This is not a post about country music.  This is not even a post about rap.  It’s not even about the death of the short story.  It’s about the need for authenticity in art, and how the current audiences of just about every art form are craving it.  In other words, rather than fiction, we prefer non-fiction, memoir, and biography in our books.  We want our films to be “Based on a True Story.”  And we want our rappers to actually be real gangsters, and our country music stars to actually be rednecks.

If Huckleberry Finn were released today, it’s easy to imagine the mass-market audience responding with a yawn. “Not even written by a fugitive slave.” Fiction is absent from our general interest magazines, replaced by intensely reported narrative features. The message is simple: We want it to be real.

Of course, this writer says that maybe country music is the one place where we don’t demand authenticity.

Some genres are immune from our weird and novel demands. Country, both in its classic and alternative forms, tops them: “I take the truck on into town/ And buy whatever we can’t seem to grow/ I work these hands to bleed cause I got mouths to feed/ And I got 15 dollars hid above the stove.” You don’t hear that and think: I know Ryan Adams is a wine-guzzling short guy with a lot of money, not a poor farmer.

As a writer of plays and short stories, oh, how I feel the burn of all this.  I’ve written creative nonfiction, too, but I’m afraid that if I start focusing my writing on personal essays, I’ll run out of subject matter and have to start making it up, like David Sedaris does.  What do you think?  Why do we seem to crave authenticity now more than ever?  It’s not an uncommon question.  Postmodernism is supposedly all about authenticity.  I suspect the answer is theological.

Why teach taste?  Painter and art professor Laurie Fendrich says some of her readers wonder why she professes to teach, and to be able to teach, taste. 

Why are college art professors so afraid to convey to their students that they have superior taste?, and, Why are they afraid to teach that taste to their students?

This is a good question in a world where taste might not exist.  She says it has something to do with the same kind of moral relativism she sees in university types.

This same relativism clearly shows up in people who insist that matters of aesthetics boil down to preferences. It shows up in university professors when they say they are there simply to “make it clear to…students that the job of an art historian is not to judge whether art is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (i.e., notions of our own taste are not what matters), but to try to understand art within the context in which it was produced.”

Of course, Fendrich doesn’t seem to have a problem with moral relativism (read the essay), although she is offended by aesthetic relativism.  Of course, God doesn’t provide as many universal imperatives about aesthetic behavior as he does about moral behavior, which means it’s even more difficult to judge, even if the implications are less dire.  Nevertheless, she makes a good point.  When art professors teach the absolute relativity of aesthetic tastes, then “No wonder so many students fall asleep in art history classes!”  Nothing is more caffeinating than a professor who says you’re wrong.

Laurie Fendrich, a blogger for The Chronicle Review and a painter and a fine arts professor, shocks higher education by suggesting that not everyone has good taste.

It’s said that there’s no accounting for taste, although I believe it’s often the case that it’s rather easy to account for it. Yes, taste may be subjective at its core, but that core is surrounded by a lot of reasons that very adequately explain why something is good or bad. There are many who would argue that because of the subjectivity of taste, it follows that no one, including a college teacher, has the right to challenge the taste of another person, including students.

I’m sure her students love to hear this, and her colleagues.  But why teach art or literature - which is just another way of saying one teaches “taste” - if there’s no such thing?  Fendrich is going to be writing more columns about taste and how to teach it, and I’ll be commenting here.

This is not an article about Aliza Shvarts, the Yale art student who either did, or did not, make an art project out of her real, or fictional, abortions.  It is, however, an article about what’s wrong with the cultivation of young artists and how people like Ms. Shvarts can be led astray by too much politicizing and too little practice on how to make an eye look like an eye and so on and so forth.

A traditional program in studio art typically begins with a course in drawing, where students are introduced to the basics of line, form and tone. Life drawing is fundamental to this process, not only because of the complexity of the human form (that limber scaffolding of struts and masses) but because it is the object for which we have the most familiarity — and sympathy. Students invariably bristle at the drawing requirement, wishing to vault ahead to the stage where they make “real art,” but in my experience, students who skip the drawing stages do not have the same visual acuity, and the ability to see where a good idea might be made better.

