Chapter 10
Phantoms of Stage, Screen, and
Canvas
As I headed north on Robertson Boulevard toward the Makk Gallery in Beverly Hills, I was eager to meet artist Steven Lavaggi. Having heard him described as a "modern-day Michelangelo" and "a positive, spiritual Salvador Dali," I was curious about his style of "visionary painting."
I was not disappointed. The curly-haired artist, displaying a perpetually sunny smile, showed off his "glimpse of glory" cloud series; the "jungle journey" series of man's physical pilgrimage through life: the "beside the still waters" series inspired by the Twenty-third Psalm, and the sleek, streamlined images of his "in the light" series, emerging from darkness into eternal light.
"There is a need for newness all the time," explained Lavaggi, who describes himself as a Spirit-filled Christian. "Younger people are tired of the old 'praying hands' kind of traditional art. They want to look forward, not back. Yet they need to be lifted up to the greater, unseen, kingdom-reality that lies beyond their next paycheck."1
Lavaggi collectors range from a Motley Crue music producer and the Scorpions' lead guitarist to movie-makers and entertainment luminaries.
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"Rock stars and movie celebrities need peace, too," states Lavaggi, adding that he often gives a verbal Christian witness to such notables.
The new dimension in spiritual art (Lavaggi eschews the term religious art) is a subtle witness, "an intelligent, loving sharing of Christ."
Spiritual Dimensions
The risen Christ is also the theme of much of the forward-looking art of Isabel and Edith Piczek. Their large mural paintings, mosaic and ceramic tile murals, and stained-glass windows grace more than 400 buildings in seven countries.
At the age of fourteen, Isabel won the International Grand Award for painting and was soon commissioned to paint a 400-square-foot fresco mural at the famed Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome.
The Piczek sisters share with Lavaggi the belief that people are turning the "spiritual" in painting as they seek reason and reassurance in a world of confusion.
"While abstract art is dying, secular art is turning to 'realism' and photographic art — like a huge glossy photo with gigantic faces," said Edith.2
The theme of "ultimate spiritual art," interjected Isabel, "is God's intention in putting the universe together — what is the divine blueprint?" Isabel, who is also an adept amateur scientist, believes that art and science will draw ever closer in an attempt to answer that question. "the two will come so close they will almost dissolve into each other.
"More and more artists are involved in science. Scientists are also interested in art. They need art for a greater freedom of mind. And art can help all of us grasp the theoretical [side] of physics and mathematics."
In the coming century, the formidable task of art will be to change the "ordinary person into an extraordinary person who can understand beyond the 'usual,' " say the Piczeks. And church art "will do things with light and lines to match the reality of the times."
Thomas Kinkade, a young painter from the Mother Lode town of Placerville, California, uses light to translate his luminous faith into
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an artistic technique that makes parts of his paintings appear to glow. As the exterior light shining upon his landscapes, street scenes, and nostalgic works is dimmed, the illuminated portions of the paintings grow brighter: headlights, street lights, candles, and moonlight on the snow, for example.
Realism in art still attracts a following, Kinkade says, adding that he is a "minister with a paintbrush," using pigment and canvas "to create images that are uplifting and representative of the One who lives inside of me. My goal is to be a strong force in the secular art world — to help reclaim that territory for the gospel."3 Kinkade made his mark early in life, winning recognition in the marketplace as co-author of the Artist's Guide to Sketching, and background artist for the Hollywood fantasy film, Fire and Ice. His works have spiraled in popularity during the early 1990s.
This fresh kind of art should turn on the visually sophisticated, media-savvy twentysomething generation that has seen and heard it all.
