THE BEAUTY PROJECT
In 2008, the year the great recession hit, when one of my sons, a recent art school graduate, said, “Somewhere along the line beauty became a cop-out, a word synonymous with vacancy.” He jolted me, a punch to my gut…my gorgeous, soulful son uttered those sad words. That very day I started an inquiry whose goal was to collect other thoughts about the big idea of beauty. I called it “The Beauty Project.” Contributors run the gamut: poets, artists, plumbers, doctors, etc. You can check out the comments below. AND here are some readings, clips, and other inspiration shared by contributors so far. If you'd like to be a contributor, click here and sign up.
And a contributor sent this link to an NPR podcast...https://www.npr.org/2013/04/19/174724704/what-is-beauty
Philosopher, Denis Dutton says here, "Beauty is deep in our minds, it's a gift handed down from the intelligent skills and emotional lives of our most ancient ancestors." Some would say, from God. Either way, it's fascinating and fantastic. Please do have a listen.
Contributor's Comments
the gestalt between separate lives
masked power and power masked
I feel this time is a time of rupture -- is that the same as a "generative moment"?
are love and beauty connected?
----
I recommend the book On Beauty: and Being Just, by Elaine Scarry. I can't live without beauty, something beautiful everyday. In these times, it's essential to stay balanced -- even if it's just balancing on our little rock in the middle of a raging river.
-----
Any moment some outside influence spills into the solitary container of your body and stirs it to a crucible, blends all that is and has been you with all you see and hear and touch in new and inseparable union; this is a moment of beauty.
-----
Nietzsche finds beauty to be the opposite of “good.” Carl Jung states clearly that “the opposite of love is not hatred, but will to power.” Adding to these two puzzles, the Dictionary of Etymology (Chambers) traces the origins of the word “beauty” to Vulgar Latin: bellitatum; state of being handsome—or, Latin: Bellus: “fine, handsome, beau.” I think what I’m trying to say is that Nietzsche and Jung are on the right path. Beauty is not the beau, not the fiancée (though the world would prefer a handsome “fiancée” who is “bellus,” over the paradox that beauty is. If you are in the present moment when a wild beauty accosts you, what you just experienced enters your soul. You can never get rid of it. This seeing of beauty, sensing its presence, becomes the longing of the soul. A bit of music? The day you were crying in the fields and 7 deer ate cheerfully beside you? Lightning, snow, someone’s brilliant face in a dream?
-----
For me, those quick and gone experiences of beauty grant me the favor of making sense of my life, making meaning, throwing hope down on a ladder. These glimpses, the moments of hair-raising awe, humanize me. Even when that fleet moment seems utterly disappeared, it has not. Perhaps memory shifts the exact date, exact location , but memory is a dear friend to beauty—it’s not the “facts” (did that “really” happen and how can I explain this event to my family/friends?) that count. It’s learning to live in the pull and the stillness of one lucky—four, five, six lucky—moments when beauty sears you forever.
-----
I bet “beauty” is sort of the last thing we expect---not necessarily happy—it may be quite terrifying, but once this moment occurs, you are never the same person, as hard as you might pretend. Bummer!
---
Beauty is a heightened sense of the sublime, often indescribable, but you know it when you see it or hear it or touch it or feel it. Beauty is S. Barber’s “Adagio for Strings”
-----
If I had one word to describe what I value most in life, it would be beauty
----
Beauty is the crows feet in an elderly woman that comes from decades of smiling.
----
----
You yourself were an infant
filled with the unmitigated
light of innocence
which remains with you
even to this day
and this is what we know of beauty
----
Re: beauty: I think its definition lies in the pleasure it accords. Its measure taken by lax plumb line heartward.
