The last years beauty has become perpetually more important in my life, it gradually became the secret ingredient to lift my day up. Yet it looks like in our society, and certainly in modern architecture, beauty is of less importance than ever. Perhaps this is because beauty is inevitably subjective and cannot be measured quite as well as other life-factors such as income or health, this has led to beauty becoming more like something need to figure out for themselves and its importance to be overlooked.
To me, beauty is a value that doesn’t only apply to one category of art or life, the most common category in which we look for beauty is visual art, within this fall paintings, architecture, drawings and also nature. I find beauty something to be broader than just the visual, ironically when you look close enough you can find it in other parts of life too from classical literature all the way to how people treat each other.
When making judgement, beauty as quality gets easily pushed away, often because it ‘doesn’t make it anything more valuable’. From a pure utilitarian standpoint this is a valid argument, however judging something as beautiful tells you it’s valuable, without having any proof of usefulness, without it even having to be useful. This tells us that beauty isn’t simply a means, it’s an end in its own right. Where other creations like a screwdriver are tools, just a means to a certain end, the painting is its own end, there is no higher purpose it has to carry in order to justify its existence.
This makes the appreciation for art and beauty an unconditional purely driven by an intrinsic love for the thing, purely for its own sake. Like a small child, the painting doesn’t have to fulfill a function in order to be adored, loved and cared for.
The fact that beauty has this strange place in our value system, reveals to me something about human nature: Humans have an unconscious internal drive for beauty. When people talk about success, they don’t see the number on their bank account or the actual lists of business innovations, they see a stunning yacht, a beautiful car and a gorgeous partner.
That longing for success, The American Dream, is so attractive to us, because of the rich beauty we associate with it. Working seventy hours a week, always with the image of the car and the palmtrees in the back of people’s mind. That image running in the back of people’s mind is what keeps them locked in in what they’re doing, they think they’re after success, when they’re actually just chasing beauty.
By recognising this desire as a need, it’s almost funny to see how easy it can be to fulfil it. In my case, I hung my favourite paintings up in my room, I read my favourite books and try to be aware of beautiful architecture or views when I see them so I can reap as most soil from them when I encounter them. All this has led me to becoming increasingly more fulfilled and happy in my life.
Earlier I mentioned the unconditional appreciation of a painting, how it has value despite its relative uselessness. For me, the fact that there are things in life which are of no practical use to us and yet deem worthwhile proves to me how deeply human this species actually is, it shows to me the intrinsic, deep love humans have for the world. That we don’t live in a race, that there are moments which are ends in and of itself.
Last autumn when I was drinking tea from my teapot, looking outside seeing the sunset and a leaf falling down, whilst reading a chapter from The Brothers Karamazov. If you ask me the memory I endear the most it’s that one, it wasn’t grand, no other people were involved and it wasn’t expensive and it still is the one which gave me such a deep sense of joy and happiness that it’s still engrained in my memory.
Another example of these moments was last week, during my trip to Vienna and I went to the Belvedere museum where I was deeply moved when I walked past Egon Schiele’s painting Die Umarmung. The desire for closeness portrayed in it, the seeming unconditional longing for one another and the unique expressionistic style made me unable to look away.
If you ask me how to make life more meaningful, more joyful, I would answer you to make a bigger effort in seeing and appreciating the beauty in life, more intensely, rigorously and passionately than you ever did before.
I think you're onto something fresh- that people are chasing beauty and not success as defined by money or abundance. Good observation.
Always you write just very nice and warm stuff bro! Bringing me ailment to my day right now