For Art's Sake!

Okay. I just recently had a fun exchange with a couple of guys regarding C.S. Lewis' intention for writing The Chronicles of Narnia. You can find it here. The posts are chronological from the bottom up. Check it out if you'd like. In fact bookmark that site if you've never read it. Cory's a friend and has a lot of great things to say. Check it out.

So on to my main point today that has been needling me ever since I got into that particular exchange on Cory's blog.

Is it right to separate the author from his work to objectify it and use it for evangelistic purposes?
Is it right to take the song away from the songwriter when she wrote it explicitly for another purpose?
Can it be unfair to divide the painting from the painter when it could be used to "advance the kingdom"?

We have to be sophisticated readers/listeners/appreciaters (is that even a word?)....enough to take the art and the artist as a whole and find the good in it. Otherwise it becomes a blunt tool of evangelism that only takes meaning from the Gospel and nothing else.

Don't get me wrong.....there are shades of The Story in every story. I don't doubt that.
What I find horribly offensive is when we take the words and deeds of artists that are clearly not communicating a clear representation of the Gospel and "christianizing" them for mass christian consumption.

When is art just art?

On the posts that I alluded to earlier one comment was made about the Evangelical Church co-opting the Matrix movies to evangelize and communicate the gospel.
Some folks did that, I don't disagree.
But since then I have some reservations about that approach.
If I were to sit down with the Wachowski brothers (creators of The Matrix) I would find that multiple world religions and New Age philosophies went into their writing of the Matrix movies. The rare interviews with the siblings illustrate this fact.

So what should our response be if we are to "bring out the God-flavors and God-colors of the world?" (Matthew 5, thanks Cory)

When Kyle would do his yearly installments of God in the Movies or God in the Music he would make it clear what that exercise was meant to accomplish.
We did not extract christian gospel meaning from High Fidelity or U2.
We pulled out the themes of: love, compassion, greed, anger, trust, patience, on-and-on-and-on-and-on.

From there we could always dive into SCRIPTURE! Yes! For those of you out there that thought that we never broke open the Good Book....how wrong you are!
Kyle would bring to the surface a certain passage of scripture that dealt with the same theme the music/movie was dealing with and asked one important question: What is our response?

It was never about making a non-christian movie a tool of evangelism.
Nor was it about making a "secular" song an aria of christian dogma.

It was about finding the God-flavors in every bite and savoring the goodness of our Lord and Savior.
It was about seeing the God-colors in every palette and appreciating the greatness of our God.

I feel like I could go on about this, but I won't.
Any responses out there?
Am I just splitting hairs here?
Is this all just empty rhetoric?
I don't think so, but I could be wrong.
It's been known to happen.