W<\/span>ho\u2019s afraid of modern art?<\/a>\u201d asks Daniel Siedell. He answers, \u201cI am.\u201d As critic and curator, Siedell is passionately devoted to modern art. It frightens him because that is what it\u2019s supposed to do.<\/p>\nMunch\u2019s The Scream<\/em>, for instance, doesn\u2019t just express the painters own anxieties. It is \u201can attempt to externalize the fear that plagued him, the fear that no one could hear him scream, that what coursed through nature actually coursed through his veins, and his alone. For Munch nature became an echo chamber where his own anxiety in the fear of death could only yield a desperate, silent scream. But The Scream<\/em> is Munch\u2019s attempt to get out, to allow it to be heard, somehow, in paint and pastel.\u201d The painting is \u201cthe sound of our response to nature\u2019s brute silence and indifference, undisclosed as gift through God\u2019s Word\u201d (21).<\/p>\nSiedell worries that Christians soften modern art by looking at it through the diffusing lens of Christian worldview. It\u2019s not supposed to express a worldview. It confronts \u201cus with our own mortality, our own weakness, failure, and impending death.\u201d Perhaps, he suggests, it\u2019s the disquiet the painting produces, and not <\/em>Munch\u2019s \u201cworldview,\u201d that makes Christians recoil. We don\u2019t want to be reminded of death and deathly silence, so we file the painting away as nihilistic instead of looking at it, receiving it (22).<\/p>\nSiedell knows that for Christians The Scream<\/em> cannot be the last word, but \u201cin its articulation of pain and suffering, in its diagnosis of our human condition . . . it must be the first word<\/em> that we hear\u201d (22).<\/p>\nChristians need to be involved in the arts, but not<\/em>, Siedell insists, as Christian artists or critics\u2014not in the sense of coming to art with a pre-arranged worldview filter. Christians should enter the art world as listeners, receivers. Christians can thrive in the world of modern art because they have been freed: \u201cThe world needs us to pay attention to the insightful art, music, film, and poetry that is already out there, the work that comes from pain, suffering, and brokenness, the world that plumbs the range of human emotion and feeling. . . . The world desperately needs us to live freely out of the grace that God gives . . . to live not as righteous culture judges, but as broken sinners bearing witness with the arts to God\u2019s sustaining peace amidst the city.\u201d We can have this freedom \u201conly if we keep our sinfulness and frailty before us,\u201d since \u201cthe remembrance of our own unrighteousness and disobedience frees us from the reactionary and defensive posture toward art and culture, allowing us to love our artistic neighbors by loving their art, poetry, music, and film. We are free to make ourselves vulnerable to art, allowing it to work on us as art<\/em>\u201d (31).<\/p>\nMuch to affirm here for sure, but there are a few problems with the way Siedell sets things up rhetorically. We might ask, to start, what place judgment <\/em>has in our experience of art. Granted, there is a moment of open receptivity; does judgment, including ethical and theological judgment, enter (as Eliot, Lewis, and many other Christian critics have claimed)? Siedell might be taken to imply that judgment\u2014a negative judgment on \u201cmodern art\u201d\u2014is itself an expression of defensive self-righteousness. And if that\u2019s the set-up, it becomes very difficult to have a discussion about the artistic (or other) value of a painting like The Scream<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\nSiedell is not, of course, opposed to passing judgment. He\u2019s an art critic<\/em>. He\u2019s very harsh with Thomas Kinkade. Kinkade\u2019s claim that he is trying to \u201cportray a world without the Fall\u201d becomes the ground for Siedell\u2019s striking critique: \u201cKinkade has long railed against the nihilism of modern art and the contemporary art world. But because it claims to deny where we live, that is, in the midst of death and brokenness, east of Eden, Kinkade\u2019s work is more nihilistic than anything Picasso and Pollock could paint, or Nietzsche and Sartre could write\u201d (76).<\/p>\nI don\u2019t intend to defend Kinkade, but I wonder if Siedell is consistent with his own stance: Has he been receptive to Kinkade\u2019s vision? Is his reaction a kind of inverted self-righteousness, the defensiveness of the cynic who sees only the ugliness and pain of the world and resists the shock of its beauties?\u00a0Siedell mentions Mako Fujimura in passage (60-61) but doesn\u2019t analyze his paintings. What would he say about the golden world of Fujimura\u2019s paintings? Lacking screams, are they sufficiently authentic<\/em>?\u00a0Siedell (unfairly, I think) makes much of Kinkade\u2019s broken life.\u00a0If Rublev\u2019s Trinity turns the brokenness of the painter into\u00a0hope <\/em>(111),\u00a0why not Kinkade? Why not see Kinkade as a glimpse of life after the eschaton?\u00a0<\/p>\nI\u2019m playing. But my question is a real one: If we are free from reactionary responses, free to listen and receive, shouldn\u2019t we also be free to listen and receive this<\/em>? If we want to plumb the depths of human feeling\u2014of all <\/em>human feeling\u2014why exclude cozy <\/em>feelings from our exploration?\u00a0Has Siedell\u2019s worldview intruded on the proceedings?<\/p>\nAnd that raises a more substantive question. Siedell comments modern art for being real, for not ignoring the brokenness of things. That, of course, raises the question of what reality is. Is The Scream<\/em> truly the first word<\/em> in the world we live in? There are times when Siedell seems to be not only attentive to the brokenness, but to ontologize it.\u00a0<\/p>\nPardon the world-viewishness, but the Gospel tells us we live in a world where Jesus, who is Life, reigns. Our stance to the world is a stance in Christ, in whom we are reconciled to God, and hence to the world that is His. This is not a stance of self-righteousness; it is quite the opposite of defensiveness. Modern art, like everything else, belongs to God, to Christ, and so to us (1 Corinthians 3). Precisely because we trust that He is repairing our shattered selves, we can be open, receptive, hospitable because He is and makes us so.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cWho\u2019s afraid of modern art?\u201d asks Daniel Siedell. He answers, \u201cI am.\u201d As critic and curator, Siedell is passionately devoted to modern art. It frightens him because that is what it\u2019s supposed to do. Munch\u2019s The Scream, for instance, doesn\u2019t just express the painters own anxieties. It is \u201can attempt to externalize the fear that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,679],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17039","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-painting"],"yoast_head":"\n
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