Arts Alive
The Old Masters aren't exactly old hat, however. Van Gogh's "Sunflowers" brought in $39.9 million at a recent auction, and his "Irises" later sold for $53.9 million. "These icons of today's renaissance are only one facet of an art boom that bolsters a burgeoning market for quality prints and lesser-known artists," say Naisbitt and Aburdene in Megatrends 2000. They go on to quote economist and art historian Leslie Singer, who says that more people are "collecting art today as a percentage of the population than ever before, even during the Renaissance."4
In fact, Naisbitt and Aburdene confidently predict that the visual and performing arts will enjoy an extraordinary boom in the 1990s. The arts, they say, will "gradually replace sports as society's primary leisure activity."
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To back up their argument, the authors cite the following statistics:5
The arts have already pulled ahead of sporting events in attendance and spending.
Since 1965, American museum attendance has increased from 200 million to 500 million annually. And new and expanded museums are popping up like dandelions.
The 1988-89 Broadway season broke every record in history. And big British musicals like Phantom of the Opera, Les Miserables, and Cats are still packing in audiences across the country. Phantom pulled in $19 million in ticket sales before it even opened. Meanwhile, local theaters are prospering in more than 150 towns and cities.
Membership in the leading chamber music association grew from twenty ensembles in 1979 to 578 in 1989. Regional and local symphony groups are thriving, especially those that feature outdoor summer programs and special festivals highlighting one composer.
Since 1970, U.S. opera audiences have nearly tripled as opera sheds its "for-highbrows-only"image.
Professional dance has grown 700 percent in the United States since 1972, and cities that can't afford a full-time ballet or dance company are cosponsoring them with sister cities.
Too Rosy a Portrait?
But not all analysts are as sanguine as Naisbitt and Aburdene about the arts. There may be some phantoms on the stage, screen, and canvas.
Naisbitt and Aburdene say that lovers of the arts tend to be affluent and well-educated. Although their assertion is no doubt correct, only a minority of our population fits that description. Tax reforms have reduced incentives for making donations to nonprofit organizations — only about 8 percent of which are designated for "arts, culture, and humanities." And the growing populations of black, Asian, and Hispanic Americans will not necessarily perpetuate artistic traditions deeply rooted in Western European culture.
John K. Urice, dean of the College of Fine Arts at Ball State University, is not optimistic about the future role of the arts in education. He sees four trends down the pike:
(1) There will be a blurring between popular culture (entertainment) and high, or fine, art. As a result of communications technology, "culture, art and entertainment will all overlap and be so
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accessible that they will be demystified to the point that education will not be needed."
(2) Economic forces will push schools to "revert to their basic role . . . preparing future employees for the workplace . . . [T]he arts will be integrated into educational curricula only to the degree they can contribute to a future worker's understanding of another culture and thus make him or her more economically efficient."
(3) Taxpayer pressure will force schools to drop the "frills" to become "even more like educational factories . . . there will be less time for bands, art classes, choirs" and other activities. Social agencies and parent groups will have to pick up the slack. So will churches.
(4) "There will be fewer role models for youth who might want to become dancers, musicians, actors, sculptors, or other artists in the traditional sense. Ironically, [with the new technology] almost anyone will be able to make music . . . and computer graphics will stimulate visual art in unprecedented ways."6
The bright spot Urice sees, however, will come from universities. Only universities will have the resources, although limited, to "preserve culture, maintain the arts, and continue the creative traditions through education."7
Urice is speaking primarily about the not-for-profit arts. The picture will be further darkened by more cuts in federal funding for the arts. During the Reagan Administration, the arts budget was reduced by 40 percent.8
Future cutbacks will be triggered by the backlash over 1990 grants by the National Endowment for the Arts for works such as the now infamous photo of a urine-submerged crucifix. Although government funding for religious displays is prohibited, tax dollars can be used, under the guise of art, to denigrate symbols of religious faith.9
While radical artists are painting themselves into a corner, other artists and innovative new forms of commercial art may surge ahead.
"The 'starving artist' is going out of fashion," said Isabel Piczek. "Art is very much wanted. Artists of the future will not be 'glorified clowns.' They will be serious, moral persons."10
Artists, concerned about originality, will team up with museums, mass communications companies, architects, and urban planners.