This same pedagogical method can be applied, really, to instruction in anything.  Learn the rules first.  Break the rules second.  Come to a more healthy and less legalistic application and appreciation of the rules third. 

It is often said that great achievement requires in one’s formative years two teachers: a stern taskmaster who teaches the rules and an inspirational guru who teaches one to break the rules. But they must come in that order. Childhood training in Bach can prepare one to play free jazz and ballet instruction can prepare one to be a modern dancer, but it does not work the other way around. One cannot be liberated from fetters one has never worn; all one can do is to make pastiches of the liberations of others.

Writing should be taught this way.  And art.  And architecture.  And much else where imagination drives the work.

My post of yesterday, “Abortion as Art” started off with the caveat: This is not a joke, where Yale art student Aliza Shvarts impregnated herself and aborted fetuses for an art project.  Apparently, though, it was a joke.  Or at least a “creative fiction.”  The Yale Office of Public Affairs posts this announcement:

Ms. Shvarts is engaged in performance art.  Her art project includes visual representations, a press release and other narrative materials.  She stated to three senior Yale University officials today, including two deans, that she did not impregnate herself and that she did not induce any miscarriages.  The entire project is an art piece, a creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman’s body.

She is an artist and has the right to express herself through performance art.

Had these acts been real, they would have violated basic ethical standards and raised serious mental and physical health concerns.

Thanks, Yale.  Does lying also violate basic ethical standards, too?  Oh, I don’t know.  The whole thing still testifies to the dereliction of universities and contemporary art into the realm of the absurd.

A Yale art major got slathered with bucketfuls of scorn yesterday after The Yale Daily News reported that the subject of her senior project was “miscarriages”—self-induced and videotaped, as they occurred. In her bathtub. Then exhibited in an installation piece, scheduled to debut next Tuesday, where a cube would be wrapped in plastic sheets lined with blood from the miscarriages, which she induced by “legal and herbal” abortifacients after artificially inseminating herself. Onto the cube, footage of the miscarriages would be looped.

Aliza Shvarts coyly summed up her project’s purpose for the News as “a private and personal endeavor, but also a transparent one for the most part.” Smelling a publicity stunt, no one really bought that line, though, including pro-choicers, one of whom even called Shvarts a “self-aggrandizing fool” bent on “throw[ing] the pro-choice movement under the bus.” Shvarts assured the paper she wasn’t going for “shock value.”

As it turns out, that’s all she was going for: Outraged callers, playing their part, hounded the university all day about Shvarts’s project. Many dubious reporters, meanwhile, questioned its veracity, and the News’s reporting of it—namely, the ability to induce as many miscarriages as possible over a nine-month period (chosen for its symbolism) and know they were, for a fact, miscarriages while not suffering other medical maladies or feeling the need to consult a doctor. Yale’s Office of Public Affairs eventually released a statement by day’s end explaining that Shvarts worked in the medium of “performance art,” acknowledging that “[h]ad these acts been real, they would have violated basic ethical standards and raised serious mental and physical health concerns.”

Before this gotcha, debate ensued everywhere on the Right about whether pro-lifers should deny her “the satisfaction of the publicity she craves,” in the words of The Atlantic’s Ross Douthat. His reckoning was no, defending it, and its prominent treatment on blogs and even The Drudge Report, as “too helpful to the pro-life cause to be ignored.” Others argued it didn’t matter: Real or hoax, either belied serious problems of its own. Many argued the faculty members responsible for approving the project should be sent packing. Some used the issue to probe pro-choicers who said they were disturbed at what they characterized as a wanton plea for publicity to explain why, if they do believe fetuses aren’t humans, there should be any outrage at all. Criticism was heaped on the campus pro-life group for not taking an official position.

Yale, for its part, called the projective “a creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman’s body.”