-----
Guess I’d have to say that the Japanese concept of Wabi-Sabi is closest to my daily working definition/sense of "beauty" - the natural, humble, worn thing, worked on by time, tides, wind, sun . . .the thing that allows us access to our own transcience, that is softened or roughened by time, that's frayed, rusted, shows its lived through cycles, resists the notion of "completion" but rather keeps itself in motion by allowing big forces in. These things, objects, unadorned people even, make me breathe more deeply, shock me awake, deepen my sight . . .
----
The experience of beauty is painful to me. In the encounter with the beautiful, I feel simultaneously awakened to the boundless wealth available to perception and devastated by my own incompleteness. In that tension, I feel most vibrantly alive. Right now, a single bough is draped, beyond my window, with skirts of green. It is a lovely thing.
----
Beauty - Unadorned Light …
-----
the way underwater creatures move
the colors they wear
the structural composition impacted by water flowing over, under and through them
beauty is the deep satisfaction arising from sensory stimulation
-----
I long avoided the word beauty, even in thought. It seemed too high and too foreign to apply to the things I cared about. But now I've grown into the word--or my concerns have grown into the word, for me. They have grown into another still place, in doing so.
E.g., of the time past--I can remember thinking of "Beauty is truth, truth beauty--" and saying to myself that I was too puritanical to see all beauty as truth, and too pessimistic to see all truth as beautiful--mostly just too much cheap clever-stupid phrasemaking here. Truth was the word I wanted to stand up for, in what was to me the false equation.
-----
We start to write--to pay homage to the beautiful in the world, or to try to make the poem beautiful--because of the perception that we are not beautiful. The perception of kinds of beauty that hurt--the perception hurts--is related to this lack. I think poets (I) get beyond this pathetic lack, go on writing for other reasons, but it is an early impetus.
----
As for other words about beauty--there are Dickinson's words--I quote this from memory-
Beauty is not caused--It is--
Chase it--and it ceases--
Chase it--and it abides--
Overtake the creases
In the meadow where the wind
Runs his fingers through it--
Deity will see to it
That you never do it.
And summer departs "Into the Beautiful"--what looks like a Platonic Beauty there. So Dickinson had no trouble with the word. The 19th century had no trouble with it? Certainly Dickinson had no trouble with Keats--"I died for Beauty, but was scarce/Adjusted in the tomb/When one who died for Truth was lain/In an adjoining room"
-----
Beauty isn't what most people think. It's not the lucky symmetrical placement of facial features on a self-centered girl named Ashley, who pulls everyone's focus when she buys gasoline, or the way the brightest moon lines your cat's curvy form like electric paint; everyone thinks that it is. Ashley is beauty only until she reveals her tendency to shift most every conversation round to her fucked-up manicure or her inability to stay interested in a guy who likes her way too much; after that she is a piece of art made by someone self-conscious with little to say beyond, "How graceful are these sailboats?" or "How delicately the moonlight plays on Moo Moo's fur!" It wasn't the moon anyway, as I thought, on the cat's silhouette, but a new streetlamp that sometimes keeps us awake, which seems more beautiful to me. If Ashley comes to me swollen from the dentist's chair, and woozy, and points out how much she loves the low, tiptoe-looking way my very fat cat walks, as if the cat's rolling, she's seeing beauty. When my elderly mother comes into the kitchen with mustache bleach on her lip and, surprised she's not alone, twirls two circles, with her arms above her head, for me, so I can laugh, that's beauty. When the streetlamp throws a spotlight on my old dead sneakers, walking home, and I feel hopeful, like a kid, same. There's beauty that singles you out, that you single out, like making a one-of-a-kind friend, and it's the most radiant kind.
----
-----
I guess I myself tend to think there's beauty with character and beauty
without character. But for those of us who prefer the former, beauty and
character become rather synonymous.
------
Sublime, hermosa, pulchritude, The Good, Truth, exquisite, the cat's meow! Not very "original", but the best I can do at the moment.
I asked myself what happens, within me, that manifests my experience of beauty... my first and most powerful thought was that it makes a direct/immediate connection with/to my heart center and second, those experiences happen through a sensory experience... or a combination of sensory experiences.
