Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Art is about the human crazy


John Shore is a writer whose blog posts I've only lately picked up on. I was particularly struck by today's notes on being a Christian and an artist:

I’m sure that in my life I’ve never given as much thought to any one topic as I have the relationship between art and God — which is to say, really, about the relationship between man and God, which I think is basically all anyone, in one way or another, is ever thinking about anyway. And one of the Big Things I think about the whole Art-God phenomenon is that a person seeking to create great art cannot let anything get between them and whatever artistic imperative is gnawing at their insides. And one of the things that I think tends to most often interfere with the production of truly fulfilling and aesthetically arresting art is the assumption (however subconsciously or subtly it presents itself) that the end product must in some very real and important way be okay with God.

He winds up saying: art is about the human crazy. And giving that form and expression isn’t really God’s thing.

My comment on that is: Art is probably about human crazy in the same way that Creation is about the God Crazy – surely he must have a tinge of craziness to have produced some of the creatures and scenes we live with in this world (let alone the people!)

1 comment:

Mike Crowl said...

Do you want to expand on that a little? I'm not quite sure what you mean.