Across the street from my apartment building in Washington there’s a gigantic supe rma rket and a CVS. Above the supermarket there had been a large empty space with floor-to-ceiling windows. The space was recently taken by a ballet school, so now when I step outside in the evenings I see dozens of dancers framed against the windows, doing their exercises - gracefully and often in unison.
It can be ar restingly beautiful. The unexpected beauty exposes the limitations of the normal, banal streetscape I take for granted every day. But it also reminds me of a worldview, which was more common in eras more romantic than our own. This is the view that beauty is a big, transformational thing, the proper goal of art and maybe civilization itself. This humanistic worldview holds that beauty conquers the deadening aspects of routine; it educates the emotions and connects us to the eternal. By arousing the senses, beauty arouses thought and spirit. A person who has appreciated physical grace may have a finer sense of how to move with graciousness through the tribulations of life. A person who has appreciated the Piet? has a greater capacity for empathy, a more ref ined sense of the different forms of sadness and a wider awareness of the repertoire of ㅏ,89emotions.
John O’Donohue, a modern proponent of this humanistic viewpoint, writes in his book “Beauty: The Invisible Embrace”:“Some of our most wonderful memories are beautiful places where we felt immediately at home. We feel most alive in the presence of the beautiful for it meets the needs of our soul. … Without beauty the search for truth, the desire for goodness and the love of order and unity would be sterile exploits. Beauty brings warmth, elegance and grandeur.”
The art critic Frederick Turner wrote that beauty “is the highest integrative level of understanding and the most comprehensive capacity for effective action. It enables us to go with, rather than against, the deepest tendency or theme of the universe.”
By this philosophy, beaut y incites spiritual longing.
Today the word eros refers to sex, but to the Greeks it meant the fervent desire to reach excellence and deepen the voyage of life. This eros is a powerful longing. Whenever you see people doing art,whether they are amateurs at a swing dance class or a professional painter, you invariably see them trying to get better. “I am seeking. I am striving. I am in it with all my heart,” Vincent van Gogh wrote. Some people call eros the fierce longing for truth. “Making your unknown known is the important thing,” Georgia O’Keeffewrote. Mathematicians talk about their solutions in aesthetic terms, as beautiful or elegant.
Others describe eros as a more spiritual or religious longing. They note that beauty is numinous and fleeting, a passing experience that enlarges the soul and gives us a glimpse of the sacred. As the painter Paul Klee put it, “Color links us with cosmic regions.”
These days we all like beautiful things. Everybody approves of art. But the culture does not at t a ch as much emotional, intellectual or spiritual weight to beauty. We live, as Leon Wieseltier wrote in an essay for The Times Book Review, in a post-humanist moment. That which can be measured with data is valorized.
Economists are experts on happiness. The world is understood primarily as the product of impersonal forces; the nonmaterial dimensions of life explained by the material ones.
Over the past century, artists have had suspicious and varied attitudes toward beauty. Some regard all that aestheticscan-save-your-soul mumbo jumbo as sentimental claptrap. They want something grittier and more confrontational. In the academy, theory washed like an avalanche over the celebration of sheer beauty - at least for a time.
For some reason many artists prefer to descend to the level of us pundits. Abandoning their natural turf, the depths of emotion, symbol, myth and the inner life, they decided that relevance meant naked partisan stance-taking in the outer world (often in ignorance of the complexity of the evidence). Meanwhile, how many times have you heard advocates lobby for arts funding on the grounds that it’s good for economic development?
In fact, artists have their biggest social impact when they achieve it obliquely. If true racial reconciliation is achieved in this country, it will be through the kind of deep spiritual and emotional understanding that art can foster. You change the world by changing peoples’ hearts and imaginations. The shift to post-humanism has left the world beauty-poor and meaning-deprived.
It’s not so much that we need more artistsand bigger audiences, though that would be nice. It’s that we accidentally abandoned a worldview that showed how art can be used to cultivate the fullest inner life. We left behind an ethos that reminded people of the links between the beautiful, the true and the good - the way pleasure and love can lead to nobility.
<
DAVID BROOKS>
댓글 안에 당신의 성숙함도 담아 주세요.
'오늘의 한마디'는 기사에 대하여 자신의 생각을 말하고 남의 생각을 들으며 서로 다양한 의견을 나누는 공간입니다. 그러나 간혹 불건전한 내용을 올리시는 분들이 계셔서 건전한 인터넷문화 정착을 위해 아래와 같은 운영원칙을 적용합니다.
자체 모니터링을 통해 아래에 해당하는 내용이 포함된 댓글이 발견되면 예고없이 삭제 조치를 하겠습니다.
불건전한 댓글을 올리거나, 이름에 비속어 및 상대방의 불쾌감을 주는 단어를 사용, 유명인 또는 특정 일반인을 사칭하는 경우 이용에 대한 차단 제재를 받을 수 있습니다. 차단될 경우, 일주일간 댓글을 달수 없게 됩니다.
명예훼손, 개인정보 유출, 욕설 등 법률에 위반되는 댓글은 관계 법령에 의거 민형사상 처벌을 받을 수 있으니 이용에 주의를 부탁드립니다.
Close
x