Is Great Art Still Possible?

Art balances artistic technique with emotional expressiveness. The more difficult the act of balancing, the greater the art. If artistic technique dominates, we get craft. If emotional experience dominates, we get kitsch. With neither, we get bad art.

With good art, our feelings, positive or negative, are liberated, our emotions resonate. With great art, our feelings, positive or negative, engulf us, our emotions are uncontrolled.¹  We are both moved, and in a state of unease.

Many scholars, mystics and artists have tried to describe the ineffable experience at the intersection of death, sex, and mysticism. Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa succeeded where they all failed – in a marble sculpture no less! Faithfully representing the experience of Theresa² is so overwhelming in person that I had to sort out my conflicting feelings and emotions about the origins, purpose, and the importance of spiritual experience.

Like Theresa, I could not understand this experience, or try to control it. I could only hold the experience. Disturbed, I had to just let these visceral feelings, sacred and profane, exist. Trying to capture a great work of art with the first impression is a mistake. I had to let the experience happen, and seep into my mind.³

Why did Bernini include the sponsors as spectators? Perhaps to flatter them, perhaps it was a financial condition for getting the commission.Whatever the reason, he did have artistic discretion on their portrayal.

He portrayed them as insensitive, even ignoring the drama below. Perhaps the spectators feel they have so much wealth that they can be above life or experience. Or perhaps, like us, they are often so busy with life acquiring wealth, or viewing life as a series of experiences to acquire, they are insensitive to the beauty around them, or the great conflicts of life.  Perchance it expressed his view of art critics and patrons – they are more concerned with expressing their views than seeing what the artist wishes to express.

Theresa has an unworldly experience they will never know because they are too busy. She cares not if observers feel, or even mock her joy or pain. She gets her internal strength from her spiritual experience. The spectators could reduce her experiences to frustration from forbidden sexuality, or the work of the devil. She cares not. The angel’s presence and action reinforces the unworldly randomness of her experiences, divorced from the real, tangible world.

Great Art

While the issue is still unresolved in my mind, my reaction forced me to once again feel the world as a dialectic – an amazingly spiritual place without any obvious purpose or plan. This dialectic is true for both the atheist and the truly religious. Theresa could not make sense out of her vision, and she lived in a religious age. To claim to know God’s plan is an act of spiritual obscurantism. This experience of overwhelming feeling and emotions with an equally overwhelming technique makes this a great work of art.

For the atheist this is Nietzsche’s problem: how to live a meaningful, nihilistic life. For the religious individual: how to live in a world that is not wholly good and is permeated with evil. Both have to face the cruel truth that life is a bunch of probabilities. This work of art, and for me most great works of art, teach you that suffering, joy, and goodness is where you find it, not necessarily in any sacred space. The Burning Bush is an unknown place in the desert, and the Garden of Eden is blocked from us ever returning.

All this arises from the unease that great art gives us, the presence of that unease is the dividing line between the very good and the great.

Faced with adversity, thinking about Bernini’s St. Theresa, I realize that it is up to me, to interpret this adversity into a life affirming statement. I may create something, I may experience something, I may change my attitude to something. Assuming I am conscious, I can choose how I face illness, dying, and death. This has always been true, from the earliest humans to the present.

Like us, St. Theresa lives in a world she cannot predict or fully understand. Better to experience meaning than happiness. Or perhaps, having meaning is happiness.

Great Art still exists.

1. That was the original meaning of passion, to suffer, or to endure something you could not control.
2. The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus, of the Order of Our Lady of Carmel Chapter 29 Sections 16-17
3. Do not worry about my particular choice. Focus on my approach and see if you can find works that match your experience. I picked a realistic pictorial work for two reasons. Other art forms such as music, film, or dance, could certainly provide examples. They are harder to illustrate in a blog. I could have picked an abstract, modern, or contemporary work of art, but the explanation would have been perhaps too idiosyncratic, or esoteric, or even more personal, and therefore harder to explain.