----
Beauty -
open-heartedness
mystery
a kind of immeasurable perfection apprehended in the mind
felt when the heart and soul are aligned
know it when I see or feel it....
----
Beauty is inexplicable energy. When a work of art gives more energy than it takes, it is beautiful. This goes for everything, including people--people like you.
-----
OK. To be honest, 'Beauty' to me is the way my heart is touched when I see something that can only touch my heart. Beauty fills my next breath as if it was the first breath I took in my life - I thank my lucky stars that my eyes can connect to my heart and breath instead of my head at those moments. Seeing and connecting in that visceral way is life to me; it keeps me going - a gift to my heart - keeps me going. And to complete the circle it can even bring tears to the eyes that saw it to begin with. It is memorable and warm and kind and very very satisfying.
------
I have been much affected by Theodor Adorno's (Frankfurt School, post-Modernist) view that no theory of the Beautiful can be complete without a theory of its opposite, The Ugly. That he comes at the end of a line of thinkers on Aesthetics beginning with Kant, Hegel and Clement Greenberg who emphasized The Sublime as one criterion of the beautiful is somewhat astonishing. The Sublime (the ocean, the sunrise, the forest, sexual climax) often contains within it a superficially confounding element of Power or Threat, Fear, even messiness, clearly visible in the great paintings and sculptures of the 20th century. One can stand in front of Picasso's late portraits of Dora Maar or Guernica and think at once, without really thinking, "how beautiful" despite the obvious ugliness of the subject matter or the perverse treatment of a human being. Before Kant, Aristotle used Mimesis as the criterion for beauty and quality in art; Kant used the subjective sensation aroused by the work and whether that feeling approached our experience of the sublime. Paintings like Picasso's clearly fail this test. Hegel and Greenberg situated beauty and quality within a progressive historical process of Modernistic or Utopian perfection or perfectibility. For a scientist such as myself, there is much to admire in this theory: it judges achievement in modern art by the same criteria applied to modern science, discovery and newness. Einstein and Poincare, both writers on creativity, clearly felt that Beauty or elegance was a chief criterion by which to judge the correct solution or the suitability of a solution to a mathematical problem. Such solutions are often intuitive, they "feel and look right", and convey tremendous heuristic power that gives emotional satisfaction to their creators. Clearly their physical embodiments, numbers and symbols, do not share the properties of a Matisse painting but they do satisfy Kant's subjective criteria. Kant thought that we possessed a built-in aesthetic muscle in our brain similar to our capabilities for ethical reasoning and rational thought, hence his tracts on each of these subjects, and that this capability could be exercised and refined. Given enough knowledge we know what we like and know it when we see it. I have always felt that the mathematics of the brain favored certain aesthetic solutions over others, the golden mean and rectangle in our visual cortex, tonal music over atonal noise in our cochlea, correct syntax in our poetry. The ability to see "beauty" in works of art that disobey these psychophysical principles, I believe, depends greatly on cultural learning or else Jackson Pollock and Arnold Schoenberg must forever remain strangers to our individual aesthetic capabilities.
Of course, I think immediately of Keats and what he said famously. Also, of this little book called On Beauty by Elaine Scarry. I have not read it yet and have been meaning to ever since Marie Ponsot suggested it in a workshop at P-town some years back. I think actually the title also reads: and Being Just. If you don't already know it, you might check it out.
----
Beauty is simply truth, resplendent
----
A rusty old fence hand made from wire or metal.
