Essays in Idleness

Depends what you mean by art. I am aware of some that might be the opposite of redemptive, including all prostituted art, such as commercial jingles and corporate design. Sometimes even that rises to clever, although never to art. On the other hand, some very simple tunes and decorations, that do not even aspire to art, are redemptive.

I was fortunate in childhood, because after Rudyard Kipling and Jules Verne, I did not graduate to The Communist Manifesto. I think I actually resisted demonic inhabitation, when young, although not consistently. Instead, my ideological consciousness was occupied by Education Through Art (1943), by the anarchist, Sir Herbert Read. My father’s had been occupied by Art in Everyday Life (Harriet Irene Goldstein, 1925), and of course, like his father, too, we were all bowled by John Ruskin. Yet not even he (Ruskin) proposed things that were inevitable, and some of his excitements now seem dreary. Outdoor and still life Sunday painting also ran along both sides of my family.

So you could say that I inherited the propensity for being “redeemed by art.” It seems to work on children, and on the mad, as well. At least, the experts have accorded it therapeutic benefits, and it has launched a few schools of immuno-engineering. Moreover, education through art was recommended, i.e. by Plato, in The Republic.

But as various of my contemporaries discovered, it is not a reliable source of income. And when it becomes a reliable source of income, it generally ceases to be art.

So much for nature. The supernatural source of redemption is Jesus Christ, who does not restrict his means of approach. He might even choose art. Ask and it shall be answered, so to speak. The redemption in art is like that in everything else, a religious phenomenon. The aesthetic dimension is, like every other aspect of beauty, sanctity, and truth, not to be sought in artistic fashions.