The conservative-leaning, small-town church my family attended as well as most of the Christian evangelical criticism I had access to growing up had a well-defined, though unstated, methodology for considering art: If the art was easily and readily reconcilable to our values it was worthwhile. If it wasn’t it should be avoided because it would likely contribute to one’s moral degeneracy and/or damnation.
The focus of this critical method seemed to primarily be about keeping impressionable teenagers away from music or movies that might offer them examples of the anti-Christian, anti-social behavior. Intentionally or not, it created a situation in which a Christianized version of virtually every major band existed alongside its secular originator and counterpart. The former usually used the latter’s sound but changed the lyrics to properly reflect Christian values. The hypocrisy was that as conservative evangelical Christians, neither you nor the band were supposed to know about secular music in the first place. Everyone practiced a faux naiveté, intentionally (instead of unknowingly as in the original parable) inhabiting Plato’s cave.
If you didn’t grow up in this sort of environment, this kind of upbringing probably sounds rigid and strange to you, like a kind of parallel pop culture universe. It was.
The above might seem to be a long aside for a blog that purports to be about the visual arts, but its actually a great example of a kind of mistake I think many of us are guilty of, left-leaning secularists just as much as right-leaning Christians. It goes like this:
I value XYZ. I will only look at art that has XYZ values. ABC art has XYZ values. I like ABC art because it has XYZ values.
Approaching art with our values in mind is something we do inevitably and I don’t imagine that it will change, nor do I think it should. However, the way most Moderns hold values over determines their experience of art objects as a sort of one-way street. Values, whether they are Marxist or Muslim, must by necessity belong to a kind of faith that is ultimately not resolved when one meets a work of art. If you’re reading this, you’re probably still waiting on the worker’s revolution or the Second Coming.
Where art meets perfectly a set of values it isn’t art at all, but instead a piece of propaganda for the value set to which it belongs. Meaningful, challenging and serious art will have sympathies and antipathies with various competing and overlapping value sets. In the end, it will not perfectly meet any of them.
This isn’t to say that artists don’t have their own values or that those values don’t affect their art. It's also not an argument for “art for art’s sake”, a statement which posits art as its own sort of faith. In fact, this observation suggests that we might consider, to the degree it is possible, both the values of the artists who made the work and how our own values color our responses.
This approach, which avoids asking anyone to bracket his or her values, calls to mind a kind of responsibility that already has a moral implication. It is a tacit recognition that humility is central to looking at art.