UPDATE: The Yale Daily News has reported that Shvarts is still standing by her original story. She called the university’s statement “ultimately inaccurate” and went on to tell the paper she did “repeatedly use a needleless syringe to insert semen into herself. At the end of her menstrual cycle, she took abortifacient herbs to induce bleeding.” She screened portions of the miscarriage videos for News reporters and concluded by saying: “No one can say with 100 percent certainty that anything in the piece did or did not happen because the nature of the piece is that it did not consist of certainties.”

Except one thing is certain: At this point, her words, which seem most at ease, whatever their claim, so long as they’re stirring publicity, aren’t likely to carry much credibility.

This post is graphic - and not a joke.  Aliza Shvarts, a senior art major at Yale, is mutilating her body, and the bodies of her unborn children . . . for her senior thesis. 

Beginning next Tuesday, Shvarts will be displaying her senior art project, a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself “as often as possible” while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages. Her exhibition will feature video recordings of these forced miscarriages as well as preserved collections of the blood from the process.

The goal in creating the art exhibition, Shvarts said, was to spark conversation and debate on the relationship between art and the human body.

I don’t even know what to say.  The idea of this is so beyond the realm of anything that belongs in the world. 

Shvarts insist her project was not for “shock value.” “I hope it inspires some sort of disclosure. Sure, some people will be upset with the message and will not agree with it, but it’s not the intention of the piece to scandalize anyone,” she said.

What do you do about something like this?  Weep, wonder, what?

HT: Phi Beta Cons

In my last post, I raised the possibility that modern, self-professedly Christian books, movies, and songs are in fact less faithfully Christian than art which would not be deemed appropriate for Christian bookstores. Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, for example, would be considered by many to be sacrilegious. Leif Enger’s Peace Like a River, a New York Times bestseller, doesn’t follow the formula of lost but not terribly wicked people finding Christ, and godless atheists getting what they deserve. “Sling Blade’s” profanity alone would keep it from most Christian stores’ movie shelves, though you’ll likely be able to purchase the dreadful “Left Behind” movie.

Good art, in short, is excluded from the Christian domain if it depicts depravity, while terrible art is included so long as it is explicitly Christian and purges itself of realism.

I want to acknowledge that there is plenty of bad secular art as well. For every “Omega Code,” there are twenty “Superbad”s. This may be part of the impetus for self-consciously Christian modern art, in fact. But bad secular art and bad Christian art are wicked, I contend, for the same reason: they do not reflect Truth.

I wrote last time that I wondered if there might be some harmful consequences to bad Christian art. I can think of a couple:

First, bad Christian art denudes our aesthetic sense. A benefit of a very fine book, movie, or song is that it either helps us see truths about the world that we have not seen before, or it articulates — if only indirectly — a truth we have always known, but could never put our finger on.

Bad books, movies, and songs, on the other hand — ones afflicted with clichéd imagery or lyrics, or characters who don’t behave and speak like genuine people — have a dulling effect on our vision. They flatten the world and drain it of color, working violence on God’s creation.

Second, bad Christian art cripples our compassionate imagination. When the bad guys practically have signs in a novel or movie labeling them as such, and the soon-to-be saved characters are similarly cordoned off, we lose sight of the wickedness that inhabits saints, and the despair that inhabits the hearts of the lost.

Instead, we have our natural tribal mentality bolstered, that pernicious instinct that prompts us to think in terms of God’s saints on the one hand, and hell-bound heathens on the other, which is always accompanied by the delusion that we can spot them easily.

I’m still thinking this through, and so I’m wondering, what do you like about the art you enjoy, and what do you dislike about the art you avoid? What art, in any form, do you look back on as having the most edifying effect on you?

I’ve been re-reading Flannery O’Connor’s Mystery and Manners, which is filled with her essays on the craft of writing, and in particular, writing as a Christian. Her stories were notably violent, and filled with depraved characters. She constructed a milieu of fallen men in order to reveal the grace of God in a sin-stricken world. Nonetheless, she didn’t sit well with many good Christians. She tells of receiving a letter from one of them, who:

“…informed me that when the tired reader comes home at night, he wishes to read something that will lift up his heart. And it seems her heart had not been lifted up by anything of mine she had read.”

