rediscovering beauty

He emerged from the metro at the L Enfant Plaza station and positioned himself against a wall beside a trash basket. By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play. It was 7:51 a.m. on Friday, January 12, the middle of the morning rush hour. In the next 43 minutes, as the

violinist performed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by. Almost all of them were on the way to work, which meant, for almost all of them, a government job. L Enfant Plaza is at the nucleus of federal Washington, and these were mostly mid-level bureaucrats with those indeterminate, oddly fungible titles: policy No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made. A onetime child prodigy, at 39 Joshua Bell has arrived as an internationally acclaimed virtuoso. Three days before he appeared at the Metro station,

Bell had filled the house at Bostons stately Symphony Hall, where merely pretty good seats went for $100. Two weeks later, at the Music Center at Strathmore, in North Bethesda, he would play to a standing-room-only audience so respectful of his artistry that they stifled their coughs until the silence between movements. But on that Friday in January, Joshua Bell was just another mendicant, competing for the attention of busy people on their way to work. On that day, each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in any urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the cityscape: Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wal-

let? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Does your decision change if hes really bad? What if hes really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldnt you? Whats the moral mathematics of the moment? In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?
From Pearls Before Breakfast , Washington Post, April 2007

part a the struggle for beauty

beauty in the eye of the beholder
500 BC
Hume and the Greeks define beauty as fluid and changing

pop beauty
17th century - 1920s
we establish independence in beauty on a superficial level but do not seem able to do so in a deeper way.

1990s - present

pythagorean beauty
beauty as a defined constant

17th century

beauty snobbery
the establishment or dictatorship of rules of beauty by the establishment

1920s - 1990s

beauty block
the ability to be awed is over-ruled by the need for control

untouchable beauty
At the close of one of those splendid nature documentaries the camera lingers over the sight of a mountain gorilla seemingly lost in contemplation of a spectacular sunset. Its hard to avoid the conclusion however anthropomorphic it may be that this gorilla is starring long and hard at the sunset because he finds it beautiful. There would seem to be no practical purpose in this contemplation the gorilla is (likely) not going to use the sunset or landscape. Philosophers such as Kant have argued that such pragmatic disinterest is a defining feature of aesthetic experience. In

contrast, a cow staring at the meadow is looking at lunch and not appreciating beauty. However, a highly developed capacity for symbolic, abstract thought would seem to be a prerequisite for the appreciation of beauty. It is simply impossible to know if the mountain gorilla possesses the capacity and/or the inclination for what qualifies as a fully developed appreciation of beauty. It may be that it was only when our Homo sapiens ancestors experienced the symbolic revolution with its huge leap in brain size making complex abstraction possible that the contemplation of beauty and therefore, in a very real sense, beauty itself became possible. But this certainty about the need for symbolic abstraction has not always figured in the definition of beauty.

From its earliest days in ancient Greece, Western philosophy has concerned itself with the subject of beauty. The mathematician Pythagoras suggested that beauty was the result of certain fixed mathematical proportions. In this view beauty if only we could work out the correct calculations is reducible to and the product of mathematical equations. A universal, unalterable given which exists within nature itself, the bottom line of Pythagorass view of beauty is that it has nothing to do with us and is unaffected by our perception of it.

For Pythagoras, beauty was out there, beyond our reach. We could appreciate it. We might even be able to calculate its equations and thereby reproduce it. But if we humans should all vanish it would carry on as before.

However, in ancient Greece there was also a popular proverb:

beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

While Pythagoras argument provides, to this day, a justification for all those elitist snobs who proclaim that they and not the rest of us plebs know what beauty is and what it isnt (because they alone are capable of discovering its objective rules), it was actually this humble yet sensible proverb which has come to the fore in more recent Western philosophy. Centuries of attempts to calculate the fundamental, unalterable equations of beauty having failed to reduce beauty to a universal formula, the Scottish philosopher David Hume, writing in 1772, proclaimed, Beauty in things exists only in the mind which

contemplates them. So instead of residing out there and being universal and forever, Hume (like the Greek proverb) was suggesting that what is and what isnt beautiful depends on us.

