How authentic? How vulnerable?

Just be honest

I often talk about and look for authenticity in the artist I know and appreciate. I have already written here about being vulnerable as both the artist and the viewer. It is the only way to have a relationship and a functional community. In a certain way, who you are will come out, no matter how much you try to be covert about yourself. Remember, out of the abundance of the heart. And as recent news and history has shown, no matter how much you try to, not just hide or keep from, but, deceive others about who you really are, one day you might get caught. Those ramifications can be catastrophic. Might as well be honest.

Validity

In Francis Schaeffer’s essays “Art and the Bible”, he discusses one of his standards for art, ‘Validity’.

By validity I mean whether an artist is honest to himself and to his worldview or whether he makes art only for money or for the sake of being accepted.

Authenticity is a necessary quality, but can be easily misunderstood. Performers don’t have paint and canvas or words and paper between them and the audience. They are the work. It can often be devastating for a young actor to get even the simplest of notes from one’s director. I tell theatre students it is important to have a bit of healthy distance between who you are and what you do. For any creative to receive negative critique can be heart wrenching. As much as one’s work has to come from within, it doesn’t define you, you define it. It has to come from you, but it isn’t you. We are made in the image of God, but we are not God.

[Consider as a side note, though. As much as it causes us pain when someone is critical or even destructive with our own work. Do you think God has similar feelings when we treat His creation similarly? Just something to think about.]

You can’t create as someone else, you can only create as you. You can study and learn from other artists, and you should. But it does no good to create as Rothko. At best you would simply be quoting him. At worse you would be a forger, as Han van Meegeren was with regard to Vermeer.

Han van Meegeren was so good at forging Vermeer that he could pass off work as a Vermeer. One work was even considered Vermeer’s greatest (in hindsight is now obviously not a Vermeer). Of that work, after getting caught, Meegeren said:

“Yesterday this picture was worth millions of guilders, and experts and art lovers would come from all over the world and pay money to see it. Today, it is worth nothing, and nobody would cross the street to see it for free. But the picture has not changed. What has?”

What has, indeed.

Guitar struggles!

I am an admirer of the Jack White school of art making. In the movie It Might Get Loud he says you have to have a fight with your guitar and win. You have to have a struggle. A director I am currently working with, in discussing a musical we are working on, likes to call the Blues the “roux” that almost all contemporary music is based on, whether jazz, pop, rock, hip hop, r&b, even country.

The struggle is a true universal everyone can relate to. In a very real sense, to me, this is the point of knowing what sin is. Not so we can accuse others (isn’t there already an accuser?) But so that we can all relate and understand each other’s struggles. How else can we sincerely weep when our neighbor weeps, rejoice when they rejoice? Sure, we can sympathize, but how much more significant when we can empathize. And how much more important is hope when there is struggle?

OK, but how honest?

How authentic and vulnerable should we be, or are even called to be? Let’s look to David in the Psalms. Glenn Kaiser calls David the original bluesman. David was an open book in his Psalms. People didn’t just see or hear about his problems, doubts, reflections, fears, and hope, they sang about it! In “church”! For all the grief contemporary worship music receives, how many hymns are as authentic and vulnerable as David’s Psalms? How many songwriters of any time, much less today, are willing and able to dare be this honest?

Psalm 51:1 For the director of music. A psalm of David. When the prophet Nathan came to him after David had committed adultery with Bathsheba. Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love; according to your great compassion blot out my transgressions.

David did not need a gossip columnist to write of his wrong doings. He put them out for everyone to read and sing about! That is our challenge today, not just as artists, but as humans made in the image of God.

We don’t need to fight over culture, we don’t need to accuse or point out sin in others. We need to be willing to point out our own sin, not others’. And of this, I am the greatest trespasser. Lord have mercy on me, a sinner.

Joe