Sunday, March 16, 2014
The world will be saved by beauty
Last Wednesday I visited the GRAM (Grand Rapids Art Museum)
for the first time. It was one of the many surprises of the day: I had no idea
what beautiful city Grand Rapids was, nor how large (the metropolitan area is
roughly 1 million). Now, for the non-Michigan readers: Grand Rapids is a city
in the West of Michigan, and the second largest in the state.
My visit to the GRAM
was part of my day-off routine: ever since I started travelling 20 years ago, I
discovered that spending a half-day in an art museum was one of the more
relaxing and restorative activities I could choose. My dad would have been
proud of me, given that he spent the first twelve years of my life dragging me
and my sister to a museum every Sunday after church! When people ask me what it
is that re-charges my batteries, I struggle to give a simple explanation. Part
of it is that in just about any museum worthy of that name you find, amongst
the many weird and wonderful exhibits, a few that arrest your gaze and
challenge you: either because they flip your perspective on its head, or
because they are simply well executed and beautiful. At the GRAM it was Frank
Stella’s works and the sculptures of Gerhard Marcks.
The previous night (yes, this was a prolific week) I sat in
a college auditorium and listened to “Pink Martini” in concert. Again, nothing
spectacular, but a profound experience of something deep inside me getting
recharged. Simply watching musicians perform flawlessly and drawing an audience
into their spell, had the refreshing effect of completely “unplugging me” and
leaving me re-invigorated afterward.
I could cite many other experiences with similar effects,
even though their circumstances were very different: a Vespa-ride through
Tuscany two summers ago, a wine tasting with friends in Cleveland, a poetry
reading in the basement of a colleague. Yet there is something that all these
experiences have in common: beauty! I am not a philosopher and would not dare
to expound on aesthetics, but it is intuitively obvious to me that beauty has a
mesmerizing and rejuvenating effect. Somehow we no longer think effectiveness,
usefulness, meeting of goals, but simply charm, pleasantness to the senses,
emotional fulfilment. What is being touched is not the mind, nor the will, but
the heart.
Even though this is
now 35 years ago I still remember the topic my baccalaureate’s final philosophy
essay: “Does the artist see the world as beautiful?” and my teacher’s assertion
was “No, not necessarily, but he at least wants the world to be beautiful”. In
other words, even if a piece of art is not beautiful in the narrow sense of the
word, it should convey the longing for a whole, beautiful and ordered world. I would
hold that Marcks’ “Job” does exactly that.
This explains what Dostoyevsky meant when he said “The world
will be saved by beauty”. It is a real question whether, after all the
scientific discoveries and the political nightmares of the past hundred years
people are still swayed by philosophical and apologetic arguments about the
existence of God. But art, in some mysterious fashion, touches human beings on
a different level, on the level of their heart. And there they discover a
profound longing for home, for a place of beauty, order and wholeness. This
very longing, awakened by art, can lead them to the source of beauty, God himself.
So as you begin the Lenten journey, maybe worry less about
giving up chocolate and more about looking at (or listening to) beautiful art.
GRAM is a good place to start, and so is Pink Martini’s new CD “Get Happy”.
Wednesday, March 05, 2014
Priceless Treasures
“What does not cost anything is not worth anything!” This
mantra, or something to that effect, exists in most languages. And at face
value, there is a lot to be said for it: valuable things are not free. But
think about it: encouraging words, random acts of kindness, a hug or a kiss-
what do they cost? Nothing. In fact, the most valuable things in life cost
nothing, because you can’t put a price tag on them. Yet our age is obsessed
with determining the price of everything, and in the process hit all kinds of
paradoxes: how much is a human life worth, so they can quantify insurance
premiums? How much is palliative care allowed to cost?
A few years back, a Swiss economist conducted an experiment:
he looked at people who regularly donated blood, and then randomly selected
some to whom he offered money for doing so. The result was that those rewarded
financially were less likely to give blood. This counter-intuitive reaction has
become known as the “Crowding Out” effect, when intrinsic motivation is crowed
out by the introduction of money. And even in daily life can we observe that
phenomenon: when everything is remunerated, be it the taking out of trash with
gold stars or the participating in the political process with tax favours, the
little idealism or volunteering instinct gets eroded by greed.
I happen to currently live in a country which, for all its
flaws, is very good at civic engagement. When I staying with my 78 year old
uncle in 2001 and 9/11 happened, he immediately picked up the phone and asked
the hospital whether they needed blood: I cannot imagine an Austrian coming up
with that reaction. Most museums, and there are many of them right in the
United States, are supported by donations: rich philanthropists, but also
middle-class Frank and Sally who have a standing order for $15/month because
“that is what we do”. Idealism, philanthropy, civic engagement- what beautiful
values, none of which can be quantified with money. Yet increasingly non-profit
organizations are also evaluated by the “philanthropic return on investment”,
by how much benefit the donors’ contributions yielded, and that is quantified
monetarily.
In other words we seem to be caught in the dilemma of most
things in life costing money, yet money being a poor measure for the value of things.
Nowhere is this more evident as when you evaluate somebody’s life achievement.
Some papers have begun to coin the phrase of somebody’s “net-worth”: Bill
Gates- 76 billion, Tom Monoghan 500 million, Opra- 2.9 billion. This is a scary
concept. The beggar down the street, or monks like myself who don’t own
personal property, would thus have a net worth of zero, or even a negative one.
Really? Surely we need a different standard to attribute worth.
Today marks the beginning of Lent in the West. This season,
like Ramadan for Muslims, is meant to be a season of preparation, purification
and prayer. Fasting, one of its aspects, is supposed to provide a “spiritual
detox”, getting rid of all the mental, emotional and spiritual waste we have
accumulated. Maybe this would be a good time to ponder priceless things in our
lives: time with friends, acts of kindness, prayer and recollection. Are we
investing enough in those treasures, or are we possessed by increasing our net
worth? Are we defining our life by how much we make or own, or by how much we contribute?
As Winston Churchill used to say: “We make a living by what we get, but we make
a life by what we give.”
