ART & SOUL L A U R E N F. W I N N E R
The Art Patron Five years ago, I gave a lecture on memoir at a small Christian school in the northeast. The talk went pretty well, and many people in the audience had read Girl Meets God, the memoir that recounts a year shortly after my conversion from Judaism to Christianity. Afterward one of the audience members approached me. She said that she had enjoyed my book and had learned a lot about Judaism from it. But she was very disturbed by one passage, which she flipped to in her copy of the book. It was marked by a big black “X” in the margin, and an even bigger black question mark. The passage in question was my discussion of the first time I ever spent money on art, which was a paper cutting of Ruth 1:21 by a contemporary Jewish artist named Diane Palley. I purchased this paper cutting at a very particular moment: a season in which I was trying to understand what kind of relationship (if any) I could still have with Judaism; a time during which, in ways not always easy to articulate, I deeply mourned my own rejection of the Judaism in which I had grown up. In the midst of that mourning, the Book of Ruth came to have a lot of meaning for me. Ruth is, after all, a story about conversion. I found myself pondering Ruth’s place with her new family and people and wondering about the losses she had sustained on her way there. I paid $900 for Diane Palley’s paper cutting. It still hangs by my bed as part of an effort to make sense of my conversion and the losses it entailed. The woman at the lecture said she was disturbed by my willingness to spend that much money on a piece of art. I think that she felt I was too glib and flippant in narrating that purchase, that I hadn’t demonstrated any awareness of
the privilege entailed in dropping the equivalent of two months’ rent on a piece of art.“How, in terms of Christian ethics,” she asked,“can you justify spending that money on art when there are poor people to be fed?” I have pondered her question many, many times: $900 is a lot of money to a broke grad student — it’s a lot of money for just about anyone, except perhaps for the artist who had to buy the paper, pay for health insurance, and generally keep body and soul together. The woman’s concern that one perhaps ought not to spend extravagantly on art when there are poor people to be fed is, it seems to me, both insightful and problematic. It is a variation of a longstanding trope that tacitly criticizes the excesses of European cathedrals. Money for stained glass windows? Gold altars? Elaborate stone carvings? When there are starving
Christians are called to live out of an ethic of abundance. children around the corner? Scandalous! This is just one of the themes that has given many in the world — and many in the church — the impression that Christians, or at least Protestants, are hostile to the arts. At the same time, there was, in my interlocutor’s concern, an important challenge.To be honest — and this is not language I use very often — I think the Holy Spirit was speaking to me through that woman. I do not think the Holy Spirit was telling me never to spend money on art. But the conversation was an absolute awakening to my own privilege. Art requires a person to pay the artist, and on occasion I have been privileged to be that person. I honestly often do not know what to do about that privilege. I tried for a two-pronged response: on one hand, to take my interlocutor PRISM 2 0 1 0
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seriously as a messenger speaking on behalf of the God who became poor himself; on the other, to undertake my obligations to that God and to the poor people in my neighborhood within the framework of what we might call a eucharistic ethics of abundance.The God who impoverished himself is also the God of abundance, and somehow, perhaps at times nonsensically, Christians are called to live out of an ethic not of scarcity but of abundance — an abundance that extends both to the homeless neighbor and to the artist neighbor. Beyond that, there is always a bit of self-justification involved when I purchase art. I can hardly call myself a “patron,” but there is a certain satisfaction in knowing that my one splurge purchase of the year has gone to support an artist who in all likelihood is struggling to make ends meet and to make art. And then there is this.The next time I feel like purchasing art, perhaps I should make that purchase with and for my community by buying a piece of art with and for my local church, for example. Or at the very least, I should take the art that hangs in my house as one more prompt to hospitality. I love the paintings on my walls, and I should share them with other people by welcoming people into my home. It’s one thing to talk in an abstract or even theological way about “supporting the arts.” It’s quite another to write a check for a piece of sculpture or a tapestry. This is a very concrete, practical piece of what it means for the church to support the arts: people with disposable income choosing to spend money on art; people budgeting and saving and supporting artists. Q This essay was adapted from chapter 5 of For the Beauty of the Church: Casting a Vision for the Arts (Baker Books, a division of Baker Publishing House, 2010), edited by W. David O.Taylor. Used by kind permission of the publisher.