Why 'Fine Art' is Unchristian

'Fine art' wishes to distinguish itself from other forms of art (e.g. folk arts, various crafts, propaganda, commercial art, et cetera).  It seems to do so nominally by appealing to some higher, 'finer' level of quality, but actually does so by its underpining philosophy.  This philosophy is unchristian, being materialistically utilitarian, Romantic, and Kantian in spirit.

Fine art claims the categories of sculpture, painting, architecture, poetry, and music as the highest forms of artistic expression.  These expressions in their most pure form are famously labeled as being 'art for art's sake'.  This claim implies that art that exists for any other sake is of a baser nature: less pure art.  However, this is not actually claiming that the purest art is of no end whatsoever.  The actual claim is more complex than this. 

The 'art for art's sake' claim is actually that the finest art must be an ultimately non-practical object (not a spoon, a latch, or a lightbulb) to be beheld and experienced by the viewer.  This pure beholding is not so much for the viewer to be taught, but rather that by interacting with the art through the senses and emotions, the viewer is enlightened in some way.  Although architecture is inconsistently excused from not being non-practical, such a mode of being implies that fine art must not be useful in the material sense.

This reduces utility to mere physical practicality, not utility toward any general end.  There is in fact an end of fine art: enlightment, where the artist is as the spirit guide in his medium.  However, it denies that this is a proper 'use', and that the only sake of art is that of this experience.  This betrays an awful disdain for the real fleshiness of the spirtual man, and smacks of Jonathan Swift's cloud city of Laputa. The Christian must reorder his mind against this modern error.

Despite this materialistic mindset, such experiencial musing ironically slip into the realm of Romanticism where arbitrary emotions and personal experience are the touchstone of truth.  By placing the emotional experience on a pedestal in this way, it nearly becomes a god. The art does not exist for the sake of a higher truth.  It is for its own sake: expyeriencial enlightment. By elevating art to this level of mystical devotion, it is an idol.

Apollo and Muses by John Singer Sargent, Public Domain

By divorcing art from the great high-priest and image of the invisible God, that is, Jesus Christ, it makes its own priesthood out of its artists.  But this is a shody, discount priesthood. The artist, conjuring and harnessing the Muse, becomes only a therapist for the viewer's emotions.  A consisent truth is not important, for the experience of the senses are deemed 'relative' and 'subjective'.  It is only important for the experience to be experiencially enlightening, or worse, only provoking. 

By relegating this experience to the emotions, the knowing of the truth therein is warped in a Kantian way.  There exists a barrier between the truth and the mind, the senses, and fine art is a wayguide to transmit wisdom therethrough.  True reliability of the senses to access the neumenon is not needed.  Fine art despise the absoluteness of Truth in favor of the keeping a personal truth as experienced in transmission.

Christian art exists for the sake of the love of God.  Any experience of truth is that of God himself truly knowable; Its utility: God's will for the health, pleasure, and salvation of all men.  Note that Christian art does not deny the sake of other ends.  All ends are wrapped together; doors are made for entering rooms just as much as for entering heaven.  Stained glass was made for splitting the light of day into prismatic display just as much as the images it contains manifest the undivided light of God into the storied salvation of the world.

The great medievals of religious art such as Durandus outright shout this message of real symbolism from the rooftops of their cathedrals.  Pillars were not to them mere stone cylinders to support the church, but were as apostles; these pillars were then piously carved with the images of said apostles.  To them, the implict and explicit, the practical and experiencial were all synthentic and of incremental depths.  The truth of the Church is whole and consistent on all levels

The Christian artist creates as the Father does.  He teaches by neither pedantic didactics nor truthless leasons.  He does not release his students into the wilderness of their own emotions to scry out their own bit of truth, but gives storied layers of lessons guiding the whole person into actual revealed truth through ritualized living.  In Christian art, nothing is too insignificant to be merely practical, nothing too austere to be unreal.

The gross symbolism of fine art in comparsion is shallow and ultimately irrelevant or it is at least disingenuous.  It aspires to be of the same depth as the Christian but is throttled by its own philosophy.  Fine art must be for its own sake, cannot be synthetic with the practical, and cannot be of consistent transmitted truth.  Further, the beholder of fine art cannot be ritually lead by practical use of the object.  It must be solely of an intellectually experiencial nature, provoking the beholder to try to find something true for himself that it can never reveal with explicit certainty.

Thus the errors of the 'fine art' philosophy fashion themselves as this unchristian idol.  Fine art's 'art for art sake' canonizes its one experiencedness as its end while simultaneously denying the ultimate end of all things, God, as certainly knowable, as the 'True'.  In contrast, Christian art is folk art, arising from the gifted knowledge of God himself, proceeding by cocreation with man to build up the earth in His glory, and returning all to the Father in the salvation of mankind.  Let no Christian practice 'fine art'.