Art

I couldn't help but notice a lot of really great blogs about the meaning of Easter this year. Funny though, my favorite had only a few words in it, and they were the title of the blog. No, it wasn't blank. It was artwork. I love art, in its many forms. I love pictures and paintings, I love photography, I love dance (mostly watching others dance, I can't dance very well). I love baking - and yes, food is most definitely art. Most of all I love music. Art is, in my book, the second best thing that makes the world worth living in. Even sports are a kind of art, I'd say, but I still can't play raquetball to save my life.

I think people are artwork too. With the whole "postmodern" thing I've been writing so much about lately, it's tough to keep my nose out of a book or my laptop, or to keep from working on it in my head 24/7. But I've noticed that with postmodernism, there's this odd contradiction - value people as artwork, but without their creator. I don't see how art could exist without an artist.

It's like saying that the Sistene Chapel was a random accident, that Michaelangelo wasn't inside laboring for days, weeks, however long, painting away, that it just "happened" and we're supposed to find that beautiful. Or like saying Josquin didn't write the L'homme Arme masses (sorry, I got hooked when I took a medieval music course), or closer to home, like saying John Mayer doesn't create works of art each time he sings a piece of music (regardless of who wrote it - but someone had to write it, right?).

No, art cannot exist without an artist. And I think God is an artist - through and through. The very universe we live in is more than a scientific marvel - it's a work of art. Think of it - indescribable complexity working to make the sun come up each morning, beauty in the intricate molecular interactions of a waterfall, fascination in the way light travels billions of light-years to bring us the night sky we look at, the complex neurobiology involved in the operation of a single human eye.



And without an artist?

I've been asked before why I believe that there's a God. How could I possibly think that there is a God when there's so much science to prove there isn't - that it's all an intricate web of interactions. My answer - you're right, it IS an intricate web of interactions, one that couldn't possibly have happened by chance. Beauty is its own evidence, the universe a testimony to its creator.