South Woods Baptist Church

Is Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder?
A Case for Aesthetic Norms in Art

The artist is the creator of beautiful things.  To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim...Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. 

For these there is hope.

                                                   - Oscar Wilde - Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray

Wilde closes his preface by stating: "The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.  All art is quite useless."[1]  Is this true?  Though in many cases its purpose is merely to be admired, is art useless?  For millennia art has been quite useful in society, either for communicating through pictures or writing, or for enriching through all forms of art.  One can scarcely say that present cultures would be what they are without the enhancement of the arts, either in the past or the present.  Can one imagine Roman Catholicism, or even Italy, in the present without the two thousand year history of fine art and culture from which it benefited?  Art has become the fortification of many cultures, and as such, has spurred great men and women to maintain the duty of making good art that describes, or defines, their era.

The question arises, though; "Does all art describe or define one's era?"  A simple glance through any art gallery of the day would certainly show that not all art is capable of describing anything.  Why?  There is no form, no subject, and no point.  It is art for arts sake.  Historically, the main components of art would have been the good, true and beautiful, but now all are severely lacking.  How has art become devoid of morals, meaning, and magnificence?  Should art have ever been based on these traits?  A brief look through art history shows the sharp decline of one particular trait, that of beauty, and the philosophical thought that lay behind the deterioration. 

The Decline of Beauty in Art

The Functions of Art

Gene Edward Veith, Jr. argues that art has performed a three-function role throughout its history.  The first role is that of functional art, and in this role the beautiful is joined with the practical.[2]  "When one designs an airplane, he must stay as close as possible to the laws of nature.  You are really playing with the laws of nature and trying not to offend them.  It so happens that our ideas of beauty are those of nature."[3]  Thus, the functionality of art can be seen in relation to every trade in which man operates.  Another role of art is that of decoration.[4]  People have always added to their quality of daily life by enhancing their surroundings with beauty.  In ancient times, pottery could have simply served a functional purpose; but instead, color, pictures, and even designs were added to make the pottery pleasing to the eye. 

The previous two categories of art contain beauty in their nature or use, but this last category has as its sole purpose that of conveying beauty.  Fine art has no function other than to be beautiful or to carry meaning.  The line between this category and the others is not always easy to distinguish, since the artist may create something to be both functional and beautiful for use in both categories at different times.  It is necessary, however, since this category has been the dominant conveyor of beauty in the arts, to trace the history of fine art and find the reason for the apparent lack of beauty in contemporary fine arts.

The History of Art

The abovementioned categories of art have been displayed throughout the history of art.  The earliest records of art come from the ancient eras.  The cultures of the ancient world mostly utilized art in the first two categories, functional and decorative.  Art was an everyday occurrence of life, found in the adornment of the tools used for cooking, as well as the form of ancient worship.[5]  One can see the significant use of literature as art in the Psalms of David or the Song of Songs, or the functional and decorative use of art in the building of the temple.

Fast forwarding through the centuries to the Christian West and the Medieval Church, one notes the preponderance of art has as its object Christianity.  The fine art of this time is highly symbolic rather than realistic, as shown in the icons of the age.  Each type of icon is full of symbolism that tells of a deeper story beyond the surface appearance of the picture.  Some icons even use the mode of narrative paintings, in which Biblical stories are shown by a series of concurrent images.[6]  Non-representational art also prospered in this medieval era in the form of tapestries and ornate scripts, which not only used calligraphy for the text, but also depictions of Bible stories and creatures of fantasy.[7]  For all the religious art produced, and its beauty, ultimately much of it led to idolatry in that the use of icons contributed to veneration of them.

