A recent article from Time touched an area of my life that is presently already smudged up with heavy strokes of yellow highlighter. In Who owns that prayer?, David van Biema discusses pious art, intellectual property, and royalties. Biema notes that huge royalty fees demanded by those holding the copyright of pious art by deceased artists can prevent the message of their work from reaching as wide an audience as they intended.
For me the article opens up questions about what motivates artists and people of faith, and, who we consider to be our provider. Those questions can go really deep. Cash is often king, and huge amounts of the greenbacks (accompanied by any sort of “legit” worldly success) leave most people with the impression that God’s giving the divine thumbs up. And I think that often financial security can be easily substituted or confused as spiritual security. Remember the disciples’ surprise at Christ’s statement about how difficult it is for the rich to be saved? Who than can be saved!
How can an artisan eat? is already a profound riddle to address. Almost as befuddling as how a rich man can be saved. And what about how to create dynamic art that matters? Perhaps the answer to these questions is always already the same. By God’s grace.
I imagine community where Christ, not creativity (or self, ideas, or cash), is king, and where people understand why they have value; but one that is productive and engaged, not lazy and self-absorbed, rather on the cutting edge all things. Such vital faith “awakened or sustained …can be at odds with free market economics.”
I think it is with courage that teeters on the verge of both freedom and despair that we need to ask God to strip us of our agendas so we can at once be saved from our own egos and in the same stroke not fail to live up to our potential as sons and daughters of God.
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Just browsing through. Good post Andrew. Your writing leaves the reader asking a lot of questions, which I think is usually better than answering them all!