{"id":41604,"date":"2021-03-30T21:45:27","date_gmt":"2021-03-31T02:45:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=41604"},"modified":"2021-03-30T21:45:27","modified_gmt":"2021-03-31T02:45:27","slug":"its-just-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2021\/03\/its-just-art\/","title":{"rendered":"Point: It\u2019s just art"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hezekiah didn\u2019t consult with artists or historians before destroying the bronze snake<\/a> Moses had made. He didn\u2019t even try to preserve it somewhere else for its cultural value.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Art won\u2019t save you. Great art can be used to promote awful things. I say that as someone who likes art, particularly religious art. Religious literature, religious music and the cathedral as Gesamtkunstwerk<\/em> have all inspired a great deal of awe in me. I\u2019m certainly not an iconoclast. But maybe, to a certain degree, the iconoclasts had a point.<\/p>\n

I recently had the opportunity to attend the temple after a year of temple closures and while temples are still not yet fully open. That required a four-hour drive in each direction on roads that could be hazardous if the weather didn\u2019t cooperate (and at times it didn\u2019t). Our temple is one of the newer and smaller ones, and the design is not unique. But with the temple open only to those attending for their own ordinances (and just enough guests to fill out a socially-distant session), this was a rare opportunity for a dozen people.<\/p>\n

People leapt at the chance. Not me; family history isn\u2019t my passion, and I would have been happy to let someone else have the opportunity. But since it was my own child attending the temple for the first time, that wasn\u2019t an option. I don\u2019t dislike the temple\u2014every time I\u2019ve gone has been a profound experience, and it was again this time, too. We encounter God in the temple in a way unlike any other in our spiritual practice.<\/p>\n

Our temple doesn\u2019t have any murals or distinctive artwork that I\u2019m aware of, but I\u2019ve certainly enjoyed discovering murals in other temples. If it were up to me, I\u2019d put murals in all the temples. But in terms of priorities for going to the temple, \u201cadmiring murals\u201d is far down the list, and dispensable. The people who seized the opportunity to make the long drive to the temple that day weren\u2019t there for the artwork.<\/p>\n

The brazen serpent, no mere work of art, had been instituted by Moses himself as an implement of salvation from death<\/a> in which we see a foreshadowing of Christ\u2019s crucifixion<\/a>. But Hezekiah demolished it anyway because it was becoming an object of worship in itself. I don\u2019t think anyone\u2019s about to burn incense to Minerva Teichart\u2019s murals (although in light of some reactions, one does start to wonder). I\u2019m glad to hear there\u2019s a plan to preserve them. But compared to the temple ordinances, the murals are unimportant. They\u2019re just art. Teichart created murals not to be displayed in the temple, but to serve the temple. They were created for a space in which art could never be equal or even comparable in significance to the sacred ordinances conducted there. Moved to another space, we can still imagine Teichart\u2019s murals in their original setting. But to make the murals inseparable from the sacred space that housed them would not only undermine the purpose of that space\u2014by hindering the alignment of the temple with new needs and updated ordinances\u2014but also undermine the artwork\u2019s original intent to serve that sacred space.<\/p>\n

There is value in art, but we can\u2019t let art become the basis for a hierarchy of temples: large versus small, central versus periphery, historical versus modern, architected versus iterated. The temples are not houses of God: the<\/em> temple is a<\/em> house of God. In a real sense, the temple ordinances bring us to the same place, no matter which temple we may be physically present in. If magnificent artwork and exquisite restoration of original craftsmanship are obscuring that fact, then we should pluck them out\u2014or at least move them to an appropriate museum space.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

Check back tomorrow for Chad\u2019s counterpoint. Aspects of the temple not for public discussion are not particularly relevant to this topic, but please consider yourself reminded. I\u2019m also not interested in cranks, crackpots, conspiracy theories, or insults directed at people or things I care about, and I will delete comments along those lines without a second thought or a trace of remorse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hezekiah didn\u2019t consult with artists or historians before destroying the bronze snake Moses had made. He didn\u2019t even try to preserve it somewhere else for its cultural value.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":67,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41604","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-politics"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41604","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/67"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41604"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41604\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41605,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41604\/revisions\/41605"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41604"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41604"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41604"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}