I was intrigued to learn of a recent address on Catholicism and the Arts at the Catholic University of America by Dana Gioia, the Catholic poet who was until recently head of the National Endowment of the Arts.
Gioia commands our respect for his indomitable defence of Catholic art in an increasingly hostile secular fundamentalist environment. His overall analysis is both correct and a wake-up call. In my judgement, however, it also fails to give sufficient credit to some of the very good Catholic art and literature being produced today, much of which is only unknown because it is marginalized by the secular fundamentalist culture. One wonders whether Flannery O’Connor or Walker Percy would have had such easy access to the secular market, were they alive today.
I’ve posted a report on Gioia’s address below:
Former head of NEA says art world and Church need faithful Catholic artists
By PATRICIA COLL FREEMAN
Special to the Standard
Tuesday, March 08, 2011
Dana Gioia, Catholic poet and former chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, speaks on “The Catholic Writer Today” during a Feb. 28 lecture at The Catholic University of America. He will also speak at the 25th annual dinner of the John Carroll Society, on May 7 at the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington.
Faithful Catholics have all but disappeared from the arts in America—leaving the arts “spiritually impoverished” and undercutting the ways the Church “speaks to the world,” according to Dana Gioia, Catholic poet and former chair of the National Endowment for the Arts.
“Catholic artists today are virtually invisible,” Gioia observed in a lecture, “The Catholic Writer Today” he delivered at The Catholic University of America on Feb. 28.
Gioia’s talk was part of a series of events celebrating the January inauguration of the university’s new president, John Garvey. Garvey attended the lecture, along with approximately 200 students, priests, university deans, professors and visitors.
Gioia told the group that the lack of Catholics in the arts is a “paradox,” given the Catholic Church’s long tradition as “patron and mentor” to the arts and the strength of the largest cultural minority in the United States. It is particularly ironic, Gioia added, in a nation where “diversity of culture and ethnicity are actively celebrated.”
But “contemporary American culture has little use for Catholicism,” said Gioia. Anti-Catholicism, he noted, remains “the one respectable form of intellectual bigotry.”
Gioia compared the dwindling numbers and influence of Catholic artists to the modern exodus of the “upwardly mobile” out of the nation’s immigrant, big city neighborhoods.
Young Catholic artists no longer see their religion as a “core identity” in spiritual or aesthetic terms—but something to be “hidden or discarded” to achieve success in a secular and “increasingly anti-religious” arts culture, he said.
In the mid-20th century, believing Catholics played a “prominent, prestigious” role in the arts, specifically literature, Gioia explained. He included Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Hisaye Yamamoto, Tennessee Williams and Thomas Merton.
Along with the British Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, J.R.R. Tolkien and Dorothy Sayers, Gioia said Catholic writers became “the center of American and British letters”—and were covered and published by the best secular and Catholic journals and presses.
“Catholicism was not only seen as a world view consistent with a literary and artistic vocation,” Gioia noted, but even “the most naturally compatible world view for an artist, and it was never surprising to hear that some writer had converted.”
Today, most cultural critics, Gioia said, would be unable to name a single, major, living American artist for whom Catholicism is “a central, positive force in their art and ideas.” Yet, they could identify “an anti-Catholic ex-Catholic or ex-Catholic who writes about the faith that he lost” or a few “cultural Catholics,” he said.
The schism between Christianity and the arts has resulted in two “vast impoverishments” for the arts world and the Church, Gioia observed.
Losing “a refined and rigorous sense of the sacred” and 2,000 years of Christian symbolism and tradition, the American arts are spiritually bereft, Gioia said. What remains are “shallow novelty” and “lost cost nihilism.”
“Once you remove the religious as one of the possibilities of art . . . you don’t remove the hungers of either the artist or the audience,” Gioia explained. “You satisfy them more crudely with the vague, the pretentious and the sentimental. You replace Flannery O’Connor with ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer.'”
Meanwhile, the “loss of the aesthetic sensibility,” he said, has weakened the Catholic Church’s ability “to make its call heard in the world”—as it did previously through artists like Dante, Michelangelo and El Greco.
The weakness is evident, he said, in churches with “graceless architecture, their banal and formulaic painting and sculpture, their awkward and often ill-conceived music” and in liturgies which are “often not seraphic but pedestrian.”
Gioia called Catholics to regain their place in the arts and “transform” the common cultural life—using faith, hope and ingenuity.
“It is time for Catholic writers and intellectuals to leave the homogenous, characterless suburbs of the imagination and move back to the ‘big city,’ where we can renovate those remarkable districts of the imagination which have such grace and personality, such strength and tradition,” Gioia stated. “It is time to renovate and reoccupy our own tradition.”
With faith, the Catholic artist can replace the “cynicism” pervading modern arts, he said. Also key is hope in “the possibility of art and one’s own efforts.”
“But the writer also needs good works—good literary works,” Gioia added. That means “to write superbly, to create powerful, expressive, memorable works of art”—with a “personal passion for perfection” and honesty in depicting “the material world while also reveling behind it in another invisible and eternal dimension.”
Following the talk, there was a question and answer period covering topics from the morality of art to Catholic themes in the TV show, “Lost.” To a question on the role of government in the arts, Gioia—who was NEA head from 2003-2009—said, “If you’re going to have a National Endowment for the Arts, your job is to reach all of America . . . and not to marginalize people of faith who constitute the majority of Americans.”
I am sorry if this sounds disrespectful, but the question glares in neon letters: Where were you, Dana Gioia, head of NEA from 2003-2009, when the Catholic absence from the arts which you describe was happening? Where were you when this anti-Catholic “intellectual bigotry” was manifested in the arts? Where were you when it was necessary for Catholic laity to stage protests against overt and disgusting child pornography (the infamous “Men and Boys” exhibit) sponsored by the NEA? When outright profanity was funded and encouraged by the NEA, and anti-Catholic, anti-Christian “art” was overtly celebrated by that organization headed by you? Where were you?
There are many sources of ostracism and persecution of Catholic art and letters, some of which are shamefully among Catholics themselves, but the NEA has been THE government-sponsored secularization instrument (not at all unlike that in the former USSR) which has forced Catholic writers and artists to choose between abandoning their “core identity as Catholics” and thereby produce work necessarily inferior, or to abandon that “passion for perfection” needed for authenticity.
I would be happy to be corrected in my reaction to Gioia’s address. But just now, I’m offended to the point of revulsion.
He received the Laetare Medal from Notre Dame last year and gave an absolutely spectacular speech. Frankly, I had never heard of him before then. And while he might not mention the promising work of those Catholic artists who do exist, how visible are they? Many of these seem to be relatively small-batch liturgical artists, architects, sculptors, iconographers, producing beautiful works that most people, even most Catholics, have no idea exist. There is little opportunity for them to reach the wider society, sadly.
Would like to recommend to anyone who isn’t familiar with his work, the beautiful silhouette paper-cutting art of Dan Paulos. I can’t leave a link directly, but it can be found at Trinity Stores. Once there, follow the links on the left to learn about silhouette art and this artist, and click on the black and/or blue images on his bio page that will take you to the various prints of his work…
They’re all beautiful. Dan Paulos was a student of the late artist Sr. Mary Jean Dorcy; some of their silhouettes are also featured in a book by Sr. Wendy Beckett, In the Midst of Chaos, Peace – published by Ignatius Press.