On Making
When Art is Offered for Enjoyment and Pleasure, Not Professional Recognition
On Making
When Art is Offered for Enjoyment and Pleasure, Not Professional Recognition
A philosopher once said
Art is a making that imitates the making of God, and it is most godlike when it is purely gratuitous, when it is not meeting a need.
True or not? Making, in this case, eliminates the ego of the artist. It’s a making that goes on freely, and money or power or greed do not get mixed up in it. That’s rather idealistic, you could say. This ideal of ‘making’ rarely happens. When it does, we seldom hear about it for obvious reasons. Why would anyone, whether making a poem, a still life, a play, a house, or a string quartet, do it gratuitously? Most art is done for a price, as any art dealer will tell you.
Though unusual, such artistic impulses exist, we are naturally drawn to the well-known by habit. For example, most of us were educated and conditioned in the Western world where Monet was one of the greatest painters. We do not spend much time studying the paintings of other less-esteemed artists, even though their work is arguably just as valuable from a purely aesthetic standpoint.
The great philosophers in the West assumed all artistic impulse was a product of imago dei (the image of God). In many ways, the artist is a human caricature of a divine example. It can be taken to the extreme, however.
Ultimately, we cannot compose or sculpt ex nihilo. Our imago dei, no matter the subject or the intention, is inadequate in capturing even a sliver of God’s creative genius. Oh yes, we all know the story of Mozart, whose earliest compositions reveal ‘godlike’ expressivity, or Shelley, who died in his prime but left a remarkable ouvre of verse.
Are we to assume that our being made in God’s image means nothing, that we are mere shadows of God’s invention and artistic power even in the best of cases? Some in history have been exceptional makers. Their work was at such a level that it is storied to approach divinity. But some philosophers (some of the same ones who agreed we are made in God’s image) insist we are like children in the sandbox compared to God’s handiwork.
Ours is a pragmatic culture. Even though artistic work might soar to the heavens, it really is possible to overstate the concept imago dei. Then again we have to notice ‘ordinary’ people who made great works of art, like the eminent Russian professor and chemist Alexandr Borodin, who wrote his hugely successful opera, Prince Igor. It might mean a creator’s merits are judged as ordinary, but because they were sincere or expressive in their work, they made it into the top tier. I think our culture would like to make that happen for every artist. Oddly, it turns out we have taken the arts—music, painting, literature, etc.—and made them in our image, not God’s.
Ken Myers* said once, “art is eminently practical, and thus suspect in a culture that is eminently pragmatic.” There is truth in this. In one way it is describing art as a commodity, something that fills a role like a decorator looking for the right colors and fabrics in a dentist’s office. What I think Myers (who clearly advocates for creativity that rises to the level of exceptional) fully recognizes there are two audiences for any work. They are idealistic in spirit, exalting the exceptional. And in other cases there are pragmatists who are tolerant of work that is clearly unexceptional, but still merit our attention. Art is just one of many commodities. If it is appealing to a majority, it has a merit that immediately qualifies it as exceptional. It’s more about our emotional response to it than about its inherent merit.
Nothing is wrong with appealing to our emotions, but it does pre-condition artists to go for the dopamine surge that brings immediate gratification. It seems in some ways we notice and prefer a kind of art that will not put us to sleep, but that will not offend our sense of the ideal and absolute. That quest travels through all the arts: visual art as pleasing decorative material for a wall or a corner; music as background for a festive event; writing that nicely narrates but seldom steps out and challenges. To be fair, banal and emotionally pleasing fare works well, and so is what we have all around us in the modern world. Pity the Gesualdos and Dalis who challenge the status quo in a culture of medium everything.
Still, there are wonderful artists producing exceptional works. What we may miss is that in the end, no artist creates as well as God does. In all the history of art only relatively few names rise to the level of exceptional. But that does not mean ordinary creators failed to make things of haunting beauty. Somehow they missed the historian’s hall of fame. In the end, isn’t that really the majority?
‘Ordinary’ artists are my favorites. They went on making despite discouragement. They came to the studio every day with a fresh spirit and they persisted despite minimal external motivation. They sold their work in some cases, and some never made the top tier, never made it into Carnegie Hall, never merited a Pulitzer.
Some of the ‘ordinary’ received a measure of gratitude, a minor mention on a plaque or a gravestone. That didn’t mean they were not exceptional in the eyes of their communities. People enjoyed their work. Perhaps they were so busy making, they spent very little time in self-promotion. They just kept on composing symphonies. Or writing poems. And their audience may have been modest, but there is merit in their efforts and their work is honest. Not everybody can be exceptional.
Those are the creators I think our philosopher (above) is talking about, who gave themselves over to the higher calling of an artist and pursued their craft over a lifetime. Their work is mainly ‘gratuitous’ in the sense they were not really looking for recognition. Their names are fairly unknown: organists who served churches for a lifetime and then faded into history, teachers who produced a handful of outstanding performers, composers who wrote for their communities and never published.
As I look back over a lifetime of making beautiful music written by some of these ordinary people, I depend on their artistry, even if their peers were reluctant to esteem their work. I have played their music, alongside that of Bach, Mozart, and Brahms. Their names are unimportant, since their art was left for others with little or no fanfare. And they, even though mostly bypassed in textbooks about music, were creating purely for the joy of making, without panting after human adulation.
Maybe that is what the artists’ community in Heaven will be populated by: a rather undistinguished band of unknowns. That would be an irony for all those who worshiped at the altar of stardom and notoriety. And doubly ironic for the legions of artists who spent a lifetime ignoring Christ and avoiding his gospel.
Further reading: today’s working artists and their achievements are monthly presented in Mere Beauty Journal. Pause to stop, observe, listen, and discover why “Beauty at its best renews us as a culture.”
*Ken Myers formerly worked for National Public Radio, edited Eternity magazine, maintains an audio nonprofit called Mars Hill Audio, and authored All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes.