One important aspect of contemporary art is to sharpen perception about what is happening around us, to understand who we are, what is forming our awareness. In this way contemporary artforms can be important tools we should not ignore. Where an artpeace will lead us depends on the motivation behind and not on the artform.

I respond like this because I’m bothered by the sense that many Christians are all too ready to decry the state of the contemporary art world without knowledge of the many good things that are going on. Yes, stuff like this beer-brewing guy is stupid. (What’s wrong with brewing good beer and selling it for people to drink?) But there’s going to be art made that you dislike in any period. There was no golden age. It’s long past time for Christians to stop acting like the age we live in is uniquely debauched and bereft of good art. Give up the declinist rhetoric (leave it in the 90′s with the culture wars), and embrace the good art that’s being made. There was some even in the 80′s and 90′s, but Christian culture was too busy complaining to notice. Now that there’s even more, let’s not make the same mistake.

my ex-girlfriend — a wonderful young lady — used the same arguments as you when discussing this question. is your real name kate? :) incidentally, she is not “ex” because of this disagreement.

thanks for your thoughts. but why is it so hard to believe that defining “art” is infinitely harder than defining “pencil?” that some things are more easily defined than others is simply obvious.

i think it is very plausible that no culture has ever had a “fixed meaning” to the word “art.” and as i used to tell kate, i couldn’t care less if words are useful, but only that questions be honest, terms be clear, premises be true, and arguments be valid.

so the honest question “what is art/non-art?” is a fantastic question. i’d personally like to know the answer to this question, especially if my toddler son ever asks it.

why couldn’t “christ in the piss jar” be art? i happen to think it is a brilliant description of what actually happened on good friday…. why couldn’t an urinal be art? it was probably designed on autocad by a thoughtful artist who fused form and function…. on what basis could i deny that pornography is photography and therefore art? what about a man wearing facial hair? why is that not art? and photographs of aborted remains coming out of yale college? on what basis could i strip the status of “art” from such obscenity?

if we follow truth where it leads, i think reasonable people could agree that all attempts to draw the line between art/non-art are purely arbitrary. if this conclusion is true, it would be true always and everywhere.

but what of a satisfactory answer to our question? are we left with no answer? well, it is at least plausible that everything — the entire created order — is art because it proceeds from God who is the maker of all things, seen and unseen. to my mind, this answer is the only answer that avoids arbitrariness. so why not believe it?

some final thoughts: (1) “what is art/non-art” has never been an easy question to answer for anyone in any age or culture who has bothered trying to answer it. (2) that the answer was easy was simply “taken for granted.” (3) philosophy and aesthetics are necessarily ahistorical — so is 2+2=4. (4) the question is not “what is the difference between the mona lisa and a toilet seat?” but “why is a toilet seat not art?”

Will Christian artists save the arts? Not without commissions they won’t. From Michelangelo to Bach to Le Corbusier, the great religious art that we cherish was done on commission. We all have a part to play. Pony up!

Artist-approved reproductions have fetched over $1 million and many are displayed in art museums around the world.

Even weirder is the phenomenon of “performance artists” going to art museums in order to urinate into their replicas. Any act that is pretentious and juvenile at the same time can count as art I suppose. Getting arrested for disorderly conduct or indecent exposure just adds to how utterly subversive and therefore artistic one’s acts are.

Of course, that idea stretches the concept of art perhaps to well past the breaking point: if art is simply “everything an artist does” then the word “art” hardly means anything at all. It ends up as a twisted knot of self-reference and irony. Perhaps we need a renaissance in the sense of returning to the achievements of the ancients.