Do we have a crisis of art alongside our spiritual crisis?
What is true art and why do we need it? And what does art have to do with spirituality?
What happens to an idea that is never explored? A poem left unwritten? A painting never put to canvas? Where does the idea go? There are artists and true creators everywhere, but how often do we turn away from the call of the muse or just let her pass us by? I think of this on occasion, when inspiration strikes me, there is but a small window to catch lightning and bottle it. And when I do not, I miss the opportunity to capture something transcendent. It does not linger or stay waiting patiently. It moves on. I miss out on what Elizabeth Gilbert calls BIG MAGIC – which also happens to be the title of her book on writing, creating, and living an inspired life.
Where does inspiration come from? Where do thoughts originate? Is it the crucible of our minds in which it emerges, or some unknown realm that is like a divine library sending messages out to another world, in hopes that someone will hear the call? And it is a call, isn’t it? The call to create something, to write something, to sing something, to compose something. Art, in so many of its myriad forms, materials, mediums, and expression, is seemingly a fathomless wellspring. Yet so many of us do not stop to drink from it let alone listen to what beckons.
When beckoned, I have not always responded to the invitation. I ask myself, why? It’s stupid, really, and simple – because I let things get in the way instead of carving out time to answer the missives from beyond. I make excuses, or I am undisciplined and lazy. Work saps my creativity, and TV will do to numb my mind after a day of work. Or sometimes, I am so pulled into a book I am reading that I ignore everything else – including the Avid Edge, like I did last week.
How many unmade things lie in wait out there, wishing to be brought to life? What great discoveries and turns of phrase have yet to be uttered because we let things get in the way? How can we become more in tune with this beckoning? How can we answer this call? How can we make sure we are bringing into being the right form of art? What is the right form of art? What is art?
Before we determine what true art is and is meant to be, let’s first recognize that to create anything you must give something up. You have to make way and sacrifice something else and I guarantee what you surrender is less fulfilling and meaningful than what comes from the inspired library beyond our perceptions. What could you give up in your day to attend to these calls and more importantly, why should you? What distracts you from the clarion call of the muse?
We are creative creatures. We have made things since the beginning of time, painted on cave walls, woven beautiful ceremonial clothing, rugs, and tapestries, molded clay with our hands on spinning wheels. Carved into stone and wood the faces of gods and spirits who occupied our dreams. Spun rich stories and songs of life, death, and meaning to tie us all together into a common purpose, a common culture. Part of creating art involves toil, countless hours poring over one thing to get it just right. Art is indeed something sacred, from the beckoning to the making. It is like a religious experience, and that is the beginning of what makes true art.
We have a great inheritance as a people that must not be ignored, and it is creating and making works of art. As I write this, I wonder if we have an undiagnosed crisis of art, as we have a crisis of spirituality because art is not what it once was. What we don’t have a crisis of is the amount of cultural material we are producing. I just read a piece in The Free Press by Ted Gioia on America’s booming culture. He sites that one hundred thousand songs are uploaded daily, 1.7 million books are self-published last year, and every minute 2,500 videos are uploaded to YouTube. While he makes some keen observations about the massive output we are experiencing, he does not scrutinize on quality of what is produced. He only goes far as to separate the corporate culture machine of mega brand labels and Disney from the burgeoning indie scene rising in podcasts and music. But all this output, all this production, not all of it adds or brings value or even meaning to our lives, much of it is shallow, self-indulgent drivel. A lot of it is noise. I would argue that even less of this output could be called art.
A lot of modern, contemporary, and popular “art,” I would argue, is not art. I had a conversation a few years ago with someone about whether or not the song W.A.P. performed by Cardi B was real art. I argued that it was not art, it was pornography. The defender of the popular song had a very post-modern view on art, that the interpretation of what art was, was relative. I found this to be a weak argument, flippant, and without depth. It made the view of art something cheap and quick, anyone could create it (quantity) and art could be anything (no standards of quality). This type of argument does not recognize the true profundity of real art and that what and how it evokes things in the observer is in essence how we define and come to recognize and experience real art.