The realm of the Church was altered greatly when Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five theses on the castle-church door of Wittenberg.  Suddenly, the constant reality of Roman Catholic power was no longer the standard, affecting even the art produced in this era.  There was a large deterioration of religious art in the decades following the reformation in favor of more secular subject matter.  There was also a move from the symbolic to the realistic.  Instead of Christ being portrayed in a two dimensional manner, with the usual iconic conventions of a halo and His hand blessing, now when He was portrayed, He was shown to have great detail in facial expression.  More usual than not, men, "living images made by God and not by the hands of men," were the subjects of art in the form of portraits.[8]  With regards to non-representational art, music had a great aesthetic impact beginning with the Reformation.  Not only was music the conveyor of Biblical truth as in hymns and psalms, but instrumental music also began to be the focus of much attention, affecting the remainder of history.[9]

Beginning near the same time of the religious Reformation, the Renaissance was mainly an Italian cultural shift that included, but was not coterminous with, the Reformation in the north.  As a whole, the Renaissance was a return to ancient Grecian philosophy, which had a great impact on the entire culture, including the arts.  Stemming from the Platonic notion of ideal forms, the Renaissance artist sought after portraying the ideal by use of spatial organization, rationalistic analysis, and the human perspective.[10]  The shift was that of the point of view of God, which was the basis of most art in the medieval era, to the point of view of man, which was the cause of the intense realism that began during the Renaissance.[11]  Due to the human point of view, though art was still at this point objective due to the influence of "forms," the seed of subjectivism was planted because the focus was no longer on God's perspective, but on man's.  Thus this era is the beginning of secular humanism.

In response to the Renaissance focus on humanism, some artists protested with healthy disillusionment and introspection.  This movement is known as Mannerism.  After the surge of humanistic optimism, many experienced the let down of putting one's hopes in the depraved, and suffered a loss of the humanistic reality.  In this age of art, paintings began to be darker, combining odd effects of color and light.  Human forms are elongated and distorted, picturing the cynicism of the culture and its inability to live up to the boasted expectations of the Renaissance.[12]

Coming in the form of a correction, rather than a reaction against, the Baroque movement of the seventeenth century was strongly based in the Counter-Reformation and purposed to amend the abuses of the Medieval Roman Catholic Church.  The art of the Baroque was not solely focused on the transcendent, as it was in the Medieval Church, but instead had a good balance between the earthly and the transcendent.  There was also a good balance between the emotional and the physical, as shown supremely in the paintings of Rubens.[13]

The humanism and classicism of the Renaissance grows into a secular movement by the eighteenth century in the form of the Enlightenment.  In an article for the Berlin Monthly Journal in 1784, Kant said that the Enlightenment was humanity's coming of age.  "It was the emergence from the immaturity that caused human beings to rely on such external authorities as the Bible, the church, and the state to tell them what to think and do."[14]  Instead of turning to religion as the basis for truth and beauty, people began turning to reason as the immutable principle.  Humans began to see themselves as autonomous from one another, while nature and society were seen as a machine.[15]  Since the Bible was no longer seen as the authority for life, the ethical basis for society shifted from that of Scripture to Utilitarianism.  Along with this shift of what constitutes beauty, there is a shift as to the content of art, from the beautiful to the proper.  Paintings become less vibrant and real for the sake of portraying achievement and the high status of man.[16]

The nineteenth century brought about another response, this time against the Enlightenment by the movement of Romanticism.  Though this advance in culture held onto the secular humanism of the Renaissance, in an attempt to bring meaning back into life the Romantics stressed the reality of personal experience and feeling.[17]  The art of this period is marked by the wildness of nature, over against the ordered subjection of nature as portrayed in the Enlightenment.[18]  Nature is no longer a complex machine, but instead is a living organism, and God is no longer self, but is imminent to His creation.  Utilitarianism is replaced with self-fulfillment, i.e., what is good is that which expresses one's emotion and which contributes to personal growth); thus selfishness becomes a moral principle.[19]  Subset into Romanticism were two smaller factions, one of naturalism, whose purpose was to portray nature and society in stark offensiveness and realism, and the other of the Pre-Raphaelites, whose purpose was to turn the pursuit of beauty into a religion.[20]

At the end of the nineteenth century, Impressionism begins to change art again from the really real to the more abstract in one sense, but to the more real on the other.  Artists, instead of portraying an object as it really is in its ontological makeup, begin to depict their impression of the object as the human eye sees it.[21]  This process, of course, is very subjective because one does not interpret the ontological form of an object, but instead his epistemological rendering of their sensing of it.[22] 

