The problem with modern art

Secularisation has removed from us the Greek notion of Truth, Beauty and Goodness. Even further removed is the biblical trilogy of Faith, Hope and Love. This is why exhibitions of contemporary art have become so pretentious and boring. They have lost the ontology of glory. They float free from the beauty of the world because it has become philosophically unjustifiable.

The question that Charles Taylor places in the beginning of his new book A Secular Age is “Why was it impossible in 1500 not to believe in God and in 2000 almost impossible to believe?” is at the base of why modern art is so sterile. It is because our horizons have been closed down by Enlightenment polemic that tells us that we are our own creation. It is the agony of the artist to think so and such a one is to be most pitied.

The artist in an exclusively secular society has no option but to make himself God and to try to create something out of nothing and then, unable to meet this demand “he will find himself wandering alone among the shadows cast by the world he forsook in order to salvage his freedom and creativity”.

The only outcome of self deification is demonisation, that is why so many contemporary works of art are so dark. The artist does not understand the central gospel imperative that if we would have our lives we must lose them. It is essential for the artist not to look more deeply inside of himself but allow the gospel to decentre the self so that beauty may intrude.

This is the difference between art as response to the Other and art as a work done among thorns and thistles, between art as a faithful response to God and art done in expulsion.

I would not say that Bob Booth’s art is Christian art. Rather, I would say that his Christianity sets the stage for it. For it is only when the self does not take centre stage that reality can speak and be heard. “Understood as a foretaste of beatific vision, beauty affirms its place in an integrated ontological order; as the radiance of being.” This is how Bob can talk about “the dead leaves living it up”.

Any art that faithfully portrays the deep truths of existence are Christian just as any science that accurately describes the physical world is Christian. “Christian” is not a label we may apply, it is rather a mode of decentred thinking in which reality may speak and be heard, in which reality can be discovered instead of our futile attempt to impose ideology or become the creator.

Meanwhile, Bob Booth works away in his farm shed studio in Toodyay seeing with his one eye the colours that I can’t see with my two, painting canvases of such deceptive complexity that my eye never wearies of exploring them.

Boredom is the telling thing with art. How long will it remain interesting? Already, walking through the art galleries of the nation we find the canvases that made a splash in their day for being the new thing but now a quick glance is all they warrant. Why? Because we have lost contact with the wellsprings of Western art. We have lost contact with the radiance of being, that radiance that is inextricably associated with God.