In his lecture series on James Joyce and art, the Wings of Art, Campbell states,
Proper art, says Joyce, is “static” and improper art is “kinetic.” Kinesis, as you know, means movement and Stasis, as you know, means standing still.
Kinesis: Improper art is kinetic in that it moves the observer either to desire, positive, or to loathe or fear, negative, that object represented. That’s clear and simple. Improper art is kinetic, it moves the observer either to desire or to refuse, to fear or hate the object represented.
Art that moves you to desire is pornography. The Supreme Court of the United States can’t define pornography, therefore, that’s what we have. All advertising art is pornographic. You are going through a magazine, and you see a picture of a beautiful refrigerator and beside it stands a lovely girl with lovely refrigerator teeth. And you think, I love refrigerators like that. Pornography. Picture of a dear old lady and you think, “Oh, lovely old sweet soul, I’d love to have a cup of tea with that dear lady.” That’s pornography. You go into a ski buffs department, and you see pictures of ski slopes and you think, “oh, wow, to go down slopes like that.” Pornography.
You get it? It has to do with a relationship to the object that’s that of social, physical, or otherwise action. You are not held in aesthetic arrest.
What Campbell means by “held in aesthetic arrest,” is something like awe – which I wrote about at the beginning of this series of essays. What’s important about Joyce’s view, and Campbell’s summary is that what art is, is determined by how the viewer is affected by it. If the art moves the person to a feeling of desire or repulsion it is kinetic and if it does not it is static. It’s not just advertisements that are kinetic by this definition, but almost everything shared online evokes a response in the observer or consumer. Later in the lecture, Campbell puts it plainly, “As soon as you assume a biological or social relationship to the object you have a kinetic situation and an improper art work.” The pop song, W.A.P. is a perfect example of kinetic art. It’s blatantly pornographic in its lyrics and in the imagery of the music video. It is vulgar, and meant to evoke in the watchers or listeners feelings of sexual desire in some, and in others (like myself), repulsion.
Campbell goes on in his lecture, saying that if you want to understand static art, Joyce says go see Thomas Aquinas. Campbell says,
Aquinas defines beauty as that which pleases; that’s a very nice definition. There is another aspect, however, to art which is the sublime. And the sublime is that which simply shatters your whole ego system. In either case, we are over on the static side: one static held by fascination, the other static held by annihilation. The beautiful and the sublime. The sublime: enormous power, enormous space, to simply diminish and wipe out the ego. The sublime.
A sublime experience is transcendent, and art that evokes this is true art - static. Art that arrests you, holds you rapt in awe is rare. In a day and age when so much online content is to produce a reaction in someone, so much popular music and videos are sexual in nature, and AI is producing compositions on demand, we need some substance and something to ground ourselves in – we need to find and create true art.
I make this argument not because I am prude but because I think the quality of art is disintegrating alongside western culture’s fading religion and there are significant consequences for this. One being that if we feed ourselves on culture that is cheap, without meaning or depth, that serves the lowest common denominator, we will produce people who have no way or wherewithal to seek something higher and profound. It’s equivalent to eating junk food vs. whole food. Only one of these nurtures you and is healthy, the other is self-indulgent and in large quantities bad for your health. We all indulge in junk food on occasion, but we shouldn’t base our entire diet on it and that is the same for consuming static and kinetic art.
It comes down to feeding our souls. When we don’t feed them, they shrivel and starve. But to feed our souls, we must have a healthy supply of spiritual material. That means more people must answer the call of the sublime. Artists and creators everywhere should look to produce profound works of meaning to speak to the best of us, that seeks to evoke an awe-inspiring response in the listener or observer, art that makes us grow towards sunlight instead of keeping us in the dirt. For without it, we grow ever more debauched, and we rob ourselves of a significant part of being human and we suffer a type of moral and spiritual decay that will spiral out of control.
So get busy making something that makes people stop in their tracks because they have been captured and held by wonder.