Art and Christianity (a nice broad title)

This article by Camille Paglia caught my attention (thank you, WorldMagBlog)--and she says art needs religion. The article does get crude in places, and also she's overly hard on the Puritans, but if you're up for it, as Dr. Bates put it, just blush and keep reading.

As for my two cents: yes, Protestants tend to be dismal at the visual arts per se. We just don't do that. I live in Northern New Mexico, and I love the way artistic whatsits pop out of the woodwork--literally, most of the time. I get a kick out of adobe and tile and murals, and the restaurants and coffee shops selling original paintings as a matter of course, and how Santa Fe fights graffiti on the power boxes by preemptively spray-painting odd designs on them. And I have frequently noticed how the artistically interesting stuff generally comes from people with whom I disagree theologically, philosophically, and/or morally. I would love it if we could put paintings of the saints in our church hallways--but I doubt that's going to happen.

But there are hopeful signs.

Scrapbooking is one of them. My church ladies, a whole contingent of them, are skilled scrapbookers. It may not be "high art," yet, but it's particular and a labor of love, and I suspect the itinerant Italian church painters weren't actually that "high" themselves--sort of like Shakespeare, who gets a halo of greatness that almost blots out his earthier moments.

Another thing: Paglia caught onto the rise of homeschooling, but she didn't mention how artistic they can be. Not all of them, of course, any more than all public schoolers are. But a lot of my homeschooled acquaintances are very accomplished musicians, or literary critics, or authors, or pencil-sketchers, or actors and directors, or filmmakers, or dancers. Homeschoolers are quirky, but they tend to follow what they love creatively.

We may not make murals of the saints, but we do make movies about them, fact and fiction, and some of the movies are even pretty decent. Just off hand, I can remember Amazing Grace, The Passion (all right, which is of Christ Himself), End of the Spear, and Second Chance.

Paglia is exactly right that we've mostly cut ourselves off from the artistic tradition, and that ought to be remedied. But people create: it's an imago Dei thing, and they can't help it. Art is not dead in evangelical circles, but maybe it's a little--blind?