them has a particular viewpoint growing out of their experience of both the arts and the church, their writings like mine are generally addressed to the church at large, rather than any particular denomination.

Next, I must define what I mean by art, the arts, and the art world. By art, I mean primarily what are often called the visual or plastic arts1—painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, and the like. Sometimes, however, when I say art, I mean it more generally, including dance, drama, music, cinema, and poetry, as well as the visual arts. I hope that the context will make clear which I mean.

While my perspective is shaped primarily by the visual arts, much of what I have to say is equally true of all the arts. For instance, any artwork, whether visual or not, whether as solid and lasting as a Greek kouros or a medieval cathedral, or as ephemeral as a single performance of John Cage’s “4’33”,” is an expression of its time and place. An artwork, regardless of medium, is, among other things, a record of the social, political, and historical context within which the artist functions. It is only in relatively modern times that art, regardless of medium, began to be understood as the idiosyncratic expression of the individual artist, or even (as is sometimes claimed) as divinely-inspired revelation.

When I say the arts, I am referring to a fairly elastic group of activities and products that includes painting, sculpture, music, literature, concert music, ballet, and other high arts, but may also be understood as stretching to include such applied arts as movies, interior decorating, and graphic design. Although there are many commonalities among the arts, it must be noted that there are very real differences as well. The technical processes and problems facing the printmaker are quite different than those facing the musician, actor, or writer. Nevertheless, regardless of medium, artists tend to recognize similarities that transcend technique, such as the difficulty of translating an interior vision into an external form that an audience can grasp.

Finally, when I talk about the art world, I am referring to museums, galleries, art schools, and journals devoted to the dissemination of ideas about art; and the artists, critics, patrons, and art historians who define themselves in relationship to these institutions. In fact, however, there is no longer anything that may be monolithically called “the art world,” in the sense that this was meant in the middle of the twentieth century. In the 1950s and 60s, that world was centered in New York, where contemporary, serious, important art of the Modernist persuasion was defined as what was shown in the Museum of Modern Art, and the art of other times and places was exhibited in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Today there are several art worlds, each with its own set of critical principles, standards, sources, and markets. While superficially similar as venues for the display of exemplary artwork, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the Museum of Visionary Art in nearby Baltimore, MD, and the American Folk Art Museum in New York City, for example, define art in very different ways. The art world, like so many other fields in this postmodern era, has splintered into many sub-specialties, each claiming the authority to decide what it values and promotes, or even to challenge the very concept of value. To make things more complicated, similar networks and distinctions exist in other artistic fields, such as music, film, and dance.

Despite this disclaimer, there is a field of human endeavor—however unclear its boundaries—that may be identified as art, and particular people and institutions—however loosely organized—that are principally involved in and concerned with that field. And within that field, those who make, critique, collect, exhibit, teach, and theorize about art as a form of intellectual or academic discourse are what I mean by “the art world.” And, until I found myself working and studying in a theological seminary, it was in that world that I had my primary professional identity.

Bridging the Gap

My theological study challenged many of the assumptions that I had taken for granted since art school. For instance, in most art schools, when the standard survey course on the history of Western art gets to the sixteenth century, Michelangelo is a hero who is mistreated by a succession of popes, whose refusal to pay him on time is matched only by their desire to multiply magnificent buildings, sculptures, and paintings throughout the city of Rome. Meanwhile, the leaders of the Reformation are portrayed as uncultured barbarians, who destroyed important artworks out of an overwrought religious sensibility.

When the same period is covered in a Protestant seminary course on the history of the Western church, the Reformers are the heroes, desiring nothing more than to purge the ecclesiastical hierarchy of its wretched excesses. Chief among these excesses were the Pope’s penchant for luxury and sensuousness, as exemplified by Michelangelo’s magnificent nudes. It is somewhat startling to someone from the art world to discover that the sale of indulgences—a major point in Martin Luther’s critique of Rome—was intended (at least in part) to finance the Pope’s art patronage. In both cases, the Pope is the villain, but it is not clear how to reconcile my admiration for the work of the Reformers with my delight in Michelangelo’s painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. I imagine that when this period is taught in a Roman Catholic seminary, the tensions are described somewhat differently.

