Sidney and High Modern Art

Since I consider myself to be an aspiring artist in various mediums, I am very interested in Sidney’s claims about poesy. It seems to him that art ought not to exist unless it can lead to moral goodness and positive emotion. Our culture does not value the moral excellence of art, but rather the brokenness it expresses. More popular art challenges our notions of morality with likeable but terrible characters. It makes us sympathetic with the lowest form of humanity. The hurt and fallen state of humanity, the tragedy of existence, these are the things that we claim for high art since the rise of Modernism. When I think of the idea of art for art’s sake, I think of a quote I heard once by Beckett. Someone asked him who Godot was, and he replied that if he had known, he would have put it in the play. According to Sidney, the play would have been deficient in its conception. The excellence of a work of art he said is in the idea. The good poet had the knowledge and wisdom of the philosopher and the examples of a historian. Beckett was not a philosopher though one could argue that he did present and form of example, absurd as it is. He merely expressed the human condition of waiting for an unknown something that might have the ability to save us from a purposeless existence. I wonder if someone were to create the ideal philosophical-historian piece of art, if our culture would find the artistic value of it. Could it really move us the way that Sidney claims?

I also wonder about how we (those of us that are Christians) can redeem art to represent the hope that we have in Christ. I often find myself wondering about how I want to present life in writing, painting, film, photography, or anything else I might take up.