----
Beauty, Hm? I'm not good with contemplating concepts like "beauty" and "aesthetics," partly because I protest. I feel manipulated by the general reverence for these ideas. I think that in the end, beauty is an idea, and an ideology, based in the stories we tell ourselves of who we are or would like to be, and what we believe in -- the truths we defend as Truth. Keats said: Beauty is truth. Truth beauty./ That is all ye know on Earth and all ye need to know." For me, beauty is not Truth at all. If anything, Truth needs to be broken down into truths; "Beauty" becomes "beauties," and these humble little entities are nothing but convincing lies, brilliant ideas that have the ability to kindle my imagination like good stories do, and that ring their truths in a place I can't quite locate -- my heart? my unconscious? my intellect?... there you go, my thoughts on beauty.
----
1. Beauty feels absolute; it must be written with a capital 'B'; it conjures a frozen perfection and paralyzes me. 'Beautiful' feels less daunting because to be 'ful' of it, even filled, still allows for a few motes, stray hairs, warts, wrinkles, if only to help us see the over-weening, preening Beauty.
2. I was browsing in an antique store in Hampden when a woman reached for a silver cup on which was engraved 'Beauty is truth'. She read it aloud with a sneer and pronounced, "What a lie." Was she beautiful? Discuss.
-----
Somewhere along the line beauty became a cop-out, a word synonymous with vacancy. Maybe because the Modernist's pursuit of the sublime never panned out? Maybe because conceptual artists demanded content over aesthetics? Maybe because something beautiful is easy to sell, and no one wants to admit that art acts in tandem with money? Maybe it is beauty's ability to put us at ease that has made it taboo. We should be skeptical of beauty. How vulnerable we are when under its spell! Beauty must be a cloak, the rouge and lipstick hiding the monster, the pearly white smile worn by politicians, a siren's song. Beauty invites people in, begs them to open and receive what it cradles. It is dangerous to let yourself go. At its best it is a reassurance that the sublime can still be touched. At its best, it is a place where a logical line of questioning is replaced with a sigh of relief.
----
Updated, July 2, 2017
And a contributor sent this link to an NPR podcast...https://www.npr.org/2013/04/19/174724704/what-is-beauty
Philosopher, Denis Dutton says here, "Beauty is deep in our minds, it's a gift handed down from the intelligent skills and emotional lives of our most ancient ancestors." Some would say, from God. Either way, it's fascinating and fantastic. Please do have a listen.
Contributor's Comments
the gestalt between separate lives
masked power and power masked
I feel this time is a time of rupture -- is that the same as a "generative moment"?
are love and beauty connected?
----
I recommend the book On Beauty: and Being Just, by Elaine Scarry. I can't live without beauty, something beautiful everyday. In these times, it's essential to stay balanced -- even if it's just balancing on our little rock in the middle of a raging river.
-----
Any moment some outside influence spills into the solitary container of your body and stirs it to a crucible, blends all that is and has been you with all you see and hear and touch in new and inseparable union; this is a moment of beauty.
-----
Nietzsche finds beauty to be the opposite of “good.” Carl Jung states clearly that “the opposite of love is not hatred, but will to power.” Adding to these two puzzles, the Dictionary of Etymology (Chambers) traces the origins of the word “beauty” to Vulgar Latin: bellitatum; state of being handsome—or, Latin: Bellus: “fine, handsome, beau.” I think what I’m trying to say is that Nietzsche and Jung are on the right path. Beauty is not the beau, not the fiancée (though the world would prefer a handsome “fiancée” who is “bellus,” over the paradox that beauty is. If you are in the present moment when a wild beauty accosts you, what you just experienced enters your soul. You can never get rid of it. This seeing of beauty, sensing its presence, becomes the longing of the soul. A bit of music? The day you were crying in the fields and 7 deer ate cheerfully beside you? Lightning, snow, someone’s brilliant face in a dream?
-----
For me, those quick and gone experiences of beauty grant me the favor of making sense of my life, making meaning, throwing hope down on a ladder. These glimpses, the moments of hair-raising awe, humanize me. Even when that fleet moment seems utterly disappeared, it has not. Perhaps memory shifts the exact date, exact location , but memory is a dear friend to beauty—it’s not the “facts” (did that “really” happen and how can I explain this event to my family/friends?) that count. It’s learning to live in the pull and the stillness of one lucky—four, five, six lucky—moments when beauty sears you forever.
