How many times have you entered an art gallery and had to peer at the small explanation at the side of a painting or sculpture before you knew what it was trying to convey?
How do you know whether a piece of art is good or bad? One test is whether you understand what it is trying to say, or when its meaning if any has to be explained. The purpose of art is to communicate and if a piece of art necessitates written explanation it has failed to communicate.
Of course repeated viewings of great works of art reveal fresh insights and we can gain understanding by reading knowledgeable art critics. That is because these works are complex and rich in meaning. Many examples of modern art require explanation because they are sterile in that they are devoid of meaning except whatever the viewer wishes to impose.
One European art collector paid $1.2million for a receipt written by the French artist Yves Klein to prove the ownership of one of his ‘invisible art’ pieces. In its auction catalogue Sotheby’s described the empty space as ‘the apotheosis of Klein’s lifelong quest to create an artwork which was “a direct and immediate perception – assimilation without any effect, any trick, or any deception”. In other words, he was aiming to directly transmit the power of painting – its sensibility – without depending on the painting-artifact to act as a medium.’ Sometimes even the explanation doesn’t explain.
Even when the art work is figurative it has to have a distortion within it to be accepted by our avant-garde cultural trendsetters.
The art any society produces is a reflection of the values of the society itself. Our art has become sterile because at its core it has, like our society, become anti-God. Acclaimed art today is anti-human and anti-nature, it has to reject the beauty at the core of creation because it has rejected the Creator.
The objectively beautiful, whether that be a building, a painting or a flower arrangement, points to God. Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder but is not purely subjective, every individual can recognise and has a standard of beauty even although that standard may differ. Beautiful works of art explain themselves. Even an unthinking unbeliever is moved on entering Chartres Cathedral and has an understanding of what it means, why it is there, and more importantly their own place in this sacred world they have entered. Great art communicates.
Even when good art portrays something which is not conventionally beautiful it can do so in such a way as to reveal the inner beauty. Instead of distorting and warping the beautiful, good art reveals the hidden beauty.
Our Western culture was built upon an understanding of God and contained a sense of wonder at what he had created. Human beings were known to be made in his image and the creation itself was seen as coming straight from the hand of God who ‘saw all that he had made, and it was very good’ (Genesis 3:1).
Every culture produces fruit, whether that is its laws, traditions, social structures or its art. A good, healthy, thriving culture produces good fruit, a faltering, lost and declining culture produces poor fruit. Art will never flourish again in the West until as a culture we return to reality and accept God.
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