We, not nature, create (and can therefore recreate, reinvent and rediscover) beauty.
The Age of Exploration and then the more systematic endeavours of anthropologists have demonstrated the truth of Humes argument, with each and every culture encountered throughout the world proving to have its own views on what is and what isnt beautiful. Of course, in the early days we in the West dismissed these other views of beauty as heathen, primitive nonsense, but as our

respect has grown for the legitimacy and the sophistication of non-western cultures we have been forced to conclude that beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder and furthermore, that different beholders can have remarkably different eyes for beauty.

Beauty isnt fixed. Its fluid.

the dictatorship of beauty

Why should this interest us here? Because if beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then it raises the question of whose eye is doing the beholding.

existing, long-established but no longer appropriate dogma governing what is and what isnt beautiful. For centuries, ignoring Humes point and the evidence anthropologists had gathered from around the world, the establishment, the educated, the upper echelons of our society have continued to presume and to assert that they and they alone have a monopoly on the beautiful. Starting with the Impressionists, various art movements sought to challenge the established conventions and rules of beauty. And yet, even while their paintings fetch evermore astronomical sums, their point that there are not now and never were fixed rules of beauty; that we should open our eyes to new, previously unrecognized sources of beauty has never been fully taken. The Impressionists

painted industrial landscapes, train stations, polluting factory smokestacks and pronounced them beautiful. Van Gogh painted a pair of muddy boots and pronounced them beautiful. The Surrealist Marcel Duchamp signed and exhibited a urinal and proclaimed it to be not only beautiful, but art. We know all this. Its history. Yet the beauty revolution hasnt really come yet to your neighbourhood or mine. The idea still lingers that the experts know better than you or I. This is true not only in art but equally in our appreciation of natural beauty. We travel on holiday to places which someone else, very probably long ago, deemed to be particularly beautiful, picturesque and scenic but are these places really the most beautiful, picturesque and scenic in our own

To promote and energize a rediscovery of beauty in our own era it is essential that we appreciate that it is our own and not some ancient and elitist vision of beauty which we are rediscovering.
To really rediscover beauty we need to also reinvent it and that is only possible once we begin to question

contemporary eyes? Maybe there are beauty spots out there which we will appreciate today but which (as with art prior to the Impressionists) would never have occurred to the Victorians as worthy of our gaze. When we have travelled to these beauty spots we dutifully stand to have our photos taken in front those scenes which have appeared on postcards since post cards and mass travel were first invented. But who decided the Matterhorn is the most beautiful mountain in all the Alps? Maybe it is and maybe it isnt, but

certainly the time has come to reach into our own souls and formulate and trust our own ideas about beauty

Leonardo da Vinci painted The Last Supper in the 15th century. Failing to recognize the essence of the painting, a door was built in the middle of it by the Milan churche / Santa Maria delle Grazie churche.

The Wyland Mural was painted in front of a hotel in Laguna, CA. Seeing it as a monstrosity, the hotel painted over it in white. Robert Wyland bought the land across the street, and painted another Mural on top of that wall.

part b challenges to rediscovering beauty in our time

pop culture beauty we have yet to , extend this personal independence and creativity to beauty in a broader sense? This change would also be timely because, sadly, nature itself is so immediately under threat in the present age. When the Industrial Revolution first began to destroy nature in the 18th and 19th centuries, in Britain where this revolution had begun and where its pollution was most immediately apparent, it generated an opposite reaction in the form of a heightened appreciation of that very natural beauty which was being lost. The Romantic poets and painters celebrated nature as never before and, in the sense that beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder, this moment also marked the discovery of a picturesque and highly

romanticized vision of natural beauty, which is still with us today. Like the romantics we desperately need to reengage with nature at a moment when its very existence is in peril. At the same time, however, our distinctive post-industrial age raises new, unique challenges to our capacity to contemplate and be spiritually enriched by beauty. A Wordsworth today might not have the time or the patience and far too many distractions to commune with clouds or daffodils. A Turner today might have his cell phone ring with an urgent call just as the sun was setting. For us it will not be enough to simply try to rediscover the beauty which another age celebrated and defined. No,

we need to find our own vision of beauty; one which reflects and addresses life in the 21st century.
And one which, in an age defined by individuality, touches and energizes that which is personal and unique in each and every one of us.

