Pierre Delattre

Art and Beauty
by Pierre Delattre

I’m going to be writing short blogs in defense of art and beauty. I think it was Shafstbury who said that to be beautiful is to beautify. We need to beautify every realm of life, the political and military, and perhaps the artistic most of all, I think. To beautify is to participate in the life of God. Buddha told Ananda that “friendship with the beautiful is the whole of the holy life.” Yet beauty has become a much despised, even a much attacked word in many art circles. Why do you think that is? Maybe it’s because beauty is confused with its opposite: prettiness. There’s nothing pretty about the beautiful. Yeats wrote of “a terrible beauty.” Ugliness is easier to deal with. If the world is seen as ugly, we don’t so much mind dying; but when we experience how beautiful the world truly is, we come alive in a more vivid way, and can be suddenly terrified at knowing that we’ll eventually lose it all on the material plane, at least during this incarnation. Beautiful music and art fill us with love for the world again, especially the world we grieve for, the world we human have stripped of so much beauty. In my view, ugliness doesn’t spur us to action nearly as much as beauty does. In our daily viewing of ugliness, feeling bad about it seems to action enough. I too often see grief over ugliness as a moral cop-out, a fake substitute for action. We live in a country that dotes on guilt, wallows in it, even as our society, including our art, music, theatre, grow uglier and uglier. Just feeling guilty is enough to justify pleasuring ourselves as a reward. Say some well-appointed people go to New Mexico’s Site Santa Fe avant-garde gallery space to see a show entitled “Our Grotesque.” Along the facade they are greeted with effigies of horrible, ugly, dead rats. The frisson of ugliness begins. They enter galleries where they see vaginas dripping blood, urine bottles, twisted testicles, tortured faces, the usual crap installed on the floor, blinking on videos, glued to canvas. Wow, that is literally some horrible, ugly shit! Look at these photos of dead bodies piled up at mass genocide sites. Cool. That’s art with a message! Okay, so you know what I think’s going on? Art goers see all this and it makes them feel very bad. They think to themselves, I must be very good to feel so bad. The badder I feel, the better I must be. So, please, like in church, make me feel really, really bad Mr. and Ms. artist, so I can feel really, really good about what a good, sensitive person I must be. Confronting ugliness that makes me squirm, sticks it in my face, that’s what confirms to me that I have a beautiful soul and that I’m so very brave. In fact, honey? Now that we’ve endured this little horror show, don’t you think we deserve one to go find a flowery cafeteria and reward ourselves with a glass of wine or an espresso and a piece of that beautiful chocolate cake?
-Pierre Delattre
source