Recently I read an article in Duke DIVINITY magazine that was in defense of Christian kitsch. You know the art most of us call “bad” or “tasteless”. The mass produced “junk” you buy in any gift shop. I was hoping the author would have some profound way of looking at kitsch that would help me understand it and better embrace it but in the end he only confirmed my feeling, it is just mass produced junk. I would go so far as to say soulless junk.
Yes, that may seem harsh but let me explain what I mean. First off kitsch is soulless because it was created for the sole purpose of making money. Possibly the original “art piece” before it was mass produced had uniqueness and heart but somewhere between the first and 10,000th piece it lost that uniqueness. Yes, I understand we live in an industrialized world, and the ability to mass produce things is a defining feature of our age and what we have come to call success – sell a million units of anything and it was successful. And when it comes to my iPhone and car there is clear value in mass production. It allows the rest of us to own these highly technical devices. That is the big difference between art and a car. I could never make a car, aside from a kit car, but I can make art.
Art is something accessible to everyone. Sure some are better at it than others, or at least we have determined that some are better than others. True art is when someone bears their soul to us and spreads it on a canvas or carves it from stone, welds old pieces of metal together, arranges words into stories, or organizes ones and zeros on their computer to create something that came from inside them. They did not create the art to make money but to express what lives inside them. Sometimes it is joy, other times it is sorrow so deep only by pounding on stone can they drive it out.
Arguments about kitsch and high art only help to drive this gift from God further from its purpose. Since we are told by marketers and critics alike what art is good, we have scared too many people away from expressing themselves through some form of art. The further we drive people from even trying art the more we separate them from failure. Yes, you read that correctly. We drive them from failure. Not even the masters picked up a brush and painted a perfect picture the first time. Art is not always about perfection, art is about finding beauty in mistakes.
Since we are all scared of creating something ugly – bad art, we run from art, hiding in the shadows of lame excuses like “I am not artistic”. You mean you cannot paint like Van Gogh?! Who cares – that does not make you non-artistic. No, it makes you afraid of what others may think.
Watching Evelyn, my 22 month old daughter, draw makes my heart glad. She likes to tell me every crayon is yellow, even the green one; and then laughs as if she is saying “I know Dad, I am just playing with you.” Her crayon drawings will never hang anywhere besides our refrigerator and if you applied the world of art criticism to them you would say she failed. Sure she failed, but that is the point. Art is the place you can fail in beautiful ways and NOT care what others think.
I say this, but I wish I could heed my own advice. Every time I finish a piece of art I rush to get approval from others. I want people to say “I love it! Go hang it on the walls of the Guggenheim or sell it for thousands of dollars.” But if I made the art for the right reasons I would be scared to show the art because I am showing them a piece of my soul I cannot express through words. I am showing them a piece of me no one else has seen before.
I think Stanley Kubrick said it best when talking about film, “A film is – or should be – more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what’s behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.” That is art. It is about finding a way to express the emotions that cannot be expressed any other way. God gifted humanity with art as a way of expressing the un-expressible, and the day we fill our walls with kitsch instead of moods and feelings is the day we squander this great gift from God.
The author of the article about kitsch was right that high art is not better than kitsch but he was wrong to say it was better than high art. Both miss the point. Art is letting yourself fail in an attempt to express something deep and profound. I will never be able to capture the deep unexplained parts of my life but art let’s me give form to them.
“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?” God ask Job and his friends. I, like them, cannot answer that with words but through spattering paint on canvas I somehow connect with something deep inside I did not even know was there. I connect with God in a way I never knew was possible. Quit saying you are not an artist and hiding in the shadows of excuses. Create, the meaning will come later.
By Jeff Nelson
Jeff Nelson is a video producer, designer and artist who lives and works in Durham, you can see some of his work at www.variableforce.com.
