Beauty Lives

Art creates space.  That’s what it does.  It creates space between life and our experience of it.  In other words, it gives us the chance to reflect, to see ourselves in third person, to take the pressure off of having to make a decision for the moment.

Art gives people a moment, a moment to take their focus off themselves and their immediate situations - to explore the creative world and somehow then follow it back into their own.  Art re-orients us to ourselves.

Without it we get hyper-fixated on the details of our life.  Art distracts us from our goals.  It teases us away from seeing only our next steps.  It lures us outside of our self-focus.  This is both the threat and danger of art.

It is a powerful force.  In luring us away from ourselves, there is the chance we will not get back on track.  There is also the chance we will not want to go back, that what we find there will be better than our existence here.  Art is designed to mess with our seeing!

Art, in this way, is less like a mirror and more like a lens.  It looks at the world that could be, one that we can barely see with our natural eyes.  It translates life as something new, strange, almost distorted, yet wildly compelling.  We find ourselves staring out.

What is it about a specific painting we can not usually say.  Why this particular song haunts us we can not put into words.  But we know something is happening.  Something powerful (other dimensional) is taking place.  We are seeing into another world.

But this is where it comes back around - that other world is actually our world.  It is just not our world, yet.  What we experience there is almost like dejavu.  There is a familiarity when we see it, a sense that we have been here before.  (Perhaps it is our future self that has?)

Art sees a world without limits, one outside of what we narrowly see as reality.  It allows us to actually experience that world, to sense it.  Though we know we can’t maintain the feeling it brings, the freshness of its air does wonders for our outlook down here.   

So in essence, we need art.  We can live without it.  We can survive without it.  But unless there are people finding and translating beauty into our world we can quickly forget its value.  We can quickly reduce life to mere instinctual survival.

There is something more.  That is fact.  Art is not make believe.  It does not seek to escape the “real” world, it seeks to find it.  What we find in there is not fanciful, in the sense that it is false.

Those premonitions of a new world may be more real than we know.

That is real power in good art.  It finds a reality that is not always accessible.  It gets to something not yet discovered, at least by us.  It mines realities that help us remember beauty and truth are endlessly discoverable, and not mutually exlusive..

Without art we lose beauty.  For art is the ability to find and translate beauty.  Beauty is hope.  Beauty is always around us but not always available.  She can be quite elusive at times.  The artist must follow her and remind us all that she is still alive.

Beauty is eternal, because ultimately it is a trait of God, and lives on in the art of God’s creation, and in the creation of art.