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The Thing Itself: Art and Poverty, Part 1

The Thing Itself: Art and Poverty, Part 1

Last updated on: June 8, 2015 at 1:00 am by Gregory Wolfe

The Thing Itself: Art and Poverty, Part 1 2015-06-02T15:12:41-07:00 Gregory Wolfe

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The following is adapted from a presentation given at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in Berkeley in January 2015 during a convocation on the topic “Blessed Are You Poor: What Does It Mean to Be a Poor Church for the Poor?”

I am profoundly grateful that the witness of Pope Francis has spurred so many of us to rethink our relationship to the poor and marginalized. There are a dozen directions to take this topic, depending on how we define poverty. We have spoken of it as an evil—a condition to be ameliorated whenever possible—and we have spoken of it as a virtue—a habit that embraces simplicity, freedom, and sacrifice.

It is, of course, both.

Poverty is the kind of topic that makes someone like me uncomfortable. After all, my bailiwick is the world of high art—literature, painting, sculpture, classical music, and so on. I inhabit a world where the production and certainly the consumption of art largely exist in a culture of privilege.

Some might say that I am entirely cut off from the poor—that their natural habitat is in an altogether different neighborhood, that of popular culture. But here we immediately bump into other complications and ambiguities. What we call popular culture today bears little relationship to its past incarnations. If you want to describe art that arises from the life of real communities bound together by history and shared experience, the better term would be folk culture.

By way of contrast, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that much of what we call pop culture today has its origins in conference rooms at Sony Corporation. Contemporary pop culture is a commodified substance, generic and syncretistic—so much “product” to be moved. And much of it is devoted to celebrating what the poor lack: money, power, and fame. The ironies here would be delicious if they were not so tragic.

This is the sort of thought that makes me occasionally wonder if I need to get in touch with my inner Marxist. The real difference between folk culture and pop culture is that one is made in the plaza or town square from a rich matrix of religious, ethnic, and historical experience, and the other is downloaded. I’m reminded of a line of Andrew Lytle’s written nearly one hundred years ago in an essay protesting the effects of modern industrialism on culture: “Throw out the radio,” Lytle wrote, “and take down the fiddle from the wall.”

Call that a utopian sentiment if you will, but if we are not haunted by that summons to make—rather than merely consume—culture, we’re going to suffer from one of the bleaker forms of human poverty.

The tension between art and poverty is an old one. Consider the famous words of Christ: “For ye have the poor with you always.” It’s worth recalling the context of that phrase: the moment when the woman anoints Christ’s feet with expensive oil. The disciples, do-gooders that they are, immediately object that the money spent on the oil would be better spent on the poor.

But Christ blesses the act. The oil not only cleanses, but also has a rich fragrance, honoring the humanity of Christ with beauty beyond utility. The anointing is wholly gratuitous, which also happens to be one of the fundamental characteristics of art. If art is a free act, not done for utility or gain—if it is truly useless—then its relationship to the world of valuation and the market will always be troubled and unclear. (The classic text on this is Lewis Hyde’s The Gift.)

Our cultural programming, at least in North America, leads us to think of art either as useless or—what amounts to the same thing—as a luxury. But if we really want to care for the poor, the question we should ask ourselves is: what have the poor done with regard to art? Pope Francis speaks constantly about the “santo pueblo fiel de Dios,” God’s faithful holy people. How have they voted with their feet?

The historical record is clear. We would not have the great cathedrals if not for the countless, nameless poor who contributed widow’s mites to their construction. And where there are no cathedrals there are household shrines, murals, depictions of Our Lady of Guadalupe spray-painted on lowriders and tattooed on forearms.

And let’s not have any condescending nonsense about the groundlings at the Rose Theatre coming only for Shakespeare’s bawdy jokes. The climactic scene of Shakespeare in Love had it just right when it depicted the entire audience, from pauper to Queen Elizabeth, as equally riveted by the drama of Romeo and Juliet.

When the privileged think about art we tend to either forget the poor altogether or, if they come to mind, to fall into moralism. We fret that art may be a distraction from justice. But as Elaine Scarry has argued in her book On Beauty and Being Just, the truth is the other way around. Beauty, whether manmade or natural, evokes in us the desire to protect what is both precious and vulnerable.

The problem for religious believers is that we confuse the virtues of piety and asceticism with mere pragmatism. We wring our hands in high-minded angst, focusing guiltily on the dollar value of the art in the Vatican. The faithful poor don’t ask how much art costs but what we have given back to God.

As David Griffith has written, “when we encounter the poor and indigent we project onto them our own deficiencies,” including our obsessions with money, utility, and success—things that have little purchase on the poor. When school budgets have to be cut, the first programs to go are arts-related. Words like global, competition, markets, and technology are given ritual obeisance while words like wonder, attention, and imagination are rarely heard.

Throw out the iPad and grab the fiddle.

To be continued tomorrow.

Gregory Wolfe is the founder of Image and serves as Writer in Residence and Director of the MFA in Creative Writing program at Seattle Pacific University. His books include Beauty Will Save the World and Intruding Upon the Timeless. Follow him on Twitter: @Gregory_Wolfe.

Etching above: Le repas frugal, (The Frugal Repast), Pablo Picasso, 1904.

Our Lady of Guadalupe

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