Looking at Creation

Here’s a passage from Christianity Today by Alan Jacobs that reminded me of Jeremy Begbie's presentation. It's from a review of the work of visual artist Gregory Blackstock:

"…Blackstock's drawings are a pleasant and instructive reminder of a time when the artist had to record the world because there was no other way to document its beauties. Such illustrations may not approach the depth and subtlety of truly "fine" art, but they represent a wonderful union of what the poet W. H. Auden, in an essay on "The Poet and the City," calls the "gratuitous" and the "utile." Auden reminds us that there was once a time when all the arts had a dimension of usefulness: poetry aided the memory, even on as humble a level as "Thirty days hath September," and we should never forget the sheer and astonishing craftsmanship that enabled Bach to crank out all those cantatas, which were invariably useful to the church and as a bonus contain more beauty than seems possible.

As Auden also notes, art has now lost that habit of usefulness and does not seem likely to get it back: when we try to unite the useful and the beautiful, he says, we "fail utterly." It's difficult to imagine a new Piranesi, or an Audubon for the 21st century. We have turned over the task of documenting the world to the various cameras, and for good reason: they perform the task well. But I hope we may occasionally find more Gregory Blackstocks, artists who — unaware that their labors of documentary love are unnecessary — plunge ahead and do their work, thereby reminding us what it means to look, really to look, at the Creation."