ordinarily understood but rather the product of a divine gift or genius.
I do not deny that some people do seem to have more innate talent than others. However, it is important to recall that even those who are more gifted than most still must work hard to develop that raw talent into something that others will recognize as great. In his memoir, The Street Where I Live, Alan Jay Lerner noted that every great star he had ever worked with never rested on talent alone, but worked harder, cared more, and had a greater sense of perfection than anyone else. He wrote,
I remember when I was doing a film with Fred Astaire, it was nothing for him to work three or four days on two bars of music. One evening in the dark grey hours of dusk, I was walking across the deserted MGM lot when a small, weary figure with a towel around his neck suddenly appeared out of one of the giant cube sound stages. It was Fred. He came over to me, threw a heavy arm around my shoulder and said, “Oh Alan, why doesn’t someone tell me I cannot dance?” The tormented illogic of this question made any answer sound insipid, and all I could do was walk with him in silence. Why doesn’t someone tell Fred Astaire he cannot dance? Because no one would ever ask that question but Fred Astaire. Which is why he is Fred Astaire.28
Such a story might be told of any talented, disciplined artist who strives continually to move towards a vision of perfection. The gift of talent is only a beginning, perhaps a necessary—but never a sufficient—condition of greatness. As someone said in another context, genius is 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration.
Regardless of the presence or absence of innate talent, in many cultures, everyone is expected to sing, dance, tell stories, and/or make images with some degree of facility. Even in our own culture, until relatively recently every educated person was given some instruction in playing a musical instrument, making watercolor sketches, and singing sufficiently well to carry a tune. It is only in our own time and place that teaching these skills is so neglected that only certain specialists are expected to do them at all, with everyone else serving as passive, adoring audience.
However, even when the practice of art is widespread in a society, rather than the domain of a specialized few, certain pictures, tunes, dances, poems, plays, and other artworks seem—at least some of the time—to convey something that feels like revelation, like an encounter with the holy. It is this experience, even more than the presumed differentness of artists, that suggests that those who make such works have a special access to God. There is something about that access that we perceive as simultaneously dangerous and valuable. The artist is given license to be flamboyant in return for going into the dangerous domain of the hidden and bringing back visible (or audible, or tangible) evidence of what is found there. In the popular imagination, the artist is often understood as a kind of shaman, and flamboyant behavior is seen as evidence of that special status.
While artists may be given license to be unconventional and simultaneously castigated for doing so, it is the artwork itself that is often seen as salvific. The conflation of aesthetic experience with religious ecstasy is the source of a worshipful attitude towards art that is widespread, especially among the highly educated professionals who make up the bulk of the audience for (and patronage of) opera, ballet, concert music, and art museums. A worshipful attitude towards art as a whole, not simply this or that artwork, is particularly problematic because it denies both the particularity of individual artworks and the particularity of individual responses to them. As Barzun puts it,
. . . it is fraudulent to pass from a great artistic moment felt by one or more persons at a certain time and place to Art in general. Art does not consist only of masterpieces. Not all masterpieces overwhelm everybody equally, nor do they hold their magic invariably, eternally, and universally as the litany of religious adverbs pretends.29
As problematic as this attitude might be for those who profess no other religion, such sanctification of art presents even greater challenges when it is imported unreflectively into the church. Barzun is not addressing the church, but rather society at large. Nevertheless, his admonition regarding how to speak (or, more properly, not speak) about art applies to those within the church who want to advocate for the arts. He continues,
Because Art is not a singleminded power, it cannot fulfill the requirements of a religion. The priest speaks with authority to all believers, no matter what his personal failings; the artist speaks with authority only to some and only when his happy condition or theirs will permit. I know that each of us, from proprietary feelings, would like to say that my chosen artist, this divine work moves all mankind. It is simply not so. All the epithets of immortal, timeless, self-sustaining, and autonomous applied to any work are but brave lies, when they are not merely partisan publicity.30
John Witvliet notes in his preface to Frank Burch Brown’s Inclusive Yet Discerning that the values and assumptions about good and bad art, the function that art plays in human life, and how such art may affect our own lives, are formed outside of an institutional Christian context. Witvliet notes that when these assumptions are brought into our worship, they
. . . may help God’s people worship faithfully and vibrantly. They might, for example, help us to appreciate an artwork from a culture other than our own, or to discern the pathos or energy of a given work and its significance for Christian prayer and proclamation. At other times, however, these assumptions can erect barriers to faithful and vital worship. They might tempt us to worship artists or artworks instead of God, for example, or to fall into the kind of elitism or pragmatism that erodes our experience of grateful awe that is inherent in the act of worship. They might even prevent us from discerning how emerging forms of cultural expression might genuinely revitalize and deepen worship practices.31
Such assumptions lead to what is often termed the worship wars, in which different groups within a congregation argue over what kind of music is best for worship. Often, such differences of taste and opinion lead to separate services for those who prefer to sing the hymns they have known since childhood and those who find joy and comfort in praise choruses that sound more or less like the popular songs heard on the radio every day.
Elitist notions of what constitutes good music (or good art of any kind) can be especially pernicious, as when an organist or choir director’s taste is in conflict with that of the majority of the congregation. In an earlier book, Frank Burch Brown describes Methodist theologian Tex Sample’s report on the struggling, hard-living, working-class people, noting that they
relate to songs that other classes tend to scorn . . . . They don’t respond favorably to imported organists and choir directors insistent on using Bach and Brahms to “lift” the musical tastes of the congregation. They don’t much like musicians who feel compromised by the so-called musical debauchery of contemporary, gospel, and country music.32
Such assumptions also carry over into a more generalized notion that art is good for people, without much attention to what is meant by art, or what that good might consist in. Thus, the very real benefits that might accrue to people who practice an instrument, for example, are conflated with the quite different experiences of individuals who attend chamber music concerts, listen to rock-and-roll or rap, go to galleries that exhibit interactive digital art, or participate in a weekend retreat that encourages participants to make collages to explore their understanding of a biblical passage. While any of these activities may, in fact, be of benefit to participants, and all of them do fit loosely into the category of art (or the arts), it is not at all clear what either the activities or their benefits have in common.
Such assumptions also lead to the growing practice of designating the church organist or choir director as the Minister of the Arts. While in principle I am glad that such a ministry is recognized
