the middle way, again

I've been reading a book by British theologian N.T. Wright called Surprised by Hope. I'm never very good at reading non-fiction, but his discussion of beauty and art at the very end of the book interested me. He identifies a trend in contemporary art that we've talked about before: "[contemporary art] responds to ugliness with more ugliness....a kind of brutalism that under the guise of realism simply expresses futility and boredom."

That is so true. Under the guise of realism, contemporary art is often about unrelieved ugliness, brutality, and futility. I'm reading short stories again in preparation for teaching a short story class, and when you read some of these stories, you'd be hard pressed to believe that there is one single honest, responsible, or compassionate person on the planet. Everything's a mess.

And it is. You don't have to watch the news for long to realize that on a large scale, everything's a mess. But to counter that, every day I see people who are kind and compassionate and taking care of their kids and not taking drugs and shouldering their responsibilities in the face of bad odds.

Who's being unrealistic? The person concentrating only on the absolute worst that life can be, or the person concentrating only on the best?

Of course, truly realistic art would hold both these poles in tension with each other, interacting with each other, playing off each other. Despair, futility, and boredom (it is perhaps Wright's most profound moment in this discussion that he includes boredom) would be tempered by the equally realistic knowledge that the world abounds with hope and beauty, and that human beings can be and often are kind and compassionate.

Wright casts this discussion in specifically Christian terms of redemption and resurrection, but I'm more and more convinced that it's a wider discussion than that. I'm not enough of a theologian to delve into that here, but it's an interesting thing to think about. Good book, if it's a topic that interests you--although the discussion about art is only a small part at the end.