The Evangelical church has no grounds, really, to make an apologetic for beauty. It is passé, even, to admit that our churches and homes and lives are either as barren as Cromwell’s churches or as crowded with kitsch as the iconic corner of a Russian Orthodox cottage. But Evangelicals at least know something is the matter when they look at what Art has become out in the world, and how it’s become not only Mostly Ugly but also Mostly an Idol.

The idea that art should serve as a source—perhaps the primary source—of spiritual sustenance in a secular age is a Romantic notion that continues to resonate powerfully. It helps to explain, for example, the special aura that attaches to art and artists, permitting such poseurs as Andres Serrano, Bruce Nauman, and Gilbert & George to be accounted artists by otherwise sane persons. This Romantic inheritance has also figured, with various permutations, in much avant-garde culture. We have come a long way since Dostoevsky could declare that, “incredible as it may seem, the day will come when man will quarrel more fiercely about art than about God.”

Something is wrong with Art, we know. So many artists are revered as shamans or as untouchable loonies or both. So much art is revered as the last province of spiritual truth. Beauty is ugly. The museums and galleries are full of so much work that means nothing without an accompanying essay or artist talk to explain it to the laity. What to do, what to do? Roger Kimball says we crave the aesthetic and we crave the religious, and we should remember that those are not the same thing:

Man is the sort of creature whose nature is to delight in art and aesthetic experience; I believe that he is also, by nature, a religious animal—a creature who becomes who he really is only by acknowledging something that transcends him. These different aspects of humanity will often conspire, but we do both a disservice if we blur or elide their essential difference.

What is art? Short answer: Not religion.

HT: Arts and Letters Daily