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”.
# posted by tino @ Sunday, March 16, 2014 