-----
I bet “beauty” is sort of the last thing we expect---not necessarily happy—it may be quite terrifying, but once this moment occurs, you are never the same person, as hard as you might pretend. Bummer!
---
Beauty is a heightened sense of the sublime, often indescribable, but you know it when you see it or hear it or touch it or feel it. Beauty is S. Barber’s “Adagio for Strings”
-----
If I had one word to describe what I value most in life, it would be beauty
----
Beauty is the crows feet in an elderly woman that comes from decades of smiling.
----
----
You yourself were an infant
filled with the unmitigated
light of innocence
which remains with you
even to this day
and this is what we know of beauty
----
Re: beauty: I think its definition lies in the pleasure it accords. Its measure taken by lax plumb line heartward.
-----
Guess I’d have to say that the Japanese concept of Wabi-Sabi is closest to my daily working definition/sense of "beauty" - the natural, humble, worn thing, worked on by time, tides, wind, sun . . .the thing that allows us access to our own transcience, that is softened or roughened by time, that's frayed, rusted, shows its lived through cycles, resists the notion of "completion" but rather keeps itself in motion by allowing big forces in. These things, objects, unadorned people even, make me breathe more deeply, shock me awake, deepen my sight . . .
----
The experience of beauty is painful to me. In the encounter with the beautiful, I feel simultaneously awakened to the boundless wealth available to perception and devastated by my own incompleteness. In that tension, I feel most vibrantly alive. Right now, a single bough is draped, beyond my window, with skirts of green. It is a lovely thing.
----
Beauty - Unadorned Light …
-----
the way underwater creatures move
the colors they wear
the structural composition impacted by water flowing over, under and through them
beauty is the deep satisfaction arising from sensory stimulation
-----
I long avoided the word beauty, even in thought. It seemed too high and too foreign to apply to the things I cared about. But now I've grown into the word--or my concerns have grown into the word, for me. They have grown into another still place, in doing so.
E.g., of the time past--I can remember thinking of "Beauty is truth, truth beauty--" and saying to myself that I was too puritanical to see all beauty as truth, and too pessimistic to see all truth as beautiful--mostly just too much cheap clever-stupid phrasemaking here. Truth was the word I wanted to stand up for, in what was to me the false equation.
-----
We start to write--to pay homage to the beautiful in the world, or to try to make the poem beautiful--because of the perception that we are not beautiful. The perception of kinds of beauty that hurt--the perception hurts--is related to this lack. I think poets (I) get beyond this pathetic lack, go on writing for other reasons, but it is an early impetus.
----
As for other words about beauty--there are Dickinson's words--I quote this from memory-
Beauty is not caused--It is--
Chase it--and it ceases--
Chase it--and it abides--
Overtake the creases
In the meadow where the wind
Runs his fingers through it--
Deity will see to it
That you never do it.
And summer departs "Into the Beautiful"--what looks like a Platonic Beauty there. So Dickinson had no trouble with the word. The 19th century had no trouble with it? Certainly Dickinson had no trouble with Keats--"I died for Beauty, but was scarce/Adjusted in the tomb/When one who died for Truth was lain/In an adjoining room"
-----
Beauty isn't what most people think. It's not the lucky symmetrical placement of facial features on a self-centered girl named Ashley, who pulls everyone's focus when she buys gasoline, or the way the brightest moon lines your cat's curvy form like electric paint; everyone thinks that it is. Ashley is beauty only until she reveals her tendency to shift most every conversation round to her fucked-up manicure or her inability to stay interested in a guy who likes her way too much; after that she is a piece of art made by someone self-conscious with little to say beyond, "How graceful are these sailboats?" or "How delicately the moonlight plays on Moo Moo's fur!" It wasn't the moon anyway, as I thought, on the cat's silhouette, but a new streetlamp that sometimes keeps us awake, which seems more beautiful to me. If Ashley comes to me swollen from the dentist's chair, and woozy, and points out how much she loves the low, tiptoe-looking way my very fat cat walks, as if the cat's rolling, she's seeing beauty. When my elderly mother comes into the kitchen with mustache bleach on her lip and, surprised she's not alone, twirls two circles, with her arms above her head, for me, so I can laugh, that's beauty. When the streetlamp throws a spotlight on my old dead sneakers, walking home, and I feel hopeful, like a kid, same. There's beauty that singles you out, that you single out, like making a one-of-a-kind friend, and it's the most radiant kind.
