WND Columnist Complains About Modern Art

Jerry Newcombe complained in a June 7 WorldNetDaily column:

A recent visit to a museum of modern art got me thinking about how much of it is meaningless.

Ecclesiastes begins with these famous words: “Vanity of vanities … All is vanity.” All is meaningless.

As a book in the Bible, Ecclesiastes is a terrific precursor to the Gospel of Christ. It shows us how life apart from God has no ultimate purpose. Ecclesiastes shows our great need for Jesus, who by His broken body and shed blood has purchased peace with God and everlasting life, which He has made available to all who believe.

But, alas, much of modern art today reflects a nihilistic worldview. Much of art today is just “vanity of vanities.”

Some modern art is interesting, but how is a painting with an eye over here and a leg over there and a grotesque uglifying of the human form “art”?

Every time I see eyesores that pass for modern art – for instance, the weird sculptures prominently displayed at some airports – I think, “That artist must be laughing all the way to the bank.” My wife adds, “Why should they call it art when a 3-year-old could create it?”

Dr. Jeff Myers, president of Summit Ministries, which teaches a Christian worldview to youth, has written an upcoming book, “Truth Changes Everything.” For this article, he gave me a sneak peek of the art chapter and permission to quote him.

Myers writes: “I appreciate many works of modern art, but often I’m left wondering what it was about that previous age that give us Michelangelo’s David, while our age’s ‘famous’ works include Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 display of a urinal, entitled ‘Fountain,’ symbolizing that everything is waste to be flushed away. It is impossible not to notice the difference. Today’s attention-getting art exhibits often feature blank canvases or galleries scattered with random objects. According to postmodern author Glenn Ward, this is not a lack of skill, but an intentional effort to ‘disrupt bourgeois fantasies about art.'”

Because our elite class has rejected God, they are left with a purposeless, absurd universe – and their art and writings reek of despair. Such a worldview isn’t creative – it’s anti-creative.

Newcombe then seemed to be arguing for directly representational art:

The New England Primer sold 120 million copies and was used as a textbook for several decades. This little book taught many of our Founding Fathers how to read and even taught them theology. It included the Westminster Shorter Catechism, which is used to this day in many Presbyterian and Reformed churches.

The opening of that catechism famously says: “Q. What is the chief end of man? A. Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.”

Life with God has meaning. Life without God is meaningless.

Newcombe seems to have forgotten what happened the last time a leader openly despised modern art (“degenerate art,” one might call it) and championed classical representations of the human form.