T-minus 5: Book: Andy Crouch -- Art & the Gospel

I can't think of a better way to begin a new year than with an excerpt from Andy Crouch's chapter in For the Beauty of the Church. In the first chapter of our book, Andy grounds all our artmaking in the fundamental category of culture making. (And if you haven't read his book Culture Making, you're missing out on a very important book.) He argues that art is a gift, not an achievement. Like the entire gospel, art establishes its purpose not in its utility but in something bigger than itself: grace. And like worship it pulls us into something bigger than ourselves, pulling all our play and all our pain into the beautiful life of God in Christ.

Here is the excerpt which appears toward the end of his chapter.

The Artist's Vocation: On Play and Pain
There are two things that artists dare to do, it seems to me, that you can only sustain if you ultimately believe that life is a gift, not an achievement. First, they play. We use that word specifically of musical artists. But it is really true of all art. It is play. It can be very serious play, it can be play that takes years of practice to master—but it is play all the same. It is not fully adult to play. I watch my children at play and I can’t help thinking of how little they know about the brokenness and danger of the world, how innocent they are of what will be required of them as they come of age and work, suffer, grieve, and die. How can you play in a world like this world? It is almost an offense—unless, in spite of the grave condition of our world, our world is still a place of grace.

And yet the other terribly useless thing that artists do is to enter into pain, and to bring us into contact with pain. In Western art this begins, as it should, with meditations on the crucified Christ. I was in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts a few weeks before the gathering in Austin, and I couldn’t help noticing that people’s pace quickened when they came to the rooms housing the medieval, and especially Spanish, art that dwells in dark tones on the dereliction of Christ. They were moving rapidly along to the Impressionist room, where they were happy to linger among Claude Monet’s bright pastel lilies and cathedrals. But Monet’s work is less glibly beautiful when you know his story. He loved Camille Doncieux—the subject of his first widely recognized painting, The Woman in the Green Dress.

had a child in 1867, they married in 1870, had a second child in 1878, and in 1879 she died of tuberculosis at age thirty-two. In response, Monet created one of his most haunting paintings, Camille on Her Deathbed, in which the young woman, already drawn and pale, seems to be vanishing before our eyes into a whirlwind of nonbeing. Even our beloved Impressionist Monet painted from a place of pain.

Play and pain are two perfectly useless things, and strangely enough, they have to go together. Play can become escapism when we determinedly play on to avoid facing pain. There is a kind of art that is too easy, too willing to let us off the hook, too comforting and too culpably ignorant of what exactly grace costs. At the moment, we find this most often in the bestselling art of the Christian subculture than in the secular art worlds, but it has had its day in even the most secular venues. Pain, meanwhile, can become sadism and masochism when it is unmoored from any hope of grace, so that the artist begins to conceive his job as an endless cynical flagellation of himself and his audience. Difficulty becomes the only test of seriousness, and “decorative” becomes the only remaining swear word.

We who are privileged enough to live in North America live in a world that is forgetting both pain and play. Our popular culture offers us endless diverting amusements that fall flat and well short of real celebration. Our so-called serious culture offers us endlessly difficult dead ends. Who will be the people who can play gracefully, unusefully, in the world? Who will be the people who turn unafraid toward pain? Who will be the people who believe in beauty without being afraid of brokenness? Who will be the people who champion that which is not useful?