----
-----
I guess I myself tend to think there's beauty with character and beauty
without character. But for those of us who prefer the former, beauty and
character become rather synonymous.
------
Sublime, hermosa, pulchritude, The Good, Truth, exquisite, the cat's meow! Not very "original", but the best I can do at the moment.
I asked myself what happens, within me, that manifests my experience of beauty... my first and most powerful thought was that it makes a direct/immediate connection with/to my heart center and second, those experiences happen through a sensory experience... or a combination of sensory experiences.
----
Beauty -
open-heartedness
mystery
a kind of immeasurable perfection apprehended in the mind
felt when the heart and soul are aligned
know it when I see or feel it....
----
Beauty is inexplicable energy. When a work of art gives more energy than it takes, it is beautiful. This goes for everything, including people--people like you.
-----
OK. To be honest, 'Beauty' to me is the way my heart is touched when I see something that can only touch my heart. Beauty fills my next breath as if it was the first breath I took in my life - I thank my lucky stars that my eyes can connect to my heart and breath instead of my head at those moments. Seeing and connecting in that visceral way is life to me; it keeps me going - a gift to my heart - keeps me going. And to complete the circle it can even bring tears to the eyes that saw it to begin with. It is memorable and warm and kind and very very satisfying.
------
I have been much affected by Theodor Adorno's (Frankfurt School, post-Modernist) view that no theory of the Beautiful can be complete without a theory of its opposite, The Ugly. That he comes at the end of a line of thinkers on Aesthetics beginning with Kant, Hegel and Clement Greenberg who emphasized The Sublime as one criterion of the beautiful is somewhat astonishing. The Sublime (the ocean, the sunrise, the forest, sexual climax) often contains within it a superficially confounding element of Power or Threat, Fear, even messiness, clearly visible in the great paintings and sculptures of the 20th century. One can stand in front of Picasso's late portraits of Dora Maar or Guernica and think at once, without really thinking, "how beautiful" despite the obvious ugliness of the subject matter or the perverse treatment of a human being. Before Kant, Aristotle used Mimesis as the criterion for beauty and quality in art; Kant used the subjective sensation aroused by the work and whether that feeling approached our experience of the sublime. Paintings like Picasso's clearly fail this test. Hegel and Greenberg situated beauty and quality within a progressive historical process of Modernistic or Utopian perfection or perfectibility. For a scientist such as myself, there is much to admire in this theory: it judges achievement in modern art by the same criteria applied to modern science, discovery and newness. Einstein and Poincare, both writers on creativity, clearly felt that Beauty or elegance was a chief criterion by which to judge the correct solution or the suitability of a solution to a mathematical problem. Such solutions are often intuitive, they "feel and look right", and convey tremendous heuristic power that gives emotional satisfaction to their creators. Clearly their physical embodiments, numbers and symbols, do not share the properties of a Matisse painting but they do satisfy Kant's subjective criteria. Kant thought that we possessed a built-in aesthetic muscle in our brain similar to our capabilities for ethical reasoning and rational thought, hence his tracts on each of these subjects, and that this capability could be exercised and refined. Given enough knowledge we know what we like and know it when we see it. I have always felt that the mathematics of the brain favored certain aesthetic solutions over others, the golden mean