The text of this week’s sermon was Psalm 150, but we also heard from Picasso and other great artists. My point was that great art is the universal or elemental expressed through the personal. When we read Homer, we aren’t just reading personal stories, but revelations about who we humans are in the cosmos.
So when the Psalmist tells us to “praise God with drums and lyres” we need to translate the symbol “God” as a not as a revered object but as a mysterious source. To “praise” or “glorify” does not mean to flatter an invisible being, but to express or manifest our primordial ground through whatever art opens our heart.
I said in the sermon that art is what makes justice compassionate because I cannot possibly empathize with your pain if I cannot feel my own pleasure. Furthermore, it is art that teaches us which of the potentially infinite facts of science are meaningful for our human lives. We closed with a call to remember and return to the childhood art that once expressed who we are as humans dancing in the cosmos. I closed with the following quote:
“Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten. Then when you hit puberty they take the crayons away and replace them with dry, uninspiring books on algebra, history, etc. Being suddenly hit years later with the ‘creative bug’ is just a wee voice telling you, ‘I’d like my crayons back, please.” -Hugh MacLeod
You did acknowledge in your sermon that 99% of people have the ART beat out of them by industrial education. Each unique spiritual being in our community goes through a process where each draws, dances and sings as kindergarteners and by college, NONE do, except the “anointed.” Of those anointed, 1% who call themselves “artists” will make a living within EMPIRE.
“Art” is therefore a loaded term that when mentioned immediately disqualifies almost every addressee.
Like “feminist” and “radical,” ART is a word that needs reclaimed — and qualified for effective utility.
I’m new to the church and currently focused on gardening as my career and spiritual hope, but I still direct and do a little bit of programming for a non-profit arts organization that I founded in 2004. It is called Austin Green Art, though when you visit the website there’s a blogpost about a re-branding effort hinting we’d change it to 5 Mile Living.
Prior to starting AGA I was a professional stone sculptor for thirteen years, board-member of the International Sculpture Center and gallery director. I know the art world. I know my art history.
My degree from William and Mary is in English Literature, so I know something about the western canon, too.
To promote world-class or “great” art is to contextualize art within western civilization and the EMPIRE.
I’d love to be a part of a broader discussion of Wendell Berry’s notions of COMMUNITY and “ways to order human life.” I’d love to talk about folk art, naive art and community-collaborative art-making, children’s art, Zen and mihaly csikszentmihalyi’s notion of flow.
Art may be foundational to empathy within EMPIRE, but there are aboriginal artists for whom there is no separation between art and life — a notion that in the west, we barely have a way of comprehending.