The catholicity of art

In Jamie Smith’s latest monthly newsletter—to which I recommend you subscribe—he has a reflection on the relationship between art and faith. In particular he has a bone to pick with those well-meaning Christian writers and artists whose approach to art is (in my words) variations on, or elevated versions of, the God’s Not Dead approach. They are “BCFC”: religious art by Christians and for Christians. The result is parochial, hokey, dull, blinkered, constricted, in a word, un-catholic. Go big or go home: don’t retreat to nostalgia or to enclaves of the sub-sub-sub-group; make art for the world. It’s God’s world, after all.

With all of this, given a certain interpretation, I think we should all agree—even if we allow, as Paul Griffiths rightly reminds us, that we ought not thereby to denigrate kitsch or its audience, though we don’t mistake it for high art. But there’s also an interpretation of this approach, and perhaps an intended meaning behind it, that I want to place a question mark next to.

Here’s the way of speaking I’m wondering about: Avoiding, rejecting, or downgrading art made for “the enclave,” for “the sub-culture,” for the collective, for the “us” by contradistinction to the “them.” Such art, on Smith’s view, doesn’t have the kosmos as its subject or audience. It’s concerned only with our little corner of it. And invariably those limits restrict to the point of strangulation. They lead to myopia of the worst and most boring kind.

It’s clear who and what Smith has in mind. But I don’t think his description quite matches his object. What he’s so repulsed by is nostalgia, sectarianism, rigidity, kitsch; art that is ornamental or didactic or self-validating (or all of the above). Hallmark art. Shallow and faux inspirational “content” that fails to live up to the venerable name of art. “Art,” therefore, whose meaning and purpose are written in shining neon letters on the first page, forestalling and alleviating the challenge—the adventure—of endless and untamed interpretation.

To that I say: Amen!

But is that best described as “sub-cultural” art by and for “the enclave”? I don’t think so. Why not? Because some of the best art we have, past and present, was and is made by and for the enclave. In fact, that’s what makes the most beautiful or moving art so endlessly compelling. Better, it’s what makes it so catholic: its very particularity. The universality of a great work of art is directly, not inversely, related to its specificity, its granularity of detail. And often as not, that granularity is a function of the artist’s parochial upbringing, identity, formation, and even initial audience. It’s only once that audience expands—in the lifetime of the artist or across the generations—that it becomes clear, perhaps even to the artist and his or her sub-group, that other people are interested in this odd little corner of the world. Sometimes such artists and groups are at a loss for words why anyone else would take an interest in them!

This goes for more recent artistic endeavors (just think of the spiritual, musical, literary, and artistic contributions of African Americans, for example, or of Catholic or Jewish American immigrants) as well as long-established canonical works. Contemporary people don’t in general care about long-dead Greeks and their wars, or about the petty rivalries of fourteenth century Italy, or about medieval Japanese ladies-in-waiting. But they (we) keep reading them, and inadvertently learning about all the background details necessary to understand them, because we believe, or we have come to see, that they continue to have something to say to us—different though we may be from them.

My only point is that the criterion of “not by and for an enclave; having the whole world as an imagined audience” does not well fit these, or plenty of other, examples of lasting, “catholic” art. The proper catholicity is located in the artifact’s mysterious capacity to speak to the world, not in its maker’s worldliness, whether real or aspirational. There is no question that Christians in American today do appear to lack that catholicity; that that lack is a feature, not a bug; that it hampers serious Christian art from getting off the ground or being appreciated by fellow Christians, much less “the world”; and that it is well worth rooting out the causes, whatever they may be.

But in a sense, I want to go further and suggest that the problem is we aren’t enclaved enough. That is to say, our sub-culture isn’t some magnificent thing worth limning in everlasting vernacular lines. It’s largely defensive in posture, lacking the courage of its convictions. It’s squirmy and unsure of itself, anxious of others’ judgments. Grand sub-cultural art is born not of insecurity but of the crystal clarity bestowed by a firm identity, deeply held beliefs, and an integrated dense network of fellow members of the selfsame community. For whatever reason (and we could enumerate many reasons), Christians in America do not fit this description. Their anxiety is revealed most pitiably in the shrill spreadsheet-hollowness of their proselytizing efforts, not to mention the pure commercial parasitism of their aesthetic products.

If I were formulating a critique of the state of “faith and art” in the contemporary American scene, that’s where I’d begin.