Not Feeling It

Abandoning Objective Standards Undermines Both Art & Life

In the classic musical The Music Man, traveling salesman Harold Hill sells band instruments to parents with the promise that he will organize their young sons into a boys’ band. But Hill knows nothing about music, and he intends to skip town before the residents realize they’ve been hoodwinked. When the instruments arrive, he delivers them, collects his money, and tells the children to learn the “Minuet in G” by using the “think system.” If they just think hard enough about the music they’re struggling to learn, eventually it will somehow flow from their instruments.

Many art teachers today have discarded the visual rules of art and teach their students something much like Hill’s think system. Let’s call it the “feel system.” They don’t give students visual rules to follow; they just urge them to paint by whatever impulses they feel deeply inside, and eventually meaningful art will somehow flow from their brushes.

I first encountered the feel system several years ago when I was invited to conduct a seminar on Freedom of Expression for the art teachers in the school district of a large Dallas suburb. I centered my presentation on the need to teach students the established rules governing visual art. Unless artists apply the standard visual principles proven to draw the viewer’s mind and eye toward the primary subject of their painting, their art will not communicate what they want it to express. Effective communication requires a common language between artist and viewer, which in painting is rooted in the universally recognized forms in nature. Art that abandons the language of nature will be dismissed as incomprehensible visual gibberish. The viewer will have no clue to the meaning of seemingly purposeless lines, shapes, and disembodied colors pulled from the artist’s psyche with no ties to recognizable forms existing in nature.

The art teachers resisted my message, claiming that rules stifle creativity. By the third session, their escalating retorts and angry disruptions made it impossible to continue, and the administrators shut down the seminar.

It’s little wonder that these teachers reacted so vehemently against teaching their students the longstanding rules of art. Influential art publications are saturated with prominent critics making pronouncements like this one appearing in New York Magazine: “There aren’t any rules [in art], and there never will be. There is only taste, which is based in education.” It doesn’t take a genius to see the blatant illogic of that statement. If there are no defining rules, how can one’s tastes be educated? You cannot educate without a body of authoritative knowledge or cultivate taste without a set of aesthetic principles.

Perhaps no artists exhibit reliance on the feel system more than non-objective painters who resist depicting objects or scenes that exist in the natural world. They insist on cutting themselves free from standards that have applied to art ever since man first scrawled pictures on cave walls. To render objects as they exist in nature is to be derivative—and no insult stings these painters like that word. To be authentically creative, they insist that their art must be original. To them originality means shunning identifiable forms and filling their canvases with shapes, textures, or masses that emerge from their inner psyche and bear no resemblance to objects existing in nature.

The Futility of Originality

J. R. R. Tolkien said that we do art because it reflects the image of God instilled into our essential nature. As he put it, when we paint, write, compose, or build anything meaningful, we become “sub-creators” acting on a deep-seated impulse to reflect the creative nature of our maker. We sub-creators can never be original in the same sense as God, who created ex nihilo—out of nothing. Our creativity will always be derivative, meaning the images we depict are necessarily derived from materials and forms that already exist. We reflect our Creator as sub-creators when we approach our canvases not to display our inner selves, but to reach outside our own resources and display the glory of his creation in fresh, individual ways. This mode of creating enables artists to awaken viewers to a deeper vision of the beauty God infused into everything he made.

To accomplish this connection with viewers, artists must use existing nature as their visual language. Nature must be the baseline for the universal language of visual art because viewers of art naturally understand the forms in nature. When artists reject nature as their source of imagery, they step into the void of meaninglessness.

The alternative to the standard of nature is the feel system—to paint by the self-referential impulses of the artist’s own feelings. Artists who follow this path unwittingly reveal their creative bankruptcy. It is impossible for an artist relying solely on his own internal resources to create anything both original and meaningful. The truly creative artist assembles, combines, and strategically modifies elements known to him through his experience of nature. Indeed, we have no source of visual imagery besides what nature provides. We humans cannot even imagine things we have not experienced in nature. Try it. Try to imagine a new primary color, a fourth spatial dimension, or a third sex that is not a combination or extension of what already exists. This doesn’t mean artists must slavishly copy natural forms, rendering them with photographic detail. It means using nature as the starting point and filtering its imagery through the lens of one’s unique personal vision.

