Essay

Culture

Doubt

Music

Psychology

24 March 2025

9 min read

What happens when perfect plans are outsmarted by the world?

There may be delight hiding in the doom.

Roger Bretherton

Roger is a Clinical and Coaching Psychologist.

Two people sit and stand next to a grand piano on a stage.

Striking the wrong note.

Polyfilm.

If I’ve learned anything at all from decades working with businesses, it’s that they love an acronym. For a while the acronym we loved was VUCA. Not a nuclear jet nor a foot wart, VUCA emerged from the leadership theories of Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus to reflect the Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity of contemporary leadership. Nothing gets a roomful of executives nodding sagely than the observation that we live in a VUCA world. For a while it felt almost sacrilegious not to evoke VUCA at some point when training leaders. It was comforting to tell people who were supposed to be shaping the world that everything was, well… a bit nuts.

But in the last few years VUCA has lost its shine. Things have started to get too crazy, a bit too VUCA for anyone’s liking. The wars, the plagues, the natural disasters, the political upheaval, the shaking of old certainties- it’s all gone a bit super-VUCA. The acronym that once reassured us that the world tends to resist our perfect plans has been outsmarted by the world it once captured. What are we to call this permacrisis, this omnishambles, this SNAFU, when super-mega-hyper-VUCA just sounds stupid? A new acronym was needed. Enter stage left- BANI, the invention of futurologist Jamias Cascio to designate the way things are now: Brittle, Anxious, Non-Linear, Incomprehensible. We’ve had a romantic breakup with the world- you’re not like it used to be, you used to be fun, you’ve changed!

In March, Seen & Unseen celebrates its second anniversary. We are two years old. Old enough to appreciate a birthday cake, too young not to burn our fingers on the candles. I’ve been writing for the site since the beginning and to this day feel surprised that this quirky mishmash of a brainfart I keep writing is still accepted for publication each month. Either the folks at Seen& Unseen are pathologically kind to their own detriment, or my monthly missive of misery is not quite as off the wall as I fear it might be.

When I look at the world, I feel like we’re in a football match with no referee. I keep shouting foul and looking for someone to blow the whistle. It feels like the Tower of Babel. Even the technologies we thought would unify us have made us incomprehensible to one another. Like the scene in That Hideous Strength (the third book in C.S. Lewis’ Cosmic Trilogy) where a roomful of people is magically befuddled. They can no longer understand each other, and anyone who rises to take charge of the situation speaks gibberish that only adds volume to the babble. We don’t need any more opinions. We certainly don’t need any more people with misplaced certainty they have the answer.

To be honest, I’ve just run out of ideas. I’m confused, baffled, clueless. But what embarrasses me most is not my helplessness, it’s my hope. For some reason, in jarring contrast to the circumstances, I can’t shake off the sense that ultimately all this will make sense, that breakdowns lead to breakthroughs. We’re in the unbearable part of the story where everything goes wrong, but if we put the book down now, we’ll think that was the end of it, when it was really just the set up. Pretty much everything I’ve written for Seen & Unseen over the last two years equates to: grief, this looks bad, but maybe there is more to it than it appears.

There is another anniversary being celebrated this year. This January marked the fiftieth year of a musical event so remarkable that a new dramatization of it premiered at the Berlin Film Festival to mark the occasion – the recording of The Köln Concert. (Watch the trailer of Köln 75.) If we are looking for a story of how beauty emerges from disaster, this one is worth telling. The event was organised by eighteen-year-old Vera Brandes, at that time the youngest concert promoter in Germany. She booked the Cologne Opera House, but given that it was a jazz concert, it was scheduled to begin at 11:30pm following an opera performance earlier that evening.

The performer, jazz pianist, Keith Garrett travelled to the concert from Zurich. But rather than flying, he sold his ticket for cash and opted to make the 350-mile trip north with his producer Manfred Eicher in a Renault 4. He had not slept well for several nights and arrived late afternoon in pain, wearing a back brace, only to discover that the opera house had messed up. The Bösendorfer 290 Imperial concert grand piano he had requested had been replaced by a much smaller Bösendorfer baby grand the staff had found backstage. The piano was intended for rehearsals only, in poor condition, out of tune, with broken keys and pedals. It was unplayable. Jarrett tried it briefly and refused to perform. But Vera Brandes had sold 1,400 tickets for the evening. So, while he headed out to eat, she promised to get him the piano he required.

But it was not to be. The piano tuner who arrived to fix the baby grand tells her a replacement is impossible. It was January in Northern Germany, the weather was wet and cold, and any grand piano transported in those conditions without specialist equipment would be damaged irreparably. They had to stick with the piano they had. Keith Jarrett’s meal didn’t go well either. There was a mix up at the restaurant and their food arrived late. They barely had chance to eat anything before returning to the venue. And when Garratt saw the tiny defective Bösendorfer still on the stage, he again refused to play, only changing his mind because Eicher’s sound-engineers were set up to record.

