c. 1999 Religion News Service
(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of”My Brother Joseph, published by St. Martin Press.)
UNDATED _ New York’s Mayor Rudy Giuliani recently caused a sensation by threatening to cut off the city’s funding for the Brooklyn Museum _ one-third of its budget _ because of its scheduled exhibition titled”Sensation.” Sensation, indeed, in the exhibit, such as a partially decomposed shark and a bisected pig afloat in formaldehyde. Giuliani’s main objection was to what the New York Times described as a”dung-stained, faux naive portrait of the Virgin Mary.”The fiery mayor pronounced this”sick stuff”and said the government should not provide funds for paintings that offend Catholics or any other religious group.
Responses rose as mightily and predictably as the full moon tide.
First of all, we find the”Aura of the Law,”or the”First Amendment Defense,”worn gray and almost featureless from its being collected after every similar storm about art. The Law is invoked so regularly in these situations you might get the impression that it has something to do with art. What it really does is change the subject and treat art like a minor child who cannot speak for himself.
The First Amendment, however, cannot and does not grant the status of art to a painting, sculpture or novel any more than the Supreme Court, in passing on its constitutionality, can invest a law with ethics or morality.
Let us pose, then, a simple question: In standard-starved America, do we ever let art speak for itself? Doesn’t real art have its own language through which it”arrests”our attention and moves us to awe through its own authority, that is, through what the artist has infused in it?
Think of David or the Pieta.
Can a lawyer, a judge or those specialists so gifted in fey phrases who write art exhibition catalogs add anything to what true artists already communicate directly to the deepest levels of our personalities?
We Americans hardly let anything speak for itself. We cannot watch baseball or football without an announcer telling us what we are looking at. USA Today publishes a list of the announcers with its schedule of games. We want the same thing with paintings, music, books and sculpture: a”play-by-play”and a”color”colleague to tell us what we are looking at and what it means.
Primary symbols of this include Sister Wendy, despite her charm and knowledge, and the cassette tapes chattering like locusts at every exhibit, setting our ears into competition with our eyes, interfering with the transaction between us and the artists whose voice is in their works.
So addicted to this”Watch by the Numbers”is, for example, the Wall Street Journal, that it recently criticized museums that did not”explain”enough and left visitors _ horror of horrors _ standing alone and undefended in front of masterpieces.
Art is not sensation but revelation available to those who, undefended by catalogs and unimpeded by earphones, attend to it as it is, a mystery, much like real religion, most of which comes symbolically to us. How do the sacraments speak to us if not in a special language that defies and, indeed, would be destroyed by translation into logic?
And if you do not think that art is a powerful mystery, ask yourself if Beethoven is dead while you are listening to the”Eroica.”Or is he urgently present to you, does he enter into you, and what happens to you in this relationship with a great artist? No lawyer can tell you. Probably not a musical colleague of Sister Wendy’s either.
The first requirement for beauty in art is integrity _ that it reflect a wholeness in its composition so that even in a still life of scattered objects, one can sense their relationships, see them as a whole, as one thing.
Secondly, the object must have harmony, an inner consistency that allows you to see it as balanced, part against part, within its limits.
This generates radiance, an illumination or, as the Italian physiologist Galvani put it,”enchantment of the heart.”We are indeed”arrested”by great art, held in a timeless moment of contemplating the world by the light of the artist’s genius.
When a country lacks such principles for understanding art, it cannot understand much of anything about itself. It ends up either politicizing everything, seeking value through price, or reducing everything to a legal argument. In short, America today.
Who, think you, has a better intuition about the controversial exhibition, Mayor Giuliani, who senses it lacks integrity, harmony and radiance, or the droves of commentators who want to change the subject or reduce it all to law or politics?
DEA END KENNEDY