Life Imitating (Bad) Art

Today life has begun to imitate art with its growing reliance on the feel system in many areas of human experience. A 2022 Barna survey reported that 42 percent of Americans said you should be morally guided by “what you feel in your heart.” A whopping 71 percent “now contend that human beings rather than God should be the judge of right and wrong.” Only 29 percent affirmed biblical principles as the basis for truth and morality. Western culture is now promoting reliance on feelings to free us from the chafing shackles of absolute morality. Drug use, sexual freedom, porn, gender fluidity, and abortion are now promoted as personal choices based on the premise that whatever makes me feel good defines what is right for me.

The late composer John Cage disdained rules in music. Most of his compositions consisted of randomly produced sounds devoid of order or beauty. One piece required a complete orchestra to sit silently on stage, never playing a note, while inadvertent sounds from the audience such as coughing or shuffling programs filled the void. Cage was also a mushroom connoisseur. When asked if he picked mushrooms with the same randomness he employed in his music, he admitted that he did not. “If I did, I’d die,” he explained. This indicates Cage’s life was not integrated. It was inconsistent and compartmentalized, because its various parts operated by opposing principles. He conducted his culinary questing by rigid rules and his music composition by the feel system. The reason for the difference is no mystery. Cage saw no danger in abandoning his music to the freedom of feelings, whereas he saw the deadly danger of gathering mushrooms in the same way.

Like John Cage, we don’t abandon objective standards when engaging in human endeavors critical to health, safety, or wellbeing. If we are wise, we don’t drive as we feel, ignoring speed limits, stoplights, and center lines. Pharmacists don’t mix meds in proportions they feel to be about right. Architects don’t select building materials they feel will probably bear an upper-story load. We don’t even allow the feel system to intrude on our games and recreation. You can’t play baseball, charades, or gin rummy without definitive guidelines and goals. Yet our culture is trying to reshape morality by the feel system because we think we see great advantages and little risk in freeing ourselves from its chafing rules.

We could hardly be more wrong. Like John Cage, when we compartmentalize our lives into separate areas, some requiring boundaries and others allowing abandon, we become dis-integrated. Integrated lives are achieved by applying standards consistently in all its areas. Though it may not be immediately apparent, discarding standards in either art or morality can damage a person as severely as flouting the rules of driving and eating. Discarding the standards of art in favor of the feel system will inflict damage on our spirits by fostering the expansion of ego and diminishing sensitivity to objective reality. Discarding the standards of absolute morality in favor of self-referential feelings will inflict damage not only on our spirits, but also on our health, stability, character, and relationships.

In each case, the damage springs from the same source. Whenever we reject the authority of external standards and rely instead on personal feelings, we proclaim ourselves to be our own masters, capable and competent to set our own rules and plot our own paths. In art this means separating ourselves from the ultimate source of meaning. In morality it means separating ourselves from the ultimate source of protection. Without the protection of rules, we become slaves to contending desires vying for fulfillment with extravagant promises of pleasures guaranteed to make us feel good in the moment.

How did we humans become so vulnerable to the lure of the feel system when we ourselves are God’s works of art? As the Apostle Paul tells us, “We are his workmanship”—God’s masterpieces created to reflect his image perfectly. Our primeval parents tarnished that reflection and introduced the feel system in Eden when they yielded to their desire to partake of that forbidden fruit. By following their own feelings, they stepped away from the protection of God. Today our culture is merely repeating their mistake. When we follow the feel system, we step away from the protection of God and assume responsibility for our own wellbeing—a responsibility we have been incapable of handling since that fateful day in Eden. As the prophet Jeremiah put it, “O Lord, I know the way of man is not in himself; It is not in man who walks to direct his own steps” (Jeremiah 10:23).

We can’t have it both ways. We can’t abandon rules in favor of freedom and yet retain stability and meaning. Stability and meaning require that all our endeavors adhere to absolute, God-ordained standards by which they can be objectively performed and evaluated. Discarding these standards does not bring freedom. When the boundaries are banished, chaos fills the void, demonstrating that freedom without rules is a fantasy. As G. K. Chesterton aptly said, “Morality, like art, consists of drawing the line somewhere.”