Following Impressionism, Expressionism sought to go further in the artist's attempt to internalize the depiction of an object.  Instead of merely painting a scene as it appears to the human eye, one should paint it as feels to them.  This stage in art history focuses on one's state of mind and demonstrates with acute bluntness the spiritual emptiness of a post-Christian society.[23]

Beginning in the early twentieth century, there was a reaction against the self-emphasis of Romanticism in the form of Cubism.  Originating with Paul Cezanne, Cubism was an attempt to pin down objective form by dividing up the artist's subject into the reality of its shape.  Picasso continued the work of Cezanne, and became the artist most associated with Cubism.  He wanted to portray his subject from many angles, so that the viewer might experience it as it truly was in all three dimensions at once.  His art became so objective, that it became unrecognizable, mathematical patterns.[24]  From Picasso forward, art is separated from one's perception, and it becomes a theory in need of being explained.  Reality is broken down and reassembled according to the will of the artist.[25]

Picasso left a wide wake as modern art carried on through many splits and reinventions.  Most notably, the Surrealists rejected peripheral orderliness in favor of the hidden world of disoriented dreams and nightmares.[26]  Dadaists were nihilists that attempted to violate every artistic norm.  In an attempt to violate the norms and shock the art world, they displayed bicycle wheels and urinals as art.  Instead of their intended result, though, they were embraced as serious artists.[27]  Later movements of Abstract Expressionism and Theosophy further subjectivize art to the point that not only is reality to be seen through one's self, but it is to be seen as an expression of the self.[28]  The absurdness of these later developments fuel pop art, which is a shallow attempt to salvage something of the self, while selling out the self for acceptance by the art establishment.[29]  The result of this declining cascade of the self is the abdication of beauty as the intention of art, and in its place now stands a dim image of humanity, devoid of beauty and purpose.

A Christian Response Against Subjective Beauty, Established in Objective Truth
Based on God's Character as Revealed in Holy Scripture

It is an amazing reality that the history of art has been transformed to the degree that it has in only five hundred years.  For millennia prior to the Reformation and Renaissance, art was invariable with regards to its subject matter, perspective, and utility; but there was a shift.  The use of art moved from being mostly that of functional and decorative to being thought of as either a secret knowledge not fit for the common person, or a mode of expression over against an experience of enrichment.  As stated before, the perspective of the arts changed from being that of God and the objective beauty with which He created, to the viewpoint of man and his subjective experience.  Finally, one notes the subject matter shifting from creation, in either its natural state or imagined state, to nothingness, attempting to produce nothing more than one's psyche in physical form, which can never have any meaning of itself. 

The result of these three shifts has had the combined result of having no basis for the notion of objective beauty.  The philosophical shift from absolute truth to individual opinion was a logical one once the eternal aspect of God's perception was extracted from the equation of existence.  If all things were not created with a purpose, and thus have no ontological purpose, then who is to say what is good or bad over against someone else's opinion, since neither have a corner on truth, but are simply making postulations based on what they need or want.  The ultimate truth teller, then, is power.  Whoever has the most power, gets to decide the truth for everyone else.  This same kind of shift has taken place with regards to obtaining knowledge of what is beautiful.  If nature is nothing but a batch of accidental cookies, who is to say what tastes good?  One may like peanut butter, another chocolate chip, but ultimately the taste buds of the individual are the judge, and each autonomous person has the ability to choose different "truths" based on their preferences.

As Christians though, it is imperative that the concepts of the good, the true, and the beautiful are understood as originating ultimately within the character and attributes of God.  The paramount attribute of God revealed in Scripture, which summarizes all others, is His perfection.  God is perfect in all His attributes (Matt. 5:48).  If He is said to possess a quality, then He possess that quality perfectly.  Not only is God perfect in His being, but also by definition of His perfection, all that He purposes and accomplishes is perfect.  If He were to err from perfection in accomplishing creation, then He would cease to be a perfect creator; but since His works are perfect, one cannot charge Him with a declaration of imperfection (Deut. 32:4). 

