Art’s New Direction

by Chad Miller /// October 16th, 2007

Society as a whole, and art in particular, have gone through some major frame-of-reference changes over the last couple of millennia.

Not to get into too much detail, our roots are in a premodern viewpoint, which basically takes the stance that the divine is directly responsible for everything that is currently unexplained. This proceeded, a few centuries ago, into the modern viewpoint, which covers a bit of a spectrum. It starts out discovering science and natural law, which can explain most of the world around us. Modernism started out attributing the existence of the world to the divine and everything else to science, but it later cut out the divine altogether as it attempted to use various comical scientific theories to explain existence itself.

Obviously, with the wholesale philosophical removal of the divine, man’s search for the meaning of existence became pointless, as the final statement and obvious conclusion of modernism was that existence itself is meaningless. This was the spark that started the fire of the postmodern viewpoint. With the loss of order and meaning provided by the divine, and with science saying that there is no meaning, art and culture fragmented into many different factions, one saying, “We must now create our own meaning,” and another, “We must now create art that is without meaning to reflect our true state,” and another, “We must transcend our current states to find meaning in a higher plane of existence,” and still another, “Each of these is correct in its own way.”

This is of course, a topic for another post, another time. What I’d like to address today is the future of art and culture.

The Redemptive Cycle

You’ll probably have observed sometime in your life that much of creation is governed by cycles. Again, not to go into too much detail, some of these things include the seasons, day and night, the tides, the phases of the moon, the human sleep cycle, along with the menstrual, respiratory, and circulatory cycles, the electric current we use today, along with most machines used to turn various forms of energy into actual work. Also, light and sound and every form of broadcast signal. All of these things are governed by cycles, and they are just the tip of the iceberg.

Much of what we humans consider beautiful in music and drama is governed by cycles. Music will cycle in theme and verse. Drama will go up and down in tension on a micro scale while the whole plotline builds tension and resolves on a macro scale. In fact, as the postmodernist viewpoint languished from lack of meaning, “postmodernist art” discarded this cyclical structure and beauty in reflection of a lack of meaning.

But the world isn’t really like that. The world does have meaning. Cycles do appear throughout creation. In fact, if you look at the Bible’s account of existence, man was created in God’s image (at the top of the cycle), but then fell (the downward turn) and was condemned to die (bottom of the cycle), and was redeemed by Jesus to live forever with God (back to the top of the cycle). The entire existence of man can be defined as one full cycle.

This recurring theme, the cycle of God, reflected in nature and man, is what I like to call the Redemptive cycle.

So What’s Next?

I stated at the beginning of this article that my intention was to look forward to the next direction art and culture would take, the next viewpoint shift we have ahead of us. Believe me, everything before was necessary as exposition for this.

You have likely already deduced the connection between the evolution of worldviews presented in the first section of the article and the examination of cycles in the second. Culture and art has been, up until this point, in the first few stages of a full cycle. We started at the top of the cycle with the premodern view, we’ve fallen through the modern view and have hit bottom with the postmodern view. Naturally, the next phase of this cycle will be the upward turn, the redemption of art and culture.

But what will this look like?

Our culture is a crystal vase that has “freed itself” from the confines of its shelf, fallen, and has consequently fragmented into thousands of pieces upon encountering the floor. Each of the pieces has scattered in its own direction, and it simply seems hopeless that the once-beautiful vessel of culture and art can ever be put back together again.

The Missing Ingredient

Culture and art likely never will take on their old forms again. Even if we did manage to collect all the pieces, there’s nothing to hold them together, or to prevent them from coming back apart once we got them all into position.

However, if an artist comes along to glue the pieces together, there’s nothing to say art and culture has to be what it was before. When our pieces are put back together, art and culture will be something that it never was, that it never could have been before it was broken. That’s the very nature of redemption.

Perhaps the broken pieces of our vase will be assembled into a beautiful crystal sculpture.

The missing piece is God. If there’s any hope for our broken culture, it is that He will put it back together again.

Please note that the vase/sculpture illustration is borrowed from the 2002 film Joshua.