On Beauty

Saturday April 5, 2008

I have just been reading an article that I found really interesting. It’s in the recent edition of American Arts Quarterly. You can follow the link below to their website with this article.

http://www.nccsc.net/2008/3/4/the-necessity-of-beauty

The author, Tom Jay, discusses how people relate to beauty and how it is seen. Part of this includes looking for a way to define beauty, and I found several sections to be very good. When I was in high school in an art class the teacher asked us to define beauty, and you can imagine we did a piss poor job of it. Everyone was trying their best to put words together that could differentiate beauty from the merely pretty, and tackle discrepencies for different tastes. Here are a few of my favorite quotes from teh article. Hopefully they will still have resonance without the context of the full piece.

”...a charge that precipitates illusion-piercing surprise.”

“Beauty is dynamic, alive, energized, healthy, powerful. Beauty is the fateful eros of ethics and aesthetics, the electricity of mystery come to ground.”

“But beauty is not a luxury item, is not pretty, cute or stylish; it is alive. Of course, beauty resounds in objects and events. Their peculiar limits enliven beauty’s surprise but do not explain beauty’s mercurial nature.”

“Necessary beauty has character, gravitas, sorrow, comedy and joy. Beauty without gravity may be a decorous ruse. Beauty without shadow is probably an illusion, and beauty without vitality a trap. Beauty may be stark but never vain, and joy may emerge as sorrow’s final cry.”

What I find so wonderful about his way of describing what makes something beautiful is seeing that the dichotomy of good and bad leads to a higher good. That looking at sorrow and misery enriches our experience when we see beauty. The wiser we are the more richly we’ll experience true beauty. I think that’s what we didn’t understand in high school… that the way to get past mere prettiness is to know and acknowledge it’s opposite.

dichotomy: Division into two usually contradictory parts or opinions: “the dichotomy of the one and the many”

It’s interesting to think about beauty being appreciated through a dichotomy of experiences or understandings. In painting it’s true that dichotomys, or differences, are what make any image interesting: Thin and thick paint, loose and detailed bushwork, warm and cool colors, Dark and light areas, thin lines and large shapes… The differences are what we find interesting and keep us looking at a painting.

I’m not much of a writer myself (one of the things that has made me reluctant in writing this journal) so I was surprised when I found myself excited by some of this authors writing, like his word choices and analogies. For example: “Beauty is dynamic, alive, energized, healthy, powerful.” These words don’t refer to something’s mere surface attraction, prettiness, cuteness, happiness.

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