It’s the same reason, I suppose, Christian-themed bookstores do such a booming business, offering music, movies, and stories free of the depravity that seems increasingly to define secular culture. O’Connor, however, rejected the notion that all depravity in fiction serves the same function. Her grotesque characters, she felt, illuminated the truly grotesque qualities of sinful man, as opposed to wooden characters who briefly struggle with sin that is not so embedded in their flesh that they can’t come neatly and completely to Christ a hundred pages later. “I think that if her heart had been in the right place,” O’Connor said of the complainant, “it would have been lifted up.” In another essay in this volume, she writes almost by way of explanation:

“Catholic readers are constantly being offended and scandalized by novels that they don’t have the fundamental equipment to read in the first place, and often these are works that are permeated with a Christian spirit.”

It was criticism that could have easily extended to Protestants in her day, though not perhaps in ours, because it’s far easier to immerse ourselves in sterilized entertainment. Starting with the assumption that what comes into our minds can infect what comes out of our mouths and hands, we seek to neither see nor hear evil.

Unfortunately, this instinct, in the realm of art, carries us toward artificial truth — which is to say falsehood — in the form of sentimentality and unreality. Following that line of reasoning leads me to conclude that many of the novels labeled as Christian are sinful, because they portray the world of God falsely, with dimensionless characters, unrealistic dialogue, and pat resolutions.

O’Connor said of the Christian writer:

“An affirmative vision cannot be demanded of him without limiting his freedom to observe what man has done with the things of God.”

And observing what man has done with the things of God, it seems, is essential to understanding, in turn, what God has done with and for the likes of man. There is not redemption, in other words, without a fall, nor grace without sin. For O’Connor and other serious Christian writers, this reality led them to write books that would never be allowed on the shelves of a typical Christian bookstore.

This leads to an interesting possibility: that our local public library has more genuinely Christian literature — which is to say books that tell a truer story of the fall of man and his redemption by Christ — than most Christian booksellers.

If that conclusion is true, I wonder what it means for modern American Christian culture? Might our self-insulation — intended to protect our hearts and minds — actually be harmful? In my next post I’ll explore the idea that Christianized art can undermine Christianity. In the meantime, I’m curious about your reactions. What ought Christian bookstores be selling, and where do you draw the line with what you read, listen to, and view?

What is art?  It’s not just a question philosophy professors asked confused students.  It’s not just a punchline in a graduate seminar.  It’s a question that wealthy people ask themselves so they can have a better idea of how much to pay. 

Art paralysis: It is a widespread and often crippling malady, striking everyone from the new college grad in his or her first apartment to the super-rich banker, lasting anywhere from a few months to a lifetime. How many are affected is not known, perhaps because the victims are often too embarrassed to come forth. Who wants to admit that “I’ve had these posters since college, I know that as one of the American Top 10 Orthodontists I should get some real art, but I don’t know what that means”? Or that “It’s not that I’m trying to make a minimalist statement with these empty white walls, I just don’t know what to buy”? Or “I walk into those snooty galleries in Chelsea and feel like I just don’t belong”?

This problem is common for the rest of us, too.  I know some of us here couldn’t care less about art, or about the world of it, but I kind of feel this latent obligation to have a little art.  I’m a believer.  I work in the arts.  I’ve read all those books about art and creativity and Christianity and how the church needs to embrace the arts and what the Bible says and suggests about art and how art is incarnational and all that.  So, I feel like I ought to be one of the few believers on my block to own a little art.  But I’m poor.  Until I sell the Great American Novel, then, I will have to settle for trading for art.  I’ve helped artists write their “artist statements,” and they always give me something small.  I’ve gleaned forgotten pieces of art from my poor artist friends.  It’s a start. 

But if you still don’t know what art is, and you have the money to care, you can do what these people did and get an art consultant.