A couple of weeks ago, Ryan Stander pointed me to a story about Kathleen Folden, who drove 690 miles from Kalipsell, Montana, to Loveland, Colorado with the sole purpose of destroying a work of art she, as a Christian, considered deeply offensive. The piece, called "The Misadventures of the Romantic Cannibals," had drawn protesters for the duration of its exhibition who claimed the work was blasphemous and pornographic.

Christians have long had a contentious relationship with art; many find themselves without a framework for how to even think about art in the first place and so turn to embracing kitsch, rejecting anything they cannot understand, or protesting (in Folden's case, violently) against something they consider to be an attack on their faith because, after all, most art is anti-Christian.

Stories like this raise all kinds of issues and questions. In the first place, for some Christians any type of art dealing with the person of Jesus immediately requires consideration of the second commandment. What was the artist, Enrique Chagoya, intending to convey with this piece? Was his intention to provoke Christians, and is he afforded the right to do so? In a pluralist society, where is the line drawn between protecting the freedom of artists to express themselves and protecting against religious persecution (I think it would be fair to assume that Folden felt this was an act of persecution)? Is an act of protest against an artist's work ever legitimate, and what should that protest look like?

There is much to discuss about this incident, but in the end I found it interesting that all the commentary focused on Folden's act of destroying the work. In part this is not surprising—society likes stories that portray Christians as nut-jobs and Folden did act in a rather outspoken way. But when I looked at a photograph of Chagoya's piece, I wondered why this did not raise more questions about art itself.

In the Fall issue of Comment magazine, Bruce Herman has an excellent article discussing a pendulum swing in the world of art. In recent times, he notes, art has been all about what is novel, strange, and provocative, moving away from what used to be a focus on meaning and substance. He writes,

Since the Renaissance, the servant role of the artist—with craftsmanship as its central value—has been gradually waning and the intellectual-poetic aspects of art have steadily risen. Historians and critics during this period have hailed the 'breakthrough' mentality, and some have even equated art with the cutting edge and the avant-garde... One result is that in the past several decades, artists of every discipline have been trained with the primary expectation that they shall produce new and sometimes shocking objects; choreograph daring dance movements; compose provocative musical pieces or poems—and in many cases, skill has been moved to the margins or completely off-stage.

We cannot get inside Chagoya's head and determine what motivated him to create the piece, and further, I am not an art critic by any stretch of the imagination, so to offer a critique of his piece is really beyond what I am qualified to do. Nonetheless, from my cursory glances at the work Folden attempted to destroy, I think Herman's words ought to be taken into consideration here. In one sense, Folden's negative reaction to the piece as a Christian is understandable. But perhaps this should elicit a further discussion about bad art—is Chagoya's piece the skilled work of a craftsman, or merely something to shock and provoke?

Herman notes that the responsibility of the artist is to employ skilled craftsmanship in the act of creating something beautiful. In large part, these two things have been missing from the world of art in the recent past. It is the question of what constitutes beauty that should be at the center of discussions on art and craft, but modern artists often eschew this conversation because, Herman notes, "beauty was largely exiled from art for nearly a century, being held suspect since Kantian philosophy equated it with superficial pleasure." But the fact is that beauty is something intrinsic in our Creator's nature. God's creative work is shot through with true beauty and skilled craftsmanship, and our artistic work, whatever form it takes, must aim to reflect this skill and beauty. Herman says,

Though we value the new and surprising in art, we can never wholeheartedly let go of craft for the simple reason that it is seated in the deep human desire to reflect glory to God in and through the arts of the beautiful. We were made by a Maker of beauty, and are restless until we too manage to make something beautiful, something purposeful and lasting. It is not enough to make something 'striking' or 'interesting'—certainly not something merely shocking. The ultimate result of placing lesser qualities like these at the centre is often a movement toward the extreme novelty of the perverse, in which case 'interesting' crosses over into the peculiar and finally into the taboo. Images are no more neutral than words, and yet there is a great resistance to legislating imagery of placing prohibitions on art the way we do on speech.

This incident, then, leaves us with a lot of questions. Was Folden justified in her attack on Chagoya's art? I don't think so. Was she right to protest something she considered blasphemous? Surely, although it could have taken a much more productive form. But perhaps the discussion should focus more on the nature of art. Is Chagoya's piece a skilled work of beauty? Must we accept modern art's propensity to make beauty a subjective standard in the mind of the artist or beholder, or must we judge it by a higher standard? If Chagoya's work is an act of provocation against Christians, can it also be seen as an implicit rejection of God's standards of beauty, and thus his sovereignty over all spheres of life? How do we determine what constitutes God's standards of beauty, and what role does common grace play in bring this beauty to fruition in the work of those who do not know God?

Since I am not artistically-minded, these are only musings. What do you think?