So the concert begins. A reluctant pianist – tired, hungry and in pain – sits at a ruined piano, and records the bestselling piano solo album and bestselling jazz album. Ever. He improvises for over an hour. Starting tentatively, exploring the contours, befriending the limitations of his damaged instrument – learning its capabilities as he plays. But soon Jarrett is whooping, yelling and humming with delight as he extracts beauty from the brokenness. The limited register forces him to play differently. The disconnected pedals become percussion. By the time he reaches the encore, the joy of his playing is irrepressible – it sends shivers down the spine. And when he finishes, the applause goes on. Forever.

Jarrett pulled off an impossible feat and sealed his reputation as one of the greatest pianists of his generation. And I take heart from the event, because when I face the world, I sometimes imagine I feel like he did facing that piano. Tired and pained and doubtful any good will come of playing. Can I order a new world, please? One more to my liking. One less likely to hurt. Yet I can’t quite shake off the intuition that there may be delight hiding in the doom, a treasure only unearthed by those willing to play.

I am drawn to Job. He is a hero to all those who are sick of the answers of others but have no answers themselves.

This year I celebrate my own anniversary. I was born seven months after that fateful night in Cologne, in the equally salubrious town of Birkenhead. This is my fiftieth year too. The 3:15pm of life: too early to clock off, too late to start anything new. If living is a race between maturity and senility – gaining the wisdom to live before losing our marbles – then I’m odds-on for a photo finish. The evidence accumulates daily that I am likely to live longer than most of my vocabulary.

Jung held a positive view of old age. He viewed it as the time for religion to ripen. And I can’t help agreeing with him. The older I get the closer God seems. As muscle mass thins the spirit deepens. Outwardly I’m fading away, inwardly I am being renewed day by day. This undoubtedly underlies my hope of beauty arising from our brokenness. In some small and barely noticeable way it is already happening in me. And I know I’m not alone in that.

Jung also wrote about Job- the Hebrew epic of suffering and restoration. Job’s life is like one of those old blues songs. He loses his wife, his kids, his home, his health. He’s left broken, infested with sores and sitting in the dust. If you’ve been in a situation like that, you’ll know that even the most well-meaning friends can respond with surprising incompetence. Job’s friends are no different. They are true believers in Just-World Theory, the universal human tendency to assume that if bad things happen to us we must deserve them, we must have been bad. They live in a world ultimately governed by the kind of instant karma that causes car crashes on YouTube, and they’re keen to teach Job the way the world really is.

But Job resists them at every turn. He may have a proverbial reputation for patience, but he is anything but patient. I used to think this was a story about a man defending his innocence, but it’s much more than that. It’s the story of a man who goes through a breakup with God. He once lived a life of goodness, abundance, and gratitude in which he knew God as attentive and lovingly present. His friends are not just arguing that he’s being punished for some undisclosed sin, but that he’d always been wrong about God. He’d never known God- not really. The God they knew was volatile, capricious, arbitrary, vicious - like a rescue dog, you never quite knew when he would turn. And Job’s suffering was the proof of it.

The problem for Job is that he has no clue why he is suffering, but he will not let his friends obliterate the history he has shared with heaven. He knows God to be utterly faithful, constantly present, sublimely attuned, hugging the contours of his life as the sea hugs the shore. He wants nothing to do with a fickle god who falls asleep on the job or flounces off the first time we let him down. He rejects the here-again gone-again god of his friends. Sometimes, to know God, we need to reject those who claim to speak for God.

The weird thing in Job’s story is that eventually God shows up. Over the course of the narrative, he has asked God 122 questions, and God responds with 61 of his own. The questions are rhetorical- they point to all the places God is present that Job isn’t, all the things that God knows that Job doesn’t, all the things God has done that Job hasn’t. And by the end, Job is satisfied, his friends are dismissed, and his life is restored. God is as Job expected, intimately present but ultimately mysterious. He was right to reject the obtuse certainties of his friends and face the pain of the world with a cultivated sense of unknowing.

When I ponder how best to bring beauty out of a BANI world, how best to play its brokenness like Jarret played his Bösendorfer, I am drawn to Job. He is a hero to all those who are sick of the answers of others but have no answers themselves. He is also a hero to those who, despite all evidence to the contrary, cannot smother their hope. Those who discern the leavening yeast sown in the hearts of humans across the planet; too inconspicuous to make the news, but destined to rise when the time is right.

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Watch the Köln 75 trailer

Article

Art

Belief

Culture

24 July 2025

5 min read

Critics and curators are missing this about contemporary artists

An interview with Jonathan Anderson

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A metak sculpture outlines an altar, stands on a beach.

Kris Martin, Altar.

Throughout much of the twentieth century, many modern artists engaged with religion in and through their work but art critics and art historians routinely overlooked or ignored those aspects of the work when writing about it. They did so because of a secularisation agenda that overrode reflection on key elements of the art that artists were creating.

In Modern Art and the Life of a Culture, Jonathan A. Anderson, together with William Dyrness, recovered some of the religious influences explored in the work of key modern artists by writing an alternative history of modern art. Now, with The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art, Anderson has addressed the central issue, which is the way in which art critics and historians have written about modern and contemporary art.

