A Response To “Getting to People Through Our Art” - What Next?

One of the great hopes of Project Pulchra is in the opportunity for essential conversations about art to take place. Blogging can be a fantastically suitable platform for these conversations to start and so this post is a response to the recent "Getting to People Through Our Art" - mostly because I quickly realized this became too big for the comment box.

The video in this post is a great reminder that art can have more ambitious goals than the "Arts & Entertainment" section of the newspaper can shake a leg at. It is also interesting that we post this video in the wake of Kony 2012 and the flurry of online discussion about the effectivity of "promoting awareness" through art (and good production values). It's making us rethink the phrase "knowledge is power."

What may challenge us most through all of this is how we are constantly reminded that awareness ultimately isn't enough - we have enough access to television and internet to know more about what goes on in the world and yet it isn't breaking through the Great Wall of Apathy. With a few praiseworthy exceptions most people become aware of the (legitimately genuinely achingly) heartbreaking-issue-de-jour before going back to living the same old life.

"[W]e don't like looking...because it might make us have to do something about it, and maybe even rethink our lifestyle." This is what so many of us are afraid of - that we'll be disturbed enough by what we see that we can't think of living the way we used to. So we build walls, dull the edge of truth to make it digestible. But what does it mean to be disarmed? To allow God to reach past our armour to touch us deeply in the most impressionable parts of our being? Art can disarm us like this, but we need to let ourselves to be disarmed. 

So how can we, as artists and Christians, be true to all the dimensions of our calling? How do we not only form our minds (through awareness) but our wills? How do we allow the mass exodus of information be translated into incarnational living? Eowyn Theophilus is spot-on when she describes how the Gospel is a force that changes our lives - in fact the only way we can truly gauge whether or not we've really encountered the Gospel is by how much our lives have been transformed. 

Truth (and art) in the end isn't entertainment - it's about transfiguration. Will we hope to never be the same?