This thing about not only rediscovering beauty but reinventing our own personal ideals of it is a timely issue. It is of our time firstly because we have recently seen such an extraordinary flowering of independence of matters of taste when it comes, for example, to dress and appearance style. Not that long ago most people like sheep passively accepted the dictates of the fashion designers and gurus. Today, however, most of us refuse to be dictated to in this way. But while we have extended our independence to

pop beauty is not beauty

there is also a lot in our lives which is attactive in a superficial sense.

If we put it to a vote Do you think beauty is a good thing? the affirmative response might well be unanimous. A rare unanimity in an increasingly complex and contrary world. Yet in practice, typically, our lives in the 21st century seem rarely to be graced with significant encounters with true beauty. There is to be sure plenty in our contemporary world, which is downright ugly. But this is only one part of the problem. For a lot of us This is a more acute problem because true, awe-inspiring beauty is actually, in our age, more threatened by the seductively attractive than by the all too obviously ugly. Ultimately we ourselves are at the root of this problem opting for the superficially, comfortingly attractive while keeping the sublimely beautiful at a safe distance. Even our vocabulary is insufficient today to cope with beauty. Indeed, do we even understand the difference between that which is aesthetically pleasing and that which is sublime?

The poet Andre Breton, in his Surrealist Manifesto proclaimed Let us not mince words . . . the marvellous is always beautiful, anything marvellous is beautiful, in fact only the marvellous is beautiful. Today we typically bandy about words like marvellous or sublime with little if any sense of their true meaning from we had a marvellous time to this pasta is sublime reducing everything to a lowest common denominator not at the end of the day much different from nice. Like our vocabulary, our experience is also constantly, increasingly devalued.

What the always fiery Breton was trying to kick and cajole us to understand and, even more importantly, to experience for ourselves was that beyond the merely attractive, the pretty, the cute, the nice there can be a marvellously, awe-inspiring, jawdropping sublime beauty which (like a drug or a magic potent) has the power to transport us to another dimension - that spiritual dimension which is so often missing in our lives today.

When everything is awesome, nothing truly is.

appreciating beauty means losing control

the framework of religious experience. But in our increasingly secular world, a forceful encounter with the sublime seems even more perilous as we are typically on our own without the safety net of organized religion without even a set of beliefs to explain this extraordinary power. Seeking an easy, comfortable and comforting life (Dont we have enough on our plate already?), we avoid that potentially terrifying loss of control, which might come with a full-on encounter with the marvellous. Instead we settle for Beauty-Lite, an Easy Viewing equivalent to Easy Listening. But this attractive, well-designed world which we increasingly inhabit, while easy on the eye, does little for the soul. We are not touched. Tears do not well up from deep within us. Our mouths do not gape open in awe.

The problem (as Breton was well aware) is that opening ourselves

Trembling is out of fashion. We think were in control, but in truth, this bland world untouched by the marvellous is plummeting uncontrollably through deep, dark, sterile space. Symbolizing, creative creatures in search of meaning, we humans need our spiritual batteries recharged from time to time. And it is precisely this which sublime beauty offers us. Our fear of being overwhelmed and losing control (to beauty) is part of our larger fears in that regard. We have evolved from a feudal society where we (generally) had little to control to a proto-democrato\ic, indpendant model of existence where we have, at the very least, a semblance of independence. To give control up is to practically admit the existence of a higher power and return to that feudal state. Perhaps this is why our modern

life is so focused on maintaining control and not allwowing oneself to give in to the marvellous or sublime.