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The wedding of art with technology will produce more unusual artists like Bran Ferrens. He "designs things so new that names have to be invented for them, at the place where architecture, cybernetics and video come improbably together," writes Jerry Adler in Newsweek. Ferrens's latest challenge is in "virtual architecture" — creating spaces defined by lights, video images, and sound as much as by ordinary walls and ceilings.11 Likely customers for this concept are shopping malls and museums, and perhaps church and parachurch organizations.
Art as Transformation
If you consider art mainly a viewing or delivery system — such as a gallery or museum, an orchestra, or a dance or theater group — be prepared for a new form of do-it-yourself art called transformative art.
In the spring of 1991, the UCLA Extension program presented a six-month "Art as Transformation" course taught by a team of visionary painters, sculptors, musicians, playwrights, psychotherapists, art historians, and assorted spiritual practitioners.
A flyer advertising the two-weekends-a-month program called it "a supportive, nonjudgmental environment" providing "guidance in tapping the wellspring of . . . imagination and creativity." Techniques included guided visualization, active imagination, dreamwork, spontaneous drawing, and ritual.12
Art increasingly will be a spiritual quest, but with an economic foundation securely in place.
Ties between the arts and the media will increase in the 1990s. Not only will major corporations use the sights and sounds of the arts to promote products over the airwaves, but the media will become a prime-time vehicle for delivering blockbuster arts events to your home. The Arts & Entertainment (A & E) network already offers drama, live performances, and documentaries to thirty-eight million households through some 3,000 cable systems.13
TV Land — Soon We'll All Be Wired
Television is the clear leader in the media field. More than 90 percent
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of Americans own TV sets, and VCRs will be in 80 percent of households by 2001. By 1993 more than 60 percent of our homes will be wired with cable TV.14
"Television has radically changed the public discourse," observes church growth expert Lyle Schaller. "In western Kansas, you're not in rural America. In northern Mississippi, you're not in rural America. Regardless of where you are, you're not in rural America; you're in television land."15
Television journalist Bill Moyers asks whether TV can be "a force in the central issue of our time, the search to signify and affirm meaning, open our souls to others" and be a channel for the "biggest story of the century, the struggle to define what it means to be spiritual." That "little screen . . . [is] the largest classroom, perhaps the largest chapel, God has given us in a long, long time."16
Television is also changing the way we perceive, assimilate, and interpret news. The 1991 Middle East conflict appeared on the screen as it unfolded — a "real-time war" — and world leaders bypassed established diplomatic channels and "talked" to each other on CNN. Only seven or eight correspondents covered the Vietnam War on location, but in the Persian Gulf the press was 700 strong. The "fourth estate" poked for angles, speculated on endless "what-ifs," and occasionally published "at rumor's early light."
Ever-improving state-of-the-art visuals, re-creations, and special effects will be used more and more by news producers struggling to get top ratings for their programs. And newspapers and magazines will respond by trying to make their pages look like TV screens, "with more color better graphics, flashy layouts and simulated pictures through digitalized alteration of photos."17 Other pressures, however, cautions attorney-ethicist Michael Josephson, "will cause stories to be shorter, lighter, geared more to gaining and holding the interest of readers rather than enlightening them."18
Meantime, companies are pioneering in the field of interactive TV. Le Groupe Videotron's TVI service comes equipped with a special "zapper" that lets viewers choose what aspects of an event they want to watch. The interactive news program shows twelve headlines and viewers "zap" whichever segment turns them on.19
And in media arts, "interactive" is also on the leading edge. A Los Angeles firm makes a video disc that plays on home TV screens and "takes you on a tour of the Smithsonian and lets you manipulate the exhibits as you stroll through."20
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Music, Movies, and More
A revolution in the music and movie industries is inevitable as well.
Before long, record and disc buyers will be able to manipulate sounds or mix them with other electronic media. An experimental Warner Brothers disc released in 1989 called "Fleetwood Macro" lets fans of the rock group Fleetwood Mac "select songs and videos from a menu and delete instruments so they can play along at home."
