Tony Woodlief defends the democratization of art, calling it “a striving to express the Godlikeness within oneself, which means that it is the fruit of searching and calling and finding something divine”:
The fact that wide swaths of people endeavor to create something—a poem, a photo collage, yes, even another teen paranormal sci-fi thriller novel—ought then hearten us. In these imperfect endeavors we have proof that the spark of divinity has not flickered out.
Yes, much of what we make is dreck; yes, it’s often driven by narcissism and psychosis and all manner of dysfunction. It’s twisted because we are twisted, but it still pours forth from children of God who are striving to imitate the Father, even those of us who have stopped believing in him.
Imagine that. Millions of people, many of them knowing not the first words of orthodox praise, harboring scant knowledge of theology, yet all of them whispering back to the whisper within their spirits, imitating the God they may only know, many of them, as the urge to arrange words in verse, the craving to strum a power chord with the amp cranked up high, the yearning to dance because sunlight has come pouring through the windows in a slant that overwhelms our adult insistence on having a reason for joy.