Two questions from my teaching days are: Why would the artist make art? and why should the artist make art? I used these two questions and a challenging poem, “Kubla Khan” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, to introduce a unit on poetry. More on all that later in this post.
For most of my adult life, I have been interested in what beauty is and why it matters. Anyone can point to various objects or people and say one is beautiful and the other is not. Those judgments pertain to differences in our preferences. Ours is a culture fighting over what a proper definition of beauty ought to be, or worse, the concept of beauty is not even discussed, either because people don’t know or don’t care what it is. Through our screened devices, someone seems to be telling us what is and what is not attractive, and by the power of the online mob, we should all agree.
One of our Praxis Circle experts, Dr. Roger Scruton, discussed “beauty” at length, and he wrote extensively about this topic. Scruton began his 2011 book, Beauty:
We discern beauty in concrete objects and abstract ideas, in works of nature and works of art, in things, animals, people, in objects, qualities and actions. As the list expands to take in just about every ontological category (there are beautiful propositions as well as beautiful worlds, beautiful proofs as well as beautiful snails, even beautiful diseases and beautiful deaths), it becomes obvious that we are not describing a shape, size or colour, uncontroversially present to all who can find their way around the physical world. For one thing: how could there be a single property exhibited by so many disparate types of things? (page 1)
He continues to examine how we come to understand beauty, a pleasurable exercise combining the sensory with reason in order to understand it. Judging beauty is part of what makes something “beautiful.”
Scruton’s point about judgment fascinates me. It seems simple and obvious: we see or hear something that strikes us, pauses us for a moment from our busy lives, and we marvel at it. As he wrote, the pleasure “in beauty is contemplative…therefore like a gift offered to the object, which returns it” (page 31). The beautiful object demands attention.
But how do we recognize it? To me, beauty possesses a spiritual power. It exists beyond what I can see or feel, until that spirit comes through the object I experience. This experience—the transcendental somehow being reflected through the mundane—is one reason why the Beauty pillar in Praxis Circle’s Ten Worldview Concepts is considered supernatural.
I asked my wife this question about recognition, and she posited that beauty is rare and out of the ordinary, not part of the humdrum of life. We must seek it out or discover it by serendipity. We both agreed that beauty possessed the inherent qualities of balance and harmony. Possibly, our agreement reflects our own classical preferences, but as I thought about what I considered beautiful, a sunrise or a Botticelli painting or a soccer ball arcing through the field and picked out of the air and fired into the back of the net, I couldn’t think my way to asymmetrical qualities of beauty. To me, recognizing beauty comes from an innate sense we all have for order.
The Spirit of Beauty
I imagine the spirit of beauty as a cosmic river whose current flows somewhere in the ether. The artist, like an ancient Roman aqueduct, taps that river and then conducts the water straight to us. We drink it. It gives us life and energy. The artist, if great at his or her craft, possesses a unique gift: the ability to transfer from its source this spiritual water to the physical world.
Below is a short clip of Dame Judi Dench reciting William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29. You will see the usual banter of the talk show, and then one of the most famous actresses alive today proposes to recite the poem. It is her pause just before she speaks that I believe is the moment she taps the spirit of beauty. Maybe she’s just doing what actors do, collecting herself before the performance, but to me, she is in communion with Shakespeare himself, who, when he wrote Sonnet 29, tapped into that same exact flowing spirit. In this moment, Dench and Shakespeare offer us the divine.
Back to My Original Two Questions
Creating beauty is messy. In Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”, the speaker initially reveals a vision of the pastoral ideal, created in Xanadu by human decree, “a pleasure dome” full of ancient forests, enfolding sunny spots in greenery.” But, the vision soon changes to one of chaos and contradiction, a demon-lover and an allusion to child-birth, complete with explosions of “huge fragments vaulted like redounding hail.” Not to mention all the paradoxes: measureless caverns, floating pleasure domes, sun and ice combined. Furthermore, the poet writes of voices “prophesying war” and then the artist himself warning “Beware! Beware!” because he has seen what is to come by making art through drinking “the milk of Paradise.”
In Coleridge’s point of view, the artist in pursuit of beauty commits to a process of confusion and mayhem. So, why in the world would anyone create art? Why be subject to the disorder and suffering just to birth something into the world that most people will reject? Why the heck do so when it won’t even provide a steady income?
Well, the artists I know—writers, painters, musicians, photographers—can’t not make art. I think this tendency goes beyond simple obsession, however. Expanding the definition of “artist” to mathematicians and scientists who are certainly capable of offering the world beautiful propositions or theorems or discoveries, the power of beauty as a spiritual force is why the artist will subject himself or herself to these torments. Beauty, in all its manifestations, is divine, and who, once one has experienced God, could ignore Him?
Finally, why should the artist create art? Because beauty is good and pure, it can only come from God. It is the Creation itself. As Genesis describes, from chaos comes order, and therefore, each time we experience beauty in whatever form it comes, we are enjoying the continued blessings of life, the eternal ripples of the Creation, and the love God has for us all.
