It was after his time in the Nazi concentration camps that the Jewish psychologist Victor Frankl stated, “in some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.”[1] That is, not only can suffering have meaning but if it is to have meaning then this meaning necessarily involves sacrifice. Given the integral link between suffering and sacrifice, as well as the notion of Artistic Suffering that I outlined in part 1 and part 2 of this series, I would like to similarly introduce something I call Artistic Sacrifice, a notion which has particularly devolved in our day.
What do I mean by Artistic Sacrifice?
At a basic level, I think we all feel Artistic Suffering in our lives to varying degrees and at different times. However, not all of us seek to “make an offering” of Artistic Suffering through Artistic Sacrifice. In other words, most people feel Artistic Suffering when they view Michelangelo’s Pieta or a beautiful sunset, but once you write a poem about it or make a sketch of it, you are involving yourself in Artistic Sacrifice; when you take your Artistic Suffering, provoked by beauty, and order it towards creating art, you likewise offer an Artistic Sacrifice.
Just as with sacrifice more generally, which entails offering something up, or someone up, to a higher cause or end (cf., this podcast on the subject of sacrifice), Artistic Sacrifice entails the sublimation of Artistic Suffering to a higher end, or an ultimate cause, which goes beyond the individual artist, even though the sacrifice is necessarily imprinted with the artist’s idiosyncratic style.
It is my belief that whenever someone is moved to create an artwork—that is, to become an artist in a formal sense, whether through creating a painting, a poem, or a film, etc.—Artistic Sacrifice is involved, and is even inescapable. In the wake of modern art, however, Artistic Sacrifice has changed; it has in fact devolved. And since artistic sacrifice has devolved, and I speak here generally, I also believe that art has devolved.
In his work The Invention of Art, Larry Shiner makes the point that in the modern age, art, while once an integral aspect of religion, has become something separate from, and equal to or greater than, religion. More bluntly, modern art is a religion, and the truest one according to its adherents. Shiner writes, “Most writers who believed in the exalted role of art simply placed it on the same level as religion…Generally, the spiritual elevation of art took the Schillerian form of viewing art as the revelation of a superior truth with the power to redeem.”[2] Additionally, it was Nietzsche who exclaimed, “Art and nothing but art! It is the great means of making life possible, the great seduction of life…the redemption of the man of knowledge…of the sufferer…where suffering is a form of great delight.”[3] What I’m illustrating here is not that aesthetes and beauty-worshipers are incapable of Artistic Sacrifice—we cannot escape sacrificing something—but that their sacrifice is untrue and in false accord with the nature of man, creation, and the divine (at the extreme, I believe beauty-worshipers conflate all three).
Now, the quote by Frankl at the beginning of this article has seemingly nothing to do with art. It does, however, have everything to do with the inextricable nature of suffering and sacrifice within the human experience; and since art has for its primary matter the human experience, it has very much to do with art as well. It is through Artistic Sacrifice that the artist can, in the words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “communicate” the human experience of one person, people, or generation to another:
"There is a miracle which they [art and literature] can work: they can overcome man's unfortunate trait of learning only through his one experience, unaffected by that of others. From man to man, compensating for his brief time on earth, art communicates whole the burden of another's long life experience with all its hardships, colors, and vitality, re-creating in the flesh what another has experienced, and allowing it to be acquired as one's own."[4]
It is this breakdown in artistic communication which has undermined the modern art movement. The artist who embodies the theories of modern art undermines his ability to communicate through Artistic Sacrifice, and instead creates a type of artistic soliloquy which few, or perhaps no one, can understand, for, “once they lower their eyes from the light of the highest truth down to the world of darkness below,” Philosophy says to Boethius, “they…become confused by destructive emotions."[5] Most of the time, the modern artist has only destructive emotions to sacrifice, and he offers them up to false gods, or perhaps even worse, to himself.
I don’t mean for this article simply to be a diatribe against modern art, however, and there’s not much good in diagnosing a disease without seeking its remedy. While I do believe there are good things that have come out of modern art, they are neither the focus of this article nor the next. Here in this article, I have sought to frame the issue and diagnose the disease: there is such a thing as Artistic Sacrifice within the realm of art and beauty, and this sense of sacrifice has devolved in the modern and post-modern age. My next article will seek to explore Artistic Sacrifice further and to propose a remedy to its current corruption.
[2] The Invention of Art, p. 194
[3] Found in The Invention of Art, p. 195.