Mormon Art and Babies

I have a love/hate relationship with Mormon art, which includes painting, sculpture, music, fiction, movies, etc. (I will focus in this post more on fiction and film, because that’s where I have more experience, but I think that what I write below applies to painting and sculpture as well. I won’t even touch music because I don’t know enough about it to write about it.) I want to like it. After all, it is from and for the demographic that I belong to. It addresses concerns that I share and speaks the language that I speak. From all objective indicators, the indicators that marketing people would use to determine the audience for a given work of art, I should like it. But, most of the time I don’t. I don’t think that it is worth my time when there are great works of art to be enjoyed by people outside the Church. Yet, I feel like if I don’t support these fledgling artistic endeavors to create something wholesome and good, I’m betraying my beliefs.

I should make it clear that I don’t think that any Mormon has any obligation to financially support anything that they don’t want to support. It doesn’t matter if it is made by a Mormon, sold by a Mormon, or packaged to appeal to a Mormon, business and faith should never be combined and anyone who says differently shouldn’t be trusted. However, one thing that Mormons tend to complain a lot about is decadence in the mass media. Movies are too violent, there’s too much sex on television, and most magazines are borderline pornographic. We complain, yet we still fork out or money for that super-violent, ultra-crude summer blockbuster (cough…Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen) or tune in every week to see television bring out the worst in people (cough…reality tv).

And when a good wholesome movie made my people who share our faith comes around, we intend to put it on our Netflix queue someday, but never seem to get around to it (I’m talking about myself, here). The literary part of me wants to say that if Mormons bothered to make good movies or write good fiction, I’d be more willing to lay down my hard earned dollars for it. The moral part of me argues that if I support these artists, their art will get better--after all, Mormon art is young and is still developing.

I think we kind of have to treat Mormon art as if we were a parent and it were a baby. In a global perspective, taking a step is no big deal. Billions of people do it thousands of times a day. But for a baby, it is a big deal. It shows that the child is developing into a healthy child. So you congratulate that child much more than you would congratulate your uncle if he were to do the same thing. However, if that baby chose not to take any more steps for the rest of his life, but decided that the one was enough, you would do something to motivate him to walk because you don’t want him to be stuck as a baby. As much as you like baby’s, a human being cannot be a baby for its whole life.

Mormon art is currently in the baby phase. It’s taking a few steps and I think that we should reward those steps by buying tickets to those movies or copies of those books. But if we ever get the feeling that it won’t progress beyond those few steps, if we get the sense that it has decided to not progress, then we should indicate that we are not pleased. It’s a hard balance to maintain, just as it is hard for parents to maintain the balance between rewarding success and demanding further achievement, but I think that Mormons with discerning tastes, and I know that there are a lot of us out there, can start to make that happen.