However, the real issue that underlies this story is the question of by what criteria the church is to evaluate art. For the Pope in the story above, Michelangelo’s painting was good, both because it conformed to current Catholic doctrine, and because Michelangelo was celebrated as an artist by other artists and patrons—the art world of his day. For at least some of the Reformers, his painting was bad because it could lead to idolatry, regardless of what the art experts of the time might think. Should the criteria for art that is good for the church be defined by the art establishment? That is, shall the church simply accept as good whatever art is currently being bought by major museums or being hailed by well-known critics? Or, should the church develop its own criteria, such as adhering to certain theological positions or exemplifying certain virtues? This question of what is good art, who decides, on what basis, and in what situations, runs throughout this volume.

So, too, does the question of the relationship between art, spirit, and matter. About twenty years ago, I was installing a rather complicated piece of art in a small church. There I was, teetering on a ladder, trying to reach a pole across a six-foot gap without dropping the linked pieces of copper that were suspended from it. Suddenly, a member of the congregation walked by, saying, “Oh, I had no idea that art was so physical!” For my part, I had no idea that anyone could have thought otherwise.

From the prehistoric painters drawing by uncertain firelight deep in the caves at Alta Mira to Michelangelo aiming hammer blows at blocks of marble to force them to release the sculpture held captive within, every printmaker who ends each day with cramping hands and aching back after endless hours of bending over a work table, painstakingly chiseling fine lines into a hardwood block; every potter who stays up all night to tend the kiln, every muralist who scrambles up and down scaffolding to get a better view of the day’s work, every dancer who comes to the final act of a ballet with bleeding toes, and every guitarist who practices for hours despite the blistered fingers and throbbing shoulders, artists have always grappled with the sheer physicality of what they do.

For the church member who marveled at my balancing act, however, art was not physical, but spiritual. Art, she believed, was something ethereal, mysterious, sacred, a way of apprehending the holy. Art, she seemed to think, was made in an instant, a painting breathed onto the canvas, a sculpture formed by thought alone, with no effort or compromise between the moment of inspiration and its realization as object. Art, for her, was something set apart, an experience outside of normal life, a divine gift unsullied by human labor.

Although this book is addressed primarily to theologians and pastors, I am writing largely in response to that church member from long ago. In her offhand comment, she embodies the unexamined attitudes and assumptions that the church holds about art and artists. In investigating these attitudes and perceptions, and tying them to concrete situations and examples, I hope to demystify art, to bring art down to earth, where theologians, pastors, and ordinary Christians can wrestle with its meanings, participate in its processes, and understand its uses in a variety of situations.

In showing the commonalities and distinctions among the various ways that artists themselves approach their work, I hope to change the conversation, to help the church talk about the arts in ways that artists will recognize. The church needs to learn the language of art, so that it can understand the artists in its midst as well as the ideas, processes, and practices that inform their work and, in turn, help them to talk about God in ways that the church can recognize. In this way, I believe, the church will realize that the Word of God is more than words. The arts embody the Word as a living, breathing reality constantly transforming our lives through our senses as well as our minds. Like the Pope who believed that a beautiful church filled with great artworks would bring the people to faith, but didn’t pay the artist who clambered over the scaffolding in order to decorate the church ceiling, the church today often sanctifies art as an idea but ignores the hard realities of actual artworks made by actual artists. As a member of both the church and the art world, I want to bridge the gap between the habits of thought that inform the intellectual discourse of the art world, and those quite different ideas about art that are taken for granted by many Christians.

When we make clear distinctions between art as spiritual practice and art as scriptural interpretation; between the benefits of art to the artist and its benefits to the audience; and between art for its own sake and art for the worship of God, we will make better decisions about the role of art and artists in our seminaries, our churches, our lives. When art is understood as intellectual, technical and physical as well as ethereal, mysterious and sacred, we will see it as an integral part of our life together in Christ, fully human and fully divine.

1. Plastic, in this context, means malleable, or able to be shaped or formed. Materials as diverse as clay, bronze, or fabric may be described as plastic in this sense.