Wednesday, November 8, 2017

MOMA, mo' Problems

(This article was previously published in the July/August issue of live magazine. You can find them at baptistwomen.ca)


While in New York last week I wandered around the famed Museum of Modern Art with raised eyebrows. While MOMA is home to some truly beautiful and iconic works such as  Van Gogh’s Starry Night, one cannot help but think of the fabled emperor and his new clothes when staring at three gigantic blank white canvases that are probably insured for a gazillion dollars. Since this is my plebeian attitude, it seems a perverse accident that I have a solid foundation of knowledge when it comes to modern art thanks to poor academic planning that required me to know about everything from Picasso’s move toward cubism, to the Surrealists and the DADA movement, to Pop Art and so forth all the way to Marcel Duchamp and his urinal. And so there I was, recognizing more of this absurdity than I am truly comfortable admitting.





I tend to agree with G.K Chesteron’s statement that, “A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.” Art, whether in the form of paint on canvas or words on the page, in order to be powerful, in order to qualify as art, must reveal something true. When I found myself rolling my eyes in that History of Modern Art class years ago, I was exasperated by the foolishness of it, but I only half grasped the truth that it was telling. I disliked the way that the moderns took beautiful things and people and made them ugly. Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Diptych or Picasso’s representations of female beauty seemed like mockeries of femininity rather than creations that revealed something true about their subjects.  But that is where I got it wrong. These works weren’t revelatory about their subjects, they were revelatory about their creators. A creation cannot help but tell the truth about its creator. Warhol himself once mused that he wished that he were plastic. That being his desire, it seems almost inevitable that his creativity would produce a flattened, garish commodified version of a flesh and blood woman.

If this is the case for those made in the image of God--how much more so does Creation reveal the truth about our Creator. I am a child of the open country; of vast rolling plains of harvest gold where the impossibly blue sky stretches from horizon to horizon in an ever-shifting ocean of billowing clouds that stack up like skyscrapers before racing one another across the firmament of heaven.  Majesty, beauty, tranquility, and terrifying force are all on display on such a canvas.  

When I leave it, I long for the sky over my hometown because its beauty never fails to catch my breath and prompt me to exclaim over its passing glory to whomever happens to be around. The sky never fails to remind me how good God is to surround us with beauty because His thoughts are beautiful and His nature is abundant and generous. His impenetrable mind is revealed by what He has made and what He has made is beautiful.

The deeper that science delves, the more Creation reveals the truth about its Creator’s invisible attributes. From implausibly intricate beauty on an atomic scale to the wideness of a universe of which we cannot find the boundaries whose raw power obliterates all life. The glory of God is on display in the wisdom of our narrow habitable zone in this galaxy; on this pale blue dot planet that teems with improbable life; each of whose unique characteristics are written in the flowing script of DNA.

Creation is beautiful because the thoughts of its Creator are lovely. 

Thinking along these lines, I cannot help but feel a newfound compassion for the moderns and the post-modern artists; for their art does tell the truth.  You cannot give what you don’t have. You can’t create works of profound meaning or beauty if your thoughts are clouded with chaos and confusion. You can’t reveal the truth about flesh and blood if you’d rather be plastic. You can only reveal yourself.








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