Venus de Milo, Louvre - photo by Jastrow
Beauty is incorruptible. It is truth. The Greeks made it a touchstone for wisdom. It is an everlasting reality. If you find beauty you have a treasure forever. But then you do, first, need to know how to recognise it. Or is it too fleeting? Too subjective? Too trend-dependent?
How beautiful is Venus de Milo to everyone? In Ancient Times, she was the short-hand for Beauty, but now we struggle to understand what this means. A generic term. An abstract ideal. How we crave it and rush to photoshop our faces symmetrical and our thighs satin smooth or to plump up our pecs. How we try to capture it in powdered wigs and silk knickerbockers one era and in leggings and botox in the next
They say, beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. Are there no definitive parameters then?
By reading essays (like in“Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art” by Julian Barnes) and studying catalogue introductions, one practices the art of perception. It's the point of art-history before it turns into pedantic academics. Right seeing is the incipient step towards recognising beauty. It is indispensible but little practiced at schools and even less for our pleasure. In suggesting that you can move into the direction of beauty, it is implied that Beauty lies out there, somewhere, waiting for you to discover it. Not in an abstract sense, but as in a faculty of soul to recognise itself at work - in a work!
| 
top row left: Amedeo Modigliani, 1919, Jeanne Hébuterne, Metropolitan Museum of Art
top row right: Édouard Vuillard - Misia Seated in an Armchair, Affecting Nonchalance, 1901
bottom row left: Botticelli, portrait of Simonetta Vespucci., 1474
bottom row centre: 'My Wife, Nude, Contemplating Her Own Flesh Becoming Stairs, Three Vertebrae of a Column Sky & Architecture' - Salvador Dali, 1945
bottom row right: Konstantin Makovsky (1839-1915)
In art there is something for everyone. Is it all beautiful? Is the Guernica by Picasso beautiful? Is della Francesca’s portrait not beautiful, despite the sitter being arguably less than stud material? And let’s not linger too long upon the Ugly Duchess by Quinten Massys! It’s the stuff of nightmares about the limits to ageing gracefully, but isn’t it a beautiful work of art!
| 
Piero della Francesca Portrait of Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino (1472), Uffizi Gallery, Florence. |
Quinten Massys, An Old Woman (The Ugly Duchess), ca. 1513, National Portrait Gallery, London
Maria Popova from Brainpickings remembers the critic and author, James Baldwin and his apt definition of the artist (in any medium) as a wakeful and courageous seer of human truth. Is truth not inherently another way of seeing beauty? Even farmers and biologists and producers of plastic household goods can be artists in their work when they try to express their beliefs and meaning of the whole earth experience in all its manifestations. This is artful and creative business! It produces beautiful results.
But a poet feels. E.E. Cummings is very strict in this, separating poetry from the head-activities and placing it as the voice piece of the heart.
Narcissus by Caravaggio (1594-96)
In our narcissistic times beauty is becoming a rare commodity.
A spiritual perception of beauty would need to include a sense of uselessness: quite literally not meant to be used to inform, explain, justify, educate; serving no direct, mundane, practical purpose. Only then can it be spiritually elevating. Yes, it uses telluric materials, the okers and umbers of the soil, the terracotta clay, the Carrera marble, the ground up lapis lazuli, the gold leaf mined mined from Gaia's running rivers or mined from her deepest entrails; the pulp of plants for paper, the skins of animals for drums. But beauty is not profane or secular as such. It is a heavenly quality, which belongs to all but which attaches itself only to a vivid spiritual impulse. It may be found in the model, but you can't model beauty an sich. That is decadence, pathos, kitsch, decorative design and a fallen beauty.
This returns us to the topic of authenticity and my Musing on Authenticity. For only the true self feels (and knows what it needs).
In my advice to people on special diets, I often had to bring it all back to that one key of life at the heart. There are no specific special ingredients to a beautiful diet! (But some products don't fit.) It meant I would have to veer off the narrow edge of the question and drop the quick-fix altogether. I moved away from what foods were good (useful) for weight-loss to appeal to the Questioner's capacity to feel self-worth- which is a tricky can of worms to pul an opener on.
It begins by observing very closely (the point to beginners-meditation). This is to wipe down the mirror of the heart. Its pictures, thereafter, may still be hard to read, like a stereogram: you need to develop the technique to discover a new focus, a new way of seeing, giving a spiritual 20/20 vision.
Ultimately, it is about enjoying art! Also the "Art und Weise" of nature. But as you grow better at looking - have seen more (and grown older) - you find your tastes will start to convene more and more with a Greater Beauty and less with personal self-reflections. Indeed, there is no accounting for taste, but there is a sacred geometry or cosmic harmony behind Beauty.
Thank you for giving us a new perspective on the beauty of art, and i would say that your articles are very powerful I don't know about that. I do not believe that human being wrote this article. I will read again and again.
Would you like to introduce a book about meditation?
Very nice suggestion. No sooner had you made it and a book fell (proverbaly) on my foot....(It's why I keep - too many - piles of books stacked up all around me so that they can listen in on what might be useful to others and make that known by "jumping out"). Working on a blog!
All reactions are aesthetic - to words too - meaning they either resonate, or not, with some internal neural landscape.
Upvoted by @AAKOM, a new forum for esoteric and exoteric sciences - request signup here.
Curious understanding of the meaning aesthetic I can't quite follow. But neurons make pretty fireworks!
you have an eclectic and mystic writing style that i find intriguing, however its probably lost on much of the steemit community. the way you challenge the subject is wonderful. im not sure if the use of artwork and citing is strictly legal. i'll drop a link that might help you decide.
https://steemit.com/writing/@rhondak/if-you-publish-an-image-you-d-better-own-the-license-for-it
Thank you for your insightful feedback. I thought I had the accredition pretty much covered. Let me know if you spot anything specifically insufficient.
it isnt that you have accredited, you did a super job on that. i'm just not sure all of the sources were free to use. anything that has copyright must have the authors explicit permission unless it is stated otherwise. I spose its confusing here. sorry i was also looking at some other posts where it might be a concern.
You are quite right to be finnicky! I support you in that. As far as I have been informed wikipedia is open source but sometimes a specific reference is required. And it remains a nightmare to trace back pinterest postings which frequently come up in google for works of art. Some say paintings in museums are in the public domain - but you would be right to note that somebody took the photo (if it wasn't you yourself), which makes them the owner of that reproduction. Then it gets complicated. However, if you scan in a picture postcard from a museum shop, what more can you do than reference the museum? Tricky terrain. You are doing a great job to raise awareness. Keep up the good work.
a photo of art from a magazine article, which is copyright noted to a writer and photographer, is not open source. this is where you should be very careful.
also, art from a living artist may very well have copyright status.
Phew, doesn't apply here then.