Lord, I Want to See
Why we need art in the digital age
The season is changing again. The trees outside my apartment are blooming. The air is getting warmer. The days are growing longer. It feels like the earth is once again coming out of its long, cold slumber, stretching, and breathing in new life. I am especially susceptible to an annual case of spring fever. With the change, I take more walks and find myself picking up my pen again and again to jot down a few new lines of poetry. Spring and fall are, in my opinion, the best seasons for poetry.
When I read books written by authors from previous generations, I am always captivated by the way these writers are so intimately acquainted with their physical surroundings. They know the names of plants, take particular care in describing the shape of the land, and have a vocabulary for all manner of interesting crafts and instruments. Many of the technologies of the last century have succeeded at granting us comfort, convenience, and safety by distancing us from the natural world and the limitations it entails. But in doing so, these very technologies have deprived us of numerous beautiful experiences and conditioned us in ways that make it difficult to appreciate beauty or create beautiful works ourselves.
Part of what allows the best writers, and artists in general, to excel at their craft is their attentiveness to what it means to be physically alive in the world. Great artists demonstrate a keen sensitivity to their physical environments and the human experience of it. That poses a problem for those of us who wish to be great artists in a day in which most people spend much of their time immersed in a digital world rather than a physical one.
As I have written about before, digital media tends to diminish physical experiences. Not only do digitally curated relationships via media platforms operate as insufficient substitutes for embodied relationships, the very time and attention they demand take us away from the embodied world and condition us to conceive of ourselves in disembodied ways. When I am sitting on my phone texting with a friend, their physicality, as well as my own, becomes virtually irrelevant. In fact, I begin to regard my own physicality—the time it takes to type a message, the crick in my neck from staring down at my phone—as unnecessarily limiting. A society immersed in digital media increasingly regards the body and the material world in this light.
Our material environments and physical experiences nourish our art. The physical world is filled with beauty. But if we are not careful, digital media will form us into people who are scornful of our own physicality and incapable of slowing down enough to revel in the beauty of every ordinary moment.
Excellent art does not only show us beauty, it also teaches us how to see it and attend to it in our everyday lives. That is why it is valuable for everyone, not only artists, to seek out great art. In a digital age, we should read books and poetry, watch plays, attend concerts that awaken us to the beauty of our physical environments and experiences, and so enrichen it. Likewise, artists should work against the current of digital society by creating works that celebrate the beauty of the created world and thus encourage communion with it, rather than escape from it.
Despite the ideals touted by a digital age, people are hungry for physical encounters with beauty. Just this last month, Broadway broke box office records with its plays “Hamlet” and “Good Night, and Good Luck,” a play written by George Clooney. People are flocking to see art in person because we are embodied creatures, and we want to experience art that speaks to the whole of our humanity, including our physical experiences of the world.
I sense that in the near future, just as analog is coming back, so also will more embodied artistic expressions make a resurgence. I hope that is the case, and I pray that the church will be leading the charge. After all, the great drama which we profess involved a transcendent God putting on flesh so as to make a spectacle of death and overcome it. Now that’s a good show.