Dear Editor:
Elder Boyd K. Packer, speaking at a fireside here in 1976, said, 'The reason we have not yet produced a greater heritage in art and literature and music and drama is not, I am very certain, because we have not had talented people. For over the years we have had not only good ones, but great ones. But few have captured the spirit of the gospel of Jesus Christ and the restoration of it in music, in art, in literature. They have therefore missed doing what they might have done, and they have missed being what they might have become.'
Looking at the student artwork on display last month in the Harris Fine Arts Center, I saw no signs of the Restoration. That which was hanging there was mostly washed-out modernism, which art historians claim is dead. Artists have been experimenting with these styles for a long 70 plus years. What has taken its place, postmodernism, usually isn't suitable or worth displaying at BYU despite how we might rationalize it. It is simply anti-gospel and anti-truth.
I don't advocate going forward into postmodernism because, basically, there is no forward. Art has been digging its own grave for some time. We must go back before Cezanne, for it is there where the junction with the true road exists.
These formulaic and incomprehensible images, like those at the Harris Fine Arts Center, never packed the punch they promised to. If God works after the manner of plainness (2 Nephi 31:3), can't we do the same?
Elder Packer said in the same address that the greatest paintings are not yet finished. Let's paint these pictures and forget what the world is doing. The world has always been unsure of which way is up anyway.
J. Michael Cline
Cumberland, Md.