We must judge as human beings, not as an abstract homo aestheticus, not as art historians or as artists but with our full human being....But everyone may and can judge art. The difference comes between a practical judgment, based on experience, and the judgment of someone who is just beginning to look. The latter must still learn a lot--in the first place, to see. And that is exactly the situation of our students. We also need to teach them to look as human beings. All of education is concerned with the humanity of young people. The point of departure is their humanity, their young and inexperienced humanity. They need to develop competence in judging, they need to gain experience and insight. they will have to do that themselves. It is all too richly multicoloured for us to be able to teach it to them as one teaches a maths sum. But we will have to show them the way. Help them. Pass on something of our experience and our knowledge by which they at least can be guarded from the most obvious misconceptions and dead ends...
The student expects that you will judge as a human being....a person with conviction, a point of view, a person with a warm heart who can get angry and can also say why you were so moved or became so enthusiastic, can explain why something had such an impact on you. We may talk about works of art, preferably close to the works of art themselves, as long as it is not an argument for argument's sake--so interesting and so cultural--as long as the real commitment is to find the truth, to say the right thing, in order to do justice to the artist, the work in question, and to the students and ourselves as well.
Besides, we can be sure that our work is never perfect. But it certainly can be meaningful. It is possible to work and deal with art and with students in this way. If it were impossible, it would be better never to speak about art again, no, even stronger, to never look at it again. After all, the work proves to be humanly impossible to approach and does not really require our reaction, the input of our personality. Basically these things are about love for our neighbour and for the truth, because only these can make us free and make our work meaningful. (CW [Complete Works], 2:134-134)
In 1970, the year Rookmaaker published his best-selling book Modern Art and the Death of a Culture, most students in Europe or North America were not being thought of or educated in this deeply human and personal way. On May 4 that year, the world looked on with horror as students, only some of whom were protesters against the bombing of Cambodia (a decision by President Nixon that appeared to expand the Vietnam War), were gunned down by National Guardsmen on the campus of Kent State University in Kent, Ohio. The opening words of Rookmaaker's book perfectly captured themood of the era: 'We live at a time of great change, of protest and revolution. We are aware that something radical is happening around us, but it is not always easy to see just what it is' (CW, 5:5).
He was exactly on target. Rookmaaker had written a searing account in this work of the dehumanization of life in our times as shown in the rise of modern art. These were threatening words for many who had accommodated themselves comfortably to modernity and contemporary culture, whether they were or were not Christians, or whether they were or were not aware of this conformity. When it came out, Modern Art and the Death of a Culture received wide acknowledgment and even acclaim, from a brief notice and review in Art News to Malcolm Muggeridge's making it one of his Observer Books of the Year for 1970. Muggeridge also promoted it in Esquire, where he was also a book review editor. Modern Art and the Death of a Culture was a genuine crossover book. It used a single language that was accessible to people whether they had Christian conviction or not. Its success may possibly have inspired its copy-editor at Inter-Varsity Press in England, David Alexander, to co-found with his wife, Pat Alexander, Lion Publishing, a new press dedicated to a refreshingly inclusive way of communicating with engaging the public.
In Modern Art and the Death of a Culture, Rookmaaker resolutely faced the problematic and polemical character of modern art that denounced the nature and dignity of humanity. In the nineteenth century Nietzsche said, 'God is dead.' In the twentieth century, the most potent stream of modern art implicitly said, 'Man is dead.' Rookmaaker asked the question:
What has become of people? Miro once painted a picture of a picture. He took a reproduction of a secondary seventeenth-century Dutch picture (it could just as well have been a Vermeer or a Rembrandt) and gave his own reinterpretation. Nothing is more telling. 'Man is dead,' it says. The absurd, the strange, the void, the irrationally horrible is there. The old picture is treated with humour, scorn...and devastating irony until nothing is left. As the image is destroyed, so too is man. (CW, 5:88)
For Rookmaaker this was spiritual combat, not simply a matter of aesthetic niceties or opinions. He was attempting to awaken spiritual sleepers to the idea that modern art was not amoral or neutral but was loaded with meaning that conveyed an impact on all of us, whether we ever darkened the door of an art museum or not, because it was an assault on our humanity. The implications were not theoretical but were as practical as how we raise our children, elect our leaders, or care for the earth's environment.
A tremendous disruption with past assumptions of Western culture regarding the nature of humankind and reality had been heralded while most people were distracted by the clever allurement of a technological age. Modern artists like Picasso, Miro, and Duchamp not only promulgated a view of human beings as absurd but also celebrated it, led the way, and propagated it through their works of art. It is widely known that early audiences of this art reacted violently to it. This did not come generally from an informed perspective but out of an intuition at some vague level of being threatened. We may smile at their reaction to the shock of the new and feel mildly superior in being able now to appreciate this art. But Rookmaaker pointed out that only those practicing an aesthetic of detachment, interested purely in formal analysis of the work of art, or somewhat naive viewers not desiring to appear to be philistines could say, 'The new art gives nothing more than a human message, conveyed by new means...[or] artists are expressing their times and when they live in different times their forms are different.'"
-Laurel Gasque
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