Wall Street Journal reporter Michael W. Miller says that someday "even movies may be computerized, and that could transform the way people watch and make entertainment . . . Viewers will load up a movie and have their choice of languages, ratings (a G version for kids, an R version for adults), and maybe even story lines."21 Talk about transformative art!
Donald Kurt, supervising producer for Warner Brothers studios, believes that as home entertainment centers and screening rooms become ever more popular during the 1990s, creative television producers will vie for a larger slice of the shrinking financial pie.
"TV networks are a dinosaur," he said, and syndication of films for later television programming "has dried up." Although in his opinion the extravagances of the 1970s and the 1980s are over, screenwriting "can still be great. The guy who can deliver a good, creative show for less money will be working all the time."
Kurt likes to emphasize values such as "commitment, family, friendship and education" — values he says came through in his movies House Party II, Homicide and The Flash. And he hasn't given up on Hollywood. Religious values can — and will — be instilled, he said in an interview, if the writers convey the message subliminally and subtly, rather than frontally. Comedy and uplifting family films like Driving Miss Daisy will always be in demand, he added, although sex and violence will be there, too, "Because the public demands it."
Blockbusters similar to the 1992 hits Hook and Beauty and the Beast will be around in 2002, Kurt thinks, guaranteed by hype and
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presales promotion. Most of the blockbusters have been rated PG, incidentally. But the trick will be "to make a film economically without losing quality. It's a matter of choices, planning, and an experienced crew," says Kurt.22
Predominantly young people in the twelve- to twenty-four-year-old range and persons of retirement age will be the most likely audiences at movie houses during the late 1990s. According to Kurt, the young like to get out of the house and go to premieres of highly touted pictures — but only in theaters with high-quality sound and projection. And the older set will attend because, presumably, they have more leisure time and spare cash than parents in the forty- to sixty-year-old category.
Fiction writer Bret Easton Ellis's description of the climate at the end of 1990 may give us a clue to what we can expect in future films. At least for those in their twenties, writes Ellis, who at age twenty-six had written three popular novels,
the comedy that audiences respond to wholeheartedly is in blockbuster crash-and-burn epics and horror films, usually after a body has been bloodily dispatched and the hero or villain (twentysomething audiences often root for both) gives us a knowing wink by capping off the slaughter with an ironic fillip. Media-savvy, we are pessimistic yet prone toward fantasy, but it's often a mean-spirited horror-show fantasy: a comic-book version of urban squalor (Batman) or gooey pop-mysticism (Ghost). Since we're so visually sophisticated, these fantasies, though obvious, are densely layered. Fleeting pleasure is found in junk culture . . .
If violence in films, literature and in some heavy-metal and rap music is so extreme that it verges on the baroque, it may reflect the need to be terrified in a time when the sharpness of horror-film tricks seems blunted by repetition on the nightly news.23
Ted Baehr, founder and chairman of the Christian Film and Television Commission, wants Christians to choose the films they see with great care — not only "to avoid filling their minds with cinematic garbage, but also to send a message to Hollywood." If decent movies
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make money and indecent ones don't, then Hollywood will make wholesome films, he reasons.24
And because of tougher competition and the probability that not all three of the major TV networks will survive to the year 2000, the survivors will be searching for wider audiences. This gives the church a major opportunity, Baehr believes, to exert leverage at the box office and influence the industry. He predicts that Hollywood will undergo "an ethical revival" and that the Motion Picture Code may be reinstated in some form by the end of the decade.25
On the music front, rap, MTV, and repackaged versions of works by the "classic" artists of the 1960s and 1970s like Bob Dylan and Cat Stevens will probably hang around for the first half of the 1990s.
