I majored in art history in college.
These days, I am wondering whether “art” and “history” are both on their way to becoming non-sequiturs.
I bring this up because art and history are critically important to people other than art historians. In fact, I would argue that art and history are critically important specifically to Christians.
Why?
Art is the material output of humanity’s creative impulse – a direct display of God, the Creator, working through us to make things.
History is the record of what has happened – actually happened – in the past; as such, it pursues truth – God’s exclusive purview.
History …?
Revisions, alternative interpretations, and aggressive edits of history have been gaining highly publicized traction in our society recently. This strikes me as somewhat ironic.
For several decades now, history education has been almost entirely omitted in American public schools. This omission has left most people in my generation and younger unable to account for what happened when or who was involved – and disinclined to be curious about what we don’t know.
Names of people and places, dates of battles and victories, facts about the establishments of government, etc. used to be standard-issue-schooling. Content-rich, specifics-anchored, knowledge-based learning ceased to be fashionable at some point in the 1970s. (Self-esteem, group projects, and “creative problem-solving” were the new foci. Check national test scores to see how that’s been working for us. But I digress…)
Into that knowledge vacuum where history used to be, imaginative ideas like Project 1619, intersectionality, and critical race theory now pour, almost unimpeded.
Perhaps it’s not so much ironic as inevitable that collective ignorance foments collective gullibility.
Art …?
As history has become more and more the intellectual property of specific, ideology-driven parties, historically themed artworks have been targeted by those parties.
Set against the background of massive social upheaval, the toppling of statues and erasure of murals could seem less consequential than other crises. But the removal of physical items that pointed to history in unfashionable terms will have lasting consequences beyond looted storefronts and burned-out police stations. Without these tangible, material proofs of other times, other people, other ideas, etc., there is no counter-argument to “alternative” ideologies.
Even offensive monuments to evil institutions like slavery serve a purpose in preserving the historical record by proclaiming in concrete terms: “This happened.”
(In the absence of such reminders, history can literally disappear… as in the case of countries seeking to deny their role in the Holocaust or other atrocities. Totalitarian governments of the 20th century specialized in re-writing history to suit their purposes, and the removal of any “troublesome” public art was standard procedure. “Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it,” Winston Churchill, at the peak of his prescient irony.)
Doubly defrauded
In the past several months, the intersection between distortions of history and destruction of art has taken on a sinister new form. Several high profile art auctions have featured “NFT”s (“non-fungible tokens”) as art. These digital creations – or, rather, licenses for these digital creations – have been marketed and sold as art.
Suddenly – overnight, even – the definition of a work of art as a tangible, material, unique item – a made thing – has been swept aside. Digital licensing has replaced pigment on canvass or sculpted marble. What is real – what is worth owning, as art – has been wholly redefined.
(In several cases, these NFT pieces have been paid for with cryptocurrency. Money as a measurement of purchasing power linked directly to something tangible, with material presence — the gold standard, or a sovereign nation’s solvency — has been dissolved alongside art as a tangible, made item. Now people can buy a license for digital code using licensed digital code… and call the process “buying art”!)
The matter of physical matter matters to a Christian
Distinction between an actual, material object – something that can be held in your hands – and a digital “object” – something that is really just lines of code displayed on screen – has profound spiritual significance.
Why?
Because the Christian faith rests completely on the God who made everything and everyone, then saved everything and everyone through the physical / material phenomena of incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection.
Jesus’s claim, that He is “the way, the truth, and the life,” perfectly synthesizes the Christian connection between physical presence and absolute truth. Jesus – fully man as well as fully God – spoke with an actual human voice, vocal chords vibrating in a specific throat. Jesus pointed to infinite truth and eternal life from the finitude of a flesh-and-blood body… and then purchased that eternal life by offering up flesh-and-blood body unto death. Without the incarnation, the “enfleshment” of God, there is no Christian faith – because without the flesh of Christ there can be no death of Christ, and without Christ’s death there can be no resurrection.
Jesus’s miracles pointed to the significance of physical life… He fed people, healed people’s diseases, even raised people from the dead. He did not perform miracles that were abstract or detached from physical reality – nothing on the lines of a “magic show.” Rather, Jesus demonstrated His sovereignty over the physical world – at once emphasizing both His authority and the significance of that world.
Bottom line: God clearly prioritized our physical nature. God formed humanity, breathed life into humanity, cared for all the physical needs of humanity. And God assumed human physicality in the person of Jesus Christ.
Virtual reality isn’t
Technology has helped us through a hard year. Screens have been a poor substitute for in-person faces and hugs, but they have been better than absence. I wonder, though, whether this year has nudged us deeper into a surreal, detached zone in which the physical world is abstracted and subservient to the digital.
I wonder whether this detachment from the “real world” exploits vulnerability to ideas that are not rooted in reality – history that has no basis in fact; art that is not art.
I wonder whether this detachment makes all of us – Christians along with everyone else – prone to embracing the digital universe as a substitute for the real world. Creation reflects the Creator; technology does likewise – but the creator of the internet was not God.
God made us in His image; we are making the online world in our own image and re-making ourselves (and our history, and our art) to reflect that remade / not-made / not-real world.
In truth, the world isn’t being digitized and “digital reality” is not any more real than it ever has been. But we are choosing to circumscribe our focus so that the world we see is increasingly a digital one. Detachment from the actual, physical world means an increasingly disembodied, theoretical, endlessly fluid existence for humanity.
All of this is at odds with reality, if we will just pull up long enough to notice.
The Corrective We Crave
The most powerful corrective to history that is not true and art that is not art is… reality. God’s made world; our God-nature making things in that world; our physical selves consciously surrendered to the indwelling of the divine.
In the smell of fresh baked bread, in the softness of an infant’s face, in the gleam of sunlight shining through green leaves and making shadows on a spring lawn, in the taste of coffee – of honey – of wine – there is not only the corrective to all the false claims, cancelled culture, and non-art… there is also the reminder of what is real and Who is with us, really, in reality and forever.
