Six Practical Ways to See Beauty in Art
Last Sunday I preached from Romans 1:16-25 regarding beauty. The main point (related to beauty) was that all true beauty reveals God, the One who alone gives rise to beauty. To hear more about that, check out the podcast.
We included more media in the service than we ever have before, but I still didn’t have time to walk through some of the more practical aspects of how to see beauty all around, even in “non-Christian” art (I use the quotes because it’s not clear to me why some inanimate things are called “Christian” and others aren’t—things, inanimate objects, like songs and movies and tables, can’t believe and can’t be Christians, and many “non-Christian” things have better, truer content than other “Christian” things).
There's always more to be said about how to see beauty in art, but here are a few ways I've found that may help get you started.
1. Empathize.
With art that has characters in it (novels, movies, tv shows, etc.), it’s usually easy for us to learn to empathize with the characters (see, for example, this study cited on the front page of last year’s New York Times). But with all art, even art that has no characters (like certain paintings), we should empathize with the artist—we’re seeing the world through their eyes. Art allows us to view the world from other perspectives with an amount of insight and honesty that’s rare, even in friendships. This allows us both to study the artist's perspective and to exercise compassion for the people holding such a perspective.
What kind of world does the artist live in? Is it like ours? What could have brought them to the place where they thought it was worth so much effort to communicate this over all the other things they could have communicated and all the other things they could have done with that time and effort?
If we’re not empathizing when we’re looking at art, we’re doing something wrong. In fact, if I had to summarize the rest of the advice below in one point, it would be: we should empathize.
2. Look for themes in art that correspond to the themes of the world.
Beyond the trite morals to the story that 80s tv taught us all to love, good art usually communicates something about the themes that are common to humanity, themes like hope and brokenness and redemption and human connection and love and resilience and change and tragedy. Art shows us that we’re not alone in experiencing these things, and it shows us we’re not alone in being deeply moved by them.
In our latest sermon series, we’ve ended up talking about several different aspects of what it means for God to be Creator—and another of them is this, that we see these themes in stories all around us because He’s weaving these themes into the Story we’re all a tiny part of. And this should give us great hope because maybe, just maybe, the prevalence of certain themes in art means they're real themes that will occur in our world and our grand Story. For example, we love seeing redemption stories, but all of us realize that a person being redeemed in the movies has little to do with our own redemption. However, if redemption in art is really a pointer to redemption in the Story of the universe, maybe the redemption in the stories we watch are not irrelevant to our lives; they're just pointers to what will eventually overtake us all.
3. Look for insight you’ve never had.
There’s something in many of us, particularly as Christians, that keeps us from really listening when others speak. Instead, we sit above and detached, waiting to pronounce our judgment of whether or not the art was “Christian” enough or moral enough or positive and encouraging enough. But when we do this, we are missing an opportunity to hear from other people bearing the image of God. If they’re image bearers like we are (and they are, whether they're Christian or not) and if they see God all around (like our passage from this weekend argued they do, whether they acknowledge it or not), they likely have a great deal of insight to share with us about God and this world He has created. Many artists become artists because they’re insightful people. But on top of that, all real artists (so-called artists who don’t do this are propagandists or “sell outs” or “not keeping it real” or “frontin’”, depending on your preferred slang) are putting everything they have into their art. They’re not spending hours crafting their perfect painting or song or book without great thought and intentionality. They’re not doing this because they have nothing better to do with their time. They’re doing this because there’s something profound they’re trying to figure out how to communicate. And if that’s the case, maybe we should listen. I remember as a seventh grader learning about themes in music, and when my teacher started hearing all sorts of implications in the song that I didn’t, I thought she was over-thinking things. But she wasn’t. For artists that care about their art, they’re trying to tell you something they think you might not have really heard before and they’re trying to do it in very intentional ways.
4. Celebrate beauty and mourn ugliness—and notice your inclinations to do the opposite.
When talking about art, media, or pop culture, one of the first concerns many Christians have is whether it’s rated R—is there any explicit language, sexuality, or nudity? We’re usually ok with violence. It might have too much violence for our really little kids and it might be so graphic that it grosses us out, but violence doesn’t usually bother us the same way the others do (although I think it probably should). I’d like to suggest that, maybe at least for some of us, the explicitness of sin in the art shouldn’t be the determining factor in whether we watch it or not. I don’t think we should run from seeing sin.
I think we should run from participating in sin, but to the extent that we can have compassion for the artists and their characters in the art, maybe we can simply share their pain and mourn with them (or for them, in the very few cases when they’re not as aware of their dysfunction as we are). Let’s see the ugliness around us, not to revel in it but to be aware of it. Let’s not bury our heads in the sand in our enclaves of self-congratulatory and self-defined righteousness. Let’s connect with the humanity around us. Let’s not run from people, however broken they may be.
In fact, this core concern of empathy can help serve as a great indicator of whether a piece of art (say, a movie) has become too “adult” for us. Instead of not watching because something is too adult, maybe we shouldn't watch when we find ourselves unable to be empathetic. When we’re being empathetic, we’re not participating in the brokenness, we’re mourning it. Likewise, when we’re being empathetic, the beauty that we see is celebrated and not perverted. But when we’re not being empathetic, we revel in ugliness and twist any beauty of the art into ugliness in us.
Here are two examples of how this works: (1) First, pornography is impossible for almost all of us to watch in an empathetic manner because of the greediness that makes us want to control and consume regardless of the people we’re seeing. This, to me, could serve as a good personal indicator for how explicit is too explicit when art has sex in it—does the sex make you empathetic or greedy, compassionate or self-interested? We can try to set limits of the amount of clothes on in sex scenes, but some movies have very graphic sex scenes that have no explicit nudity. It may do some good to set limits on what parts of others' bodies we allow ourselves to see, but this will never prevent us from abusing them in our minds—only empathy will. (2) Second, with violence and all kinds of other non-sexual explicitness, this same approach may be helpful. When we’re watching the latest Liam Neeson revenge-flick, maybe our celebration of violence should scare us more than it does. Maybe we can watch violence, but maybe we should limit our exposure to it to the times when we can mourn it. And maybe when we find ourselves reveling in the brokenness of this world, we should be a little bit more scared of ourselves and our own violent tendencies than we are.
5. Reinterpret opportunistically.
Sometimes artists say things really well. And sometimes, even when we see the world a bit differently than they do, there’s something so powerful in their art that it takes on a life of its own, speaking to us in ways they never intended, showing us things they never quite saw. It is of course true that, for us to be empathetic, we ought to do our best to listen to the artist; however, sometimes when we’ve really listened and really understood we can begin to see more than the artist herself did. (For a biblical example of this, check out Acts 17:28, which happens to be one of the texts of this coming weekend’s sermon.)
6. Allow beauty itself to move you, even without verbal content.
When we Christians talk about art, sometimes we forget that beauty isn't all about verbal content. (This should appall us!) That wordless beauty can so strikingly speak to previously unknown parts of our being hints that there is much in our world beyond our understanding. Beauty itself moves us, even when we can't explain why it does or why it's beautiful. Sometimes the best thing to do with art is to soak it in, to rest in it, to absorb it and see what happens.
Personally, I'm a sucker for the cello and for paintings. There's something about the deep, rich tone of the cello that can pierce me even when I'm in an apathetic and unfeeling funk. And there's something delightful about how much paintings can communicate, even when there's no scenery or characters to speak of. For example, here in Houston is the Rothko Chapel that houses fourteen gigantic black paintings, and, for some reason, I find them stirring and spiritual. Something in them makes me directly aware of the vastness and the mystery of the One who created the cosmos. If you've never been, you should check it out. It's free.