The only militant messages that appear headed for the top of the pop charts in the near future are from the new contingent of self-described "radical rappers." Hearing the raps of groups like Laquan, Movement Ex, or Paris, is a foretaste of urban debates on race, education, drugs, and crime, suggests Jon Pareles. Radical rap is evolving fast, and "its vision of America as a racial and economic battleground is apocalyptic," he says.
Despite the dogma and occasional wrong-headedness, it remains one of the most promising zones of popular music. It confronts problems with commitment rather than apathy or nihilism or escapism, and where most popular music promotes pleasure, radical rap urges listeners to seek knowledge before titillation . . . Radical rappers aspire to be teachers, not gangsters. The question is whether they are building a movement, or simply a market.26
Perhaps commercialism has already bummed out many younger music fans. "Kids aren't stupid," says Mike O'Connell, 23, leader of his own band, Rights of the Accused. "the [Rolling] Stones aren't playing rock 'n' roll anymore. They're playing for Budweiser."27
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Reading Writing, and Researching
Even with all the competition from electronic media, reading for pleasure will remain pastime at the turn of the century. Boomer spending, especially, will keep the market for books and magazines healthy.28 And the book and periodical market will increase internationally with more simultaneous printings in multiple languages.
Although the appetite for Christian reading may slacken a bit, romance novels, how-to, self-help, and Bible study materials will sell well, in my opinion. And there's no end in sight for the sale of — you guessed it — end times and prophecy books.
On the other end of the publishing process, authors will see vast changes in the ways they research and write. We'll access "hyper-media" databases that store graphics, music, speech, and other sounds, as well as text, that can be quickly (but not cheaply) retrieved from a vast, flexible, interactive, web-like reservoir of almost limitless resources.29 And with up to thirty-five times as much information available in 2001 as in 1990, we will switch from getting information to analyzing and using it.30
If our brains aren't on information overload.
Apparently that's already happened for the under-thirty generation when it comes to the news.
A study by Times Mirror, publisher of The Los Angeles Times, found that people aged eighteen to thirty know less, care less, and read newspapers less than any generation in the previous five decades. Andrew Kohut, who conducted the survey, says that young people are not so much disillusioned as indifferent, displaying "a failure to find public events compelling." They bore more easily; their eyes glaze quicker.
"Catering to this new generation has spawned a new kind of news media," commented L.A. Times media writer Thomas Rosenstiel, "offering a lighter fare and 'infotainment,' a hybrid of information and entertainment."31
Perhaps it's time to exorcise a few media phantoms.
" 'Mindless' entertainment is a misnomer," says Elizabeth Thoman, whose Media and Values newsletter is a leading resource for examining media issues. "Even the most ephemeral sitcom or video movie has an impact on our hearts and minds." She believes we need to develop "a values-based media awareness movement that will educate individuals to become critically aware of the pervasive
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influence of media — not just the content of programs but the role of media in driving our consumer economy."32
Unfortunately, unrelenting demands for profit and advertising revenue will color media standards well into the next millennium.
"Because media is so expensive and such a team effort," says film producer / writer Mel White, "we could lose a marvelous learning tool if it doesn't make a profit or if it isn't underwritten by some massive government grant. The loss of artistic creativity and talent is what I'm most afraid of. But if we hold together financially, there can be a great and exciting future for educational media, with interactive video."33
The most likely future scenario, according to White, is a mixed bag, with a few major studios making a few big pictures, and "many little filmmakers and noble little video houses making wonderful films."
White predicts that because of the double effect of spiraling production costs and shrinking budgets, much of media will be "pirate and underground, with handmade super-8 video film that people pass around." He anticipates a continuing demand for video in the church market. But religious films are "dead." Nor, in his opinion, is there a market for creative, thought-provoking or controversial subjects that would help the church grow.
"As the need for income becomes more acute, more and more stuff verging on hysteria will come out, pushing people to give money to support ministries," said White. "The thoughtful and the ideas of the thoughtful" will be lost in the process.34
Market-dictated strategies and uncritical consumerism will in fact drive much of the future American economy.