Another important aspect of the character of God is His independence (Acts 17:24-25; Job 41:11).  If all things in creation were extinguished and all that was left was God, God would be perfectly needless and happy.  He is the logically prior being to all of creation, and therefore if there is anything brought into existence by Him, it must be in accordance with what He wills.  As stated above, if He were to create an imperfection, then He would cease to be perfect.  Likewise, if something were to come into existence without His creation of it, then He would cease to be independent. 

So how, then, does imperfection come about in the form of evil?  It could be that God is perfect and independent of outside influences, but that He is not perfectly good.  Scripture, though, paints a different picture.  Jesus states in Luke 18:19 that none are good except God alone.  The psalmist says in Psalm 34:8 that one can even experience the goodness of God.  Well, if God is good, and is so perfectly, as well as being independent of any influence of creation, i.e. that which is not He, then the question still remains, how does imperfection occur?

The eminent 5th century theologian Augustine reasoned a significant argument related to this question.  Since imperfection could not have sprung up out of nothing, and since a perfect and good God would not create imperfection, then God, having created the perfect creation, and haven given humanity wills to choose to follow Him, must have allowed for His creation to disobey, or not meet the standards of, His perfection.  Though not a perfect model in dealing with the origination of the problem of evil, it does sufficiently explain one's experience of the fall in that all that a person does imperfectly has a standard to which it is measured, that of God's character as laid out in His moral Law.  This perversion of the good explains how imperfection exists in a cosmos created by a perfect, good, and independent Deity. 

This argument for perversion of good is helpful in understanding the decline in society's perception of objective beauty, as well.  God reveals Himself in Scripture on multiple occasions as possessing, as part of His eternal nature, the quality of beauty or glory (Deut. 5:24; Ps. 27:4; Rom. 16:27).  If, then, there is beauty in the creation, the standard for it must be based in God Himself.  God is said to have created all things, and they were very good (Gen. 1:31).  "[O]ut of the ground the LORD God caused to grow every tree that is pleasing to the sight and good for food" (Gen. 2:9).  God created things with the ontological quality of beauty and goodness.  So, if there is any deviation from the beauty or glory of God, it is due to a perversion, or falling short, of God's ideal beauty (Rom. 3:23).

Why, then, has the perception of objective beauty diminished in most art over the past centuries?  As argued above historically, society as a whole has chosen not to allow God into the equation of autonomous perception.  As in the decline of objective moral standards, which were based in the character of God as declared through the moral Law of Scripture, there is a direct correlation between attention to the character of God and His creative authority, and the decline of objective aesthetic standards.  As in Paul's argumentation in the first chapter of Romans, what can be known about God is evident within men and women because God has revealed Himself to them; thus they are without excuse (vs. 20).  Mankind, though, no longer honors God as God, or gives thanks to Him, thus changing their perspective of what they can observe from that of God, to that of creation (vs. 23, 25).  As a result, God has given humanity over to the desires of their hearts to impurity (vs. 24).  Yes, there can be perception of beauty by many in God's creation, but this phenomenon should be attributed either to an active awareness of objective beauty as based in God's character, or to an unintentional retention of theistic morals.  Thus arguing for objective beauty with many in present day society is akin to arguing for objective standards of truth with a postmodern politician. 

Conclusion

So what is the Christian's response to the culture?  What, if any, action should the God-fearer take in standing for God's truth?  As Christians, it is important to proclaim the ontological existence of beauty, not just with declarations of truth, but also by becoming actively involved in the arts.  Due partly to the effects of fundamentalism in the earlier twentieth century (concurrent with the beginning of Dadaism and Abstract Expressionism), evangelicals began shying away from the art realm, thinking it not as important as evangelism, therefore not important at all.  As a result, most of the past century has been devoid of a Christian influence with regards to beauty in art.  To remedy this problem, Christians need to assume once again the place of communicator through art, so that they may interact in the marketplace of ideas and, with the grace of God, win back the battlefield of truth and beauty.