I had forgotten all about Francis Schaeffer’s four-part “grid” — good art with a good message, good art with a bad message, bad art with a good message, bad art with a bad message — until I came across this post at Andy Whitman’s blog. He makes some very good points about the limitations of Schaeffer’s approach (does all art have a “message”? is it really all that easy to distinguish “good” art from “bad” art? etc.) and how to move beyond that approach.
Though I would offer at least a token defense of understanding art in its historical contexts — it’s more than just “dry academics”! Indeed, if one of the purposes of art is to help us become more other-centred, then it behooves us to at least try to figure out how an artist’s attempt to communicate something was received in a time and place that may have been different from our own.
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