ART OF BEAUTY

MORE than ever before we utter the word ‘beauty’ today, but isn’t it disappearing from our lives more and more at the same time? It seems to us that we possess little more of it today than the word, an expression which through over-use has become hackneyed, almost meaningless.

Beauty is a promise on posters, an incentive to buy, a pleasing facade, an enticement, a goal, a pipe dream. Is that really beauty? Or has a cheap imitation gradually found its way into the setting that once bore a precious stone?

What is beauty? Hardly anyone is able to give us a clear answer. It means so many different things to different people. And those people who should deal with beauty by profession and vocation, the artists, often turned away from it because it does not express what they feel. For example, it is not disputed that we find a landscape beautiful, that the phenomenon of beauty exists. But what about beauty in art? It is as if the more a person is into art, the more hesitantly he uses the word ‘beautiful’. It can be said that the aesthetic quality of a work of art is not based on ‘beauty’, but is based mainly on expression and imagination. At the same time, it is also a reflection of our dark ethereal environment, thus the world of thoughts, which is ‘picked up’ by the sensitive artist, who, although gifted and talented, cannot tap into the higher planes for his inspirations because he has not developed the dormant spiritual qualities required for this. Therefore he depicts in a striking and provocative manner what he perceives as our immediate surroundings. Thus the works that emerge from this, if not downright ugly, may be enticing, provocative, iridescent, sensual, intellectually stimulating, but hardly ever beautiful!

If we did not know through many unmistakable signs, not the least of which are to be found in modern works of art, that we are standing in a dark hour of humanity, we would have to recognise it by the fact that we have lost the key to beauty, that