JE: What is it about this situation – that modern art has often wrestled with God, but critics and curators haven’t always shared that focus – that engages your interest and motivates you to write so compellingly about it?

JA: The more I have studied and circulated through the worlds of contemporary art (first as an artist, then as a critic), the more attentive I became to significant disconnects in the ways we talk and write about religion in modern and contemporary art. Many prominent artists working today and over the past century have been shaped by religious traditions, and their works are in serious dialogue with those traditions in various ways and from various perspectives. Their relationship to religion might be highly conflicted or nuanced—it often is—but it is a live issue in their work and one can talk with them about it in their studios or in informal settings. But when one moves to the critical writing and public discussions about these artists’ works, this aspect either disappears altogether or is discussed in ways that are clumsy, stifled, or shapeless.

The aim of a lot of my work is to understand in a non-superficial way why this has been the case, why there has been a recent resurgence of discussions of religion and spirituality, and how we might develop more substantive ways of thinking and speaking about these topics.

JE: What did you find most surprising as you undertook the research for both books?

JA: I am consistently surprised at how sprawling and dense this topic is. Once one begins rethinking ‘the strange place of religion’ in the histories of modern and contemporary, the more one finds that there is an enormous amount of material that deserves renewed investigation. Both books give a strong sense of this, but chapter three in my new book is especially full of sign-pointers toward items that require further exploration.

To give one concrete example, I found myself referring to several major curated group exhibitions that, in one way or another, significantly address topics of religion and spirituality in twentieth- and twenty-first-century art. As I began to look more seriously at the history of such exhibitions, this curiosity swelled into a huge endeavour. Over the course of several years, I assembled a long list of exhibition catalogues and other documentation—the most comprehensive list of its kind that I’m aware of—which in turn helped me not only to recognize how prevalent interest in these topics has been but to think through the diversity of approaches. A version of this list is published in The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art as an appendix, and the full, updated list is also available on my website. I hope it’s a valuable resource for others.

JE: Both books offer ideas and suggestions for constructive ways to understand, address and write about the relationship between art and religion going forward. In Modern Art and the Life of a Culture there is the idea of a charitable hermeneutic, while in The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art you offer substantial new frameworks for discussing art and religion. Why is it important that the dialogue between art and religion finds paths to conversation rather than conflict?

JA: This is an important question. The public dialogue between contemporary art and religion has been relatively dysfunctional for much of the past century, often riddled with mutual antagonisms, melodramatic controversies, misunderstandings, and mutual unintelligibility. But art and religion are complex, vital domains of meaning that have continued to deeply shape each other up to the present and that have an enormous amount to ‘say’ to one another today, both critically and constructively. My own experience is that the more the participants in this conversation become attentive to and conversant in the other’s history, vernacular, and ways of thinking, the more highly constructive and mutually enriching the dialogue becomes.

I think this kind of dialogue has everything to do with cultivating mutual care and love of neighbour. The art world is a series of loosely connected communities full of people who are your and my neighbours. I happen to really care about these communities who make, exhibit, and talk about art, despite their problems. And the same might be said about various religious communities, who have their own problems and who often have more complicated interrelations with those art communities than is generally recognized. Wherever you’re coming from—the arts, the church, or otherwise—I’m interested in expanding dialogue oriented toward loving one’s neighbours, or even one’s enemies if that’s how it must be. At the most basic level, that means listening in a way that tries to discern others’ animating cares and concerns.

JE: Do you see any parallels or differences between the way the relationship between secularism and religion has played out in the world of art and the way the broader relationship between the two has been shaped in Western society in the same period?

JA: This is a fascinating but complicated question. For some people, the whole point of the artistic avant-garde was to enact and exemplify, in a highly concentrated way, the secularization of Western society. At the same time, however, it was also widely recognized that the arts have, in almost all places and times, been deeply interconnected with religion and spirituality, and this was, in some conflicted or repressed way, still likely the case for much of the avant-garde as well.

Secularization has meant the pressurizing and pluralizing of religious belief, sometimes corresponding to disaffiliation from traditional organizations, but this has relatively little to do with an eradication or obsolescence of religious belief. Indeed, any notion of what Rosalind Krauss memorably described as an ‘absolute rift’ between ‘the sacred’ and ‘the secular’ is really just shorthand for some kind of social conflict, because there’s not really any rational way to absolutize these as mutually exclusive. Whether acknowledged or not, religion still provides the metaphysical and ethical groundings of modern secularity, and modern secularity provides the social conditions for contemporary religion. In this context, distinctions between religiosity and irreligiosity are often ambiguous, running through each of us in unexpected and ever-changing ways (rather than simplistically separating us from each other). In my view, contemporary art is highly illuminating to these broader dynamics. Anyone who has spent any extended time in the worlds of modern and contemporary art knows that they are full of spiritual and theological struggle. To put it succinctly: contemporary art is not an art of unbelief and nonpractice but an art of conflicted, pressurized belief and practice, which is theologically significant if attended to as such.

The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art, Jonathan A. Anderson (Notre Dame Press)

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