Discouraging Artistic Ability

[Ken]

Ah, but it is challenging! Just not in the way the heathen want it to be. I don't want to be "challenged" to be more sinful. I want to be challenged to be more holy. Take these prayer scenes we are talking about. I find them incredibly challenging, particularly "Grace" by Eric Enstrom. It challenges me to be more of what is being portrayed. More prayerful, more simple. More thankful, and content. To endure to the end, when I am old to be faithful. I do not strive to be inspired by patriotic scenes, nor have my sense of propriety dulled by nudity.

Those old artist were hardly living examples of faith. Should it come as any surprise that some of their art is as anti-God and chaotic as their lives? Why should we find inspiration or be challenged by such products? We also largely reject what modern artists produce in terms of inappropriate pictures, and music. To often these products are a reflection of values that are not of God.

To make money from art, I suppose you need to have a product that a large population finds attractive. As we know, sex sells. So that is what is produced. I expect the same economics were at play down through the ages. These products last forever, they aren't consumed like clothes or food. Each person is only going to buy so much art, and most people are going to buy mass produced art, or used cheap art. The starving artist is a real thing.

I do go to art museums somewhat frequently when traveling with my kids as they are interested. Honestly one rarely sees nudes in art museums that are newer than 500 year-old renaissance paintings. Other than modern expressionist stuff like Picasso or Duchamp’s famous Nude Descending a Staircase, which is barely discernible and certainly not selling sex: https://smarthistory.org/duchamp-descending/

Modern Art is almost never about nudes or sex: https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions

You and I must have been going to different modern art galleries, museums, and festivals over the last decade. A lot of modern art is extremely sexualised and indecent.

I was recently at the Museum of Modern Art with my daughter. The largest and most prestigious museum of modern art in the country. The current exhibits at MOMA are in the link above. Feel free to point out what you find so disturbing. Every one of their exhibits is online. I saw very little that is as you describe. Their most famous nudes on display are probably Matisse’s The Dance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dance_(Matisse) or Picasso’s Girl Before a Mirror: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girl_before_a_Mirror. Perhaps not to your taste. But hardly porn. There are a whole lot more nudes over in the Renaissance section of the Metropolitan Museum with the Botticelli's and Michelangelo’s and such.