Just beauty?
How can those two words be part of the same phrase? To me beauty is something so fleeting, so fragile and so precious. Beauty is what feeds my soul and gives meaning to my life.
My definition of the word beauty is quite broad, perhaps broad enough to be encompassed by anything that moves me - reaches inside and touches me deeply. So to me beauty really is never a matter of just. But it seems gotten a dirty name in the art world. To me this image by Lalla Essaydi, that we saw today in Core, is beautiful. 
This week in Landscape class we looked at books that examined the idea of paradise - not the same thing as beauty, but can't help but explore some of the same themes. I was struck by the work of Terri Weifenbach in her book Lana and how she is not afraid to celebrate beauty in the landscapes she is surrounded by. Listen to me - "afraid to celebrate beauty". Something is just not right about that kind of mindset, the art lens that puts those words together. Here is what one reviewer wrote about her: “Weifenbach has never shied from the beautiful; her images celebrate natural color and through the use of selective focus she distills scenes and plants to their essential aspects. She embodies the ideal role of the artist working in nature, allowing the manifold of sensory perceptions to filter through her mind, translating this materia prima into her own graceful language."
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Hi Eve,
ReplyDeleteLalla's images are presently on exhibit at the DeCordova Museum, http://www.decordova.org/art . I would check them out. They are indeed about beauty, present and past notions of it, .
David Mussina
Maybe the idea of "Beauty" has gotten a bad rap in the art world because people think it is not representative of reality, that art should focus on realism and the "ugly truth".
ReplyDeleteI agree that beauty is found in many places but is very fleeting. I like art that can capture it before it changes or fades. There is nothing false or anti-realism about that.
-Lisa
Beauty has a bad rap because it is so seductive & because it is so seductive, so often beguiling, so often employed to hide an "ugly" truth. Perhaps the funniest line in the wizard of OZ belongs to Glinda the Good Witch "Only bad witches are old and ugly." To truly love beauty the artist has a special obligation to look at beauty w/out blinders, to see it in three or even four dimensions, to see and show beyond mere appearances. Beauty must always serve truth. For the artist there can be no ugly truths since the truth sets us free and freedom, no matter how stark, is always beautiful, in the truest sense of the word. The mere appearance of beauty isn't art at all. It's just decoration.
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