to encounter full on the power of sublime beauty can be an overwhelming experience involving a loss of control over ourselves, our emotions, our decorum.
For centuries within the West this potentially destabilizing encounter with sublime beauty was cast within

you cant work beauty

In fact, time-travellers from any previous era of history or visitors from any non-western culture would be shocked and stunned by the astonishing fast pace of the rhythm of our lives. Ever since the Industrial Revolution we have taken it not only as given but as beneficial that life will be raced through at ever greater speed. First it was work and transport but inevitably this same drive for upping the RPMs of life has penetrated and now structures our leisure and private lives as well. Fast food is not only cooked quickly, it is also consumed in haste. In the evening, to relax, we play a computer game which sets us against not only our opponent but also the clock. To simply sit and do nothing goes against the grain of a new kind of Puritanism which nags at us that we are bad slackers for wasting time.

But the contemplation of beauty cannot be rushed. It needs time to gradually seep into our souls. There is no such thing as instant beauty.

Yet even when we travel (often, so we say, specifically in pursuit of beauty) we race from one scenic location to the next, snapping our cameras at every photo opportunity, telling ourselves that when we return home we will give the images the time they deserve. Of course, in truth, when we get home there isnt time for anything but a quick, hurried glance and all these beautiful mega pixels just clog up our hard drives. So, ironically, our addiction to photography has become yet another technique by which we insulate ourselves from the whirlwind of sublime beauty staring into a viewfinder rather than encountering the world directly. And not only do we do everything too quickly, we also try to do too many things at once. Just as we have come

to see speed as a virtue, so, too, have we multi-tasking. We pride ourselves on our capacity to split our brains into ever smaller but still (or so we believe) fully function systems dealing with an infinity of separate tasks simultaneously. Of course, in truth the result is that no part of our brains and most certainly not our souls is fully functioning in such a chaotic situation. Again, as with our addiction to the fast life, such multi-tasking is precisely the opposite of what is required for the contemplation of beauty which demands focused as well as sustained concentration. No, lets not say concentration. This sounds too much like it is work and that isnt what we need at all. Indeed,

it is our new found, all-pervasive work ethic which lies at the heart of so many of these problems which hamper our appreciation of true beauty.
Today we not only work at work, but we are encouraged to work on our relationships, to work on improving our sex lives, to work on getting more from our leisure time, to work on our emotional health, and so forth and so on. To work on rediscovering beauty would be the ultimate abomination. And working on rediscovering beauty simply wouldnt work.

What we need to do is precisely the opposite: to banish from our minds those feelings of puritanical guilt at wasting time and, equally, to stop criticizing ourselves for being so oldfashioned as to focus on just one thing at a time. We need the courage to do nothing.
Then, instead of racing around the world frantically clicking our cameras in some absurd and counter-productive attempt to find beauty out there as part of an escape from our own real lives, we will slowly discover that there is sublime, enriching beauty all around us everyday. And it really is awesome.

part c some prerequisities for rediscovering beauty

4 5

1 2 3

Slow down. A form of meditation, the contemplation of sublime, marvellous beauty takes time.

Dump the assumption that true beauty exists only out there in some exotic place or back then in history. There is beauty in the here and now of our everyday lives. (In the film American Beauty, the young video maker finds marvellous beauty in a film of a plastic bag garbage being blown around and around in the wind.)

6 7

Let beauty sweep you up like a tornado in Kansas and set you down in some magic kingdom (which, very likely, is still Kansas but seen with new eyes). Become the plastic bag blowing effortlessly in the wind. Go with the flow.

Stop working at it. Enjoy.

Stop multi-tasking. We are not computers not, at any rate, when it comes to the really important things in life. Focus.

True beauty shouldnt be confused with the simply attractive. Beware of Beauty-Lite. As Breton said, Only the marvellous is beautiful. If it doesnt bowl you over, then its not the real thing.

Trust your own instincts. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder your eye is as good as anyone elses. Maybe better. What the ancient Greeks or todays designers, artists and experts think is or isnt beautiful is of no relevance to you or me. If you find something to be marvellous then it is. (Again, the plastic bag in American Beauty).