FRIDAY POTPOURRI: BUT IS IT ART: MORE THAN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

So the beautiful is not just matter of taste but a transcendental.  There are things that are fascinating, innovative, novel and maybe even pretty and which draws one in.  But does that make it beautiful?  

Beauty is more than personal taste.  Beauty is beauty by its nature.  It is Truth and the Good made visible.  Thomas Aquinas adds these characteristics: integrity, due proportion and claritas.  It is something that draws one in.  It is also admirable: when one stands before that which is beautiful it is more than being attracted, it is being awed and enveloped, it is being inspired deeper into truth and goodness.

A few decades ago a Supreme Court Justice (Potter Stewart) in rendering a decision on hard core pornography side stepped defining it, a thing which he found very difficult to do, by saying, “I know it when I see it.”  But is it entirely subjective?  No, there are elements that must be present.  Is it entirely objective?  No, there are things that seem to have all of the right elements but just, somehow, fail.  Can someone be coached into seeing the beauty of something that at first did not strike them as beautiful?  Well, yes.  It may be called developing good taste.  Can one be fooled?  Oh, definitely.  Can something be beautiful without me seeing the beauty in it?  Yes.  Etc.

Like the building up of a good culture, could it be that beauty needs the collective experience of “the many” and time to be declared truly so?  (This helps rid us of the bias against, "I don't like the color blue," or "Anything to do with this politically correct topic/style is tops with me.)  Are critics and experts just pretty good predictors who have a step up on weathermen but who, similarly, are at times spectacularly wrong?  Could a ten million dollar “work of art” today be thrown in the ash heap of the future along with the thought, “What were they thinking?”  I think so.  

Beware of the prophet that declares something beautiful too out of the norm and pressures you to follow suit (but be open to skeptically considering) and don’t be too quick to jump on board declaring something long thought to be beautiful to be destroyed because what might only be fashion has influenced us too much.  Beauty doesn’t get to be beauty simply because someone says so.  But a lot of human beings over a long period of times certainly have a defining voice.

All of which makes judging art more difficult (but not completely impossible either.)  So the next question is, “Are art and beauty permanently joined at the hip?  Does a work need to be beautiful in order to be art?”

YOU ALWAYS SAY MORE THAN YOU INTEND TO REVEAL

There is a saying that goes, “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.”  When a person is not careful about their speech they can end up revealing much more than they intend.  It is part of the “why” behind the Gospel injunction to always be truthful and speak that which is Good, True and Beautiful.

Take today’s Gospel for example.  Jesus drives out a mute demon and his detractors say, “It is by the prince of demons that he drives out demons.”  In their carelessness in denouncing Jesus, they inadvertently bring Him some credence.  Notice that they didn’t say, “Nothing happened.”  Clearly something happened and they needed a way to discount it and so ascribed the miraculous thing they witnessed as being evil.

So first they inadvertently give great testimony to something that they themselves witnessed.  Then they reveal something about themselves in turn.  Jesus explains the weak logic of their argument and then says, “Those who are not with me are against me.”  Who is He?  God.  If one are not with God, with whom else can one be?  There is a lot of things being revealed here though an attempted deception.

Something similar happened in the local newspaper recently.  In a letter to the editor this week entitled, “Stop the Hatred,” the author rallied against what she saw as growing division in the United States.  She wrote, “If you are an anti-Semite, racist or whatever else, bigotry is an equal opportunity killer.”  What is interesting here is that she takes a group of people (who by and large are clearly in the wrong from a Christian point of view) and separates them from the rest of the “good people” (My words, not hers) and then sort of sets up this “we good people” pointing that the “bad people” and berating them.  “What these bigots don’t realize . . .”  (To whom is she speaking?  People who who are not bigots?  Wouldn’t they already know this?)  While I agree with her premise that if we allow hatred of any group, we may, one day, find ourselves on the wrong end of the stick, her method for getting there is not to engage those whom she may desire to convert to a more loving stance, but to put them in a group and denounce them and inadvertently becomes, at least somewhat, what she hates.

In another interesting article in the Beacon Journal this past Saturday entitled, “Planned Parenthood funding cut.”  The subtitle was, “Federal Appeals Court upholds laws ending flow of state dollars to abortion providers.”  The title and much of the writing is an enormous reversal of language normally used in the public media.  There was no mention of “abortion foes” (as opposed “Pro-Life Advocates” that those who promote life would prefer to be called) or the masking of abortion by the writer as “women’s health care” and in describing an abortion procedure the baby is referred to as a fetus not a mass of cells.   

Is this, too, starting to reveal a change in popular culture?  Only time will tell.  It was only one article.  But it was published and makes one wonder what truths it may be revealing.