The Philosophy of Art:
by Gerard J Kelly
The Aesthetics of Beauty
Beauty is a term we use to describe an affinity for someone or something because of a sensation that is abstract to us, and yet has a profound impact on us which is interpersonal, social, and cultural. Our notions of beauty are affected not only by the culture we are part of by by the times we live in, and the education we have attained. Beauty is a truly fleeting phenomena, as the wiser men than me have expressed. Here today and gone tomorrow does not only refer to the aging process which in Western Culture is designated as a thief of that which is beautiful. People fight an ongoing battle against the inevitable, with pills, cosmetics and even surgery! This physical perfection of beauty that is dictated by the media of the day is also always changing and as always is really unattainable. But where did it all start and what other ideals of beauty are distorted by our culture and our times?
I would suggest that man has always had a fascination with form and pattern and in these forms and patterns he has found ideals that he has aspired to. Our earliest sculptures revered the female both sublime and the divine in small effigies that we suppose to have been fertility fetishes. These offering to an unknown god of that day we think were utilized in appeasing the earth mother and leading to a bountiful harvest. Yet, if you read authors such as Gimbutas and her books, Language of the Goddess, 1989, or her later book of 1991 Civilization of the Goddess you can find that there is evidence to point to a hypotheses that is not male oriented and is much more encompassing for this figurines. If she is correct then in our early years on this planet we had a holistic approach to the notion of beauty and the divine.
Later the Greeks who had a large pantheon of Gods and Goddesses had by that time developed a view of physical beauty that verged on and strived for perfection. Their relationship with their deities was very close and the Gods and Goddesses walked with them, made love with them, and ate and drank with them. They had an idea that they too could attain the beauty of the gods, if not the divinity. As a side note to this and changing aesthetics our concept of beautiful polished white marble statues is very distorted. We see them portrayed as such in film and TV, but in reality the Greeks had these works heavily painted to be as close to realistically human ( and godlike) as possible. It is our distorted view of them as pristine white polished perfection that is wrong. The Ancient Greek concept of beauty was muscular and voluptuous, so unlike today's ideal, which again is a distorted view of reality that I would say is causing a great deal of damage to our culture psychologically, and physically.
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Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.
Ralph Waldo Emerson