Someone has to Stand Up for Art

​The movie “Monuments Men” was a more-or-less-true-to-life story about Allied officers who went into Europe as World War 2 was winding down in order to save... a bunch of paintings.
True, it’s not exactly Saving Private Ryan. Here’s one response to such a story: “Wait a minute; millions of human beings were dying! Why would anyone waste any time or energy on a bunch of paintings when human lives were at stake?”
I want to take a moment to recognize the basic justice of this question. If you saw a person about to fall off a cliff, and ten feet away you saw a painting by Vermeer about to fall off the same cliff, would you go save the person, or the painting?
Put that way, the question should answer itself. Any human is worth more than any work of art, and the reason is theological; Ephesians 2.10 famously says that “we are his [God’s] workmanship...” [literally, poem, artwork]. This tells us that we are masterfully crafted expressions of God’s creative nature.
So think of the cliff scenario as two artistic masterpieces of unequal worth in equal danger. But what would happen if you change the situation slightly? Let’s say that there are a dozen people standing at the cliff’s edge watching the painting and the person about to fall. Most of the people rush over to help the human being, of course. Is there any reason that even one of them would be justified in rushing over to grab the painting?
Art is an enormous topic with lots of controversial opinions floating around inside. But if we keep the discussion theological (for the sake of the argument) we can see a pretty direct line between the artwork expressed in creation – the way God molded earth and clay into an anthropoid shape before he breathed his life into it – and the way we human beings put care and concern into the things we produce; whether it’s someone taking pains to craft a door that will fit into the doorframe on the front of their house, arranging an outfit that will complement one’s figure and represent their own aesthetic, or creating a visual impression on a canvass with paint. JRR Tolkien called us ‘sub-creators’; men and women who make because we were made, who are objects of the great Subject, who express ourselves in myriad creative ways because God has expressed his ultimate creativity in us.
From this point of view, any work of art has the potential to be an homage to God as the divine Artist, and anyone who feels the impulse to preserve artwork may potentially do so as an act of service toward God.
Of course, no one would ever be justified in saving a piece of art in lieu of saving a human being. But if, in the conflagration of a world war, with millions of lives being thrown into the conflict in order to oppose evil, a few men stand up in front of the altarpiece and say “This, too, deserves to be preserved” how can anyone argue?
After all, the Nazis approached the art of the conquered European nations exactly the same way they approached its populations: They would either own it for their own purposes, or completely destroy it. There is a disturbing and telling similarity between the Nazi impulse to quickly end the lives of their perceived enemies before they lost the war, and their impulse to abolish every piece of art before they lost the war. To save the artistic heritage of Europe was to oppose Hitler's agenda.
And we might also ask on behalf of the survivors, those few who were able to be reunited with their lost treasures, what it means to them to have been reunited with a particular family heirloom. What about those candlesticks which belonged to their mother? That small portrait which hung in their father’s study? The print which used to be in their grandmother’s room? How might they respond if we were to ask them whether art is worth saving?
On the face of it, art deserves to be preserved because it begs to be made, because it is the irresistible desire of the artist or artisan which is an echo of God’s on creativity.
​Of course, once you’ve granted that basic idea, the discussion becomes more specific, because not all art is the same: does all art deserve to be preserved? Which pieces merit our efforts? Who gets to decide? All of a sudden, our little discussion has become a murky one which requires nuance... but that is a topic for another time.