We live in a cruel world.  There is suffering.  There is a lack of human compassion.  We prefer the preservation of the self over the welfare of others.

For centuries, we have turned to beauty to move our eye from the tragedy around us in order to preserve order and save a modicum of humanity.

We find beauty in the physical perfection of others that is created through Art.  Art teaches us what we value as a societal whole and the propagation of that notion of beauty is passed down from generation to generation.

When we cut funding for the Arts, we are cutting out the very soul of what makes us human and compassionate — because the loss of new beauty adversely affects those around us who unwittingly seek ongoing clues to living in the landscape of Art that surrounds them.

Without Art and Beauty we are memeingless.  We have no pathways to hope.  Our access to glory is cut off.

When we remove beauty from our lives, we internalize the wicked and we begin to celebrate the cruel.  We take our outward disappointments, and our inward compressions, and try to make our own beauty, but because we are untrained and uneducated in the ways of bringing sunlight to Art, our effort is darkly misconstrued as proper and patriotic and misunderstanding and maliciousness slowly begin to redefine the memeing of beauty.

Instead of being inspired by beauty, we then are repulsed by it and when we recognize that misshapen beauty in others, we reach for the cudgel and the gun to remove it from our sight.  We don’t know why we want to do harm, we only know we must harm or face the reality of our own despicable demise.

The remedy for this cruel ruse against the self is to promote Art and Beauty higher in our lives to help continue to give us current moral references exposing the beguiling of our condition; for without art, we are but crusty vessels looking for a filling from our fallowness; and nothing other than Art and Beauty can heal the damaged being.  Beauty offers us salvation from our own maligned human impulses.

6 Comments

  1. The role of the arts in our world is clearly misunderstood and undervalued.

    I like the title of your blog, RelationShaping. It sounds closely related to the tag line of my 2004 book: Being Spherical – Reshaping Our Lives and Our World for the 21st Century.

    Spherical,
    Phil

  2. David,

    The more the government pushes aside art, the more it becomes incumbent upon us to support it. For example, I enjoy the PRI program “This American Life” and so I send in a donation whenever I can.

    It is also important that we send our thoughts to the government vis-a-vis why we feel their supporting the arts is vital.

    1. Great advice, Gordon! We think nothing of spending a million dollars for a bomb in the Middle East, but we balk at paying a teacher $50,000.00USD a year to teach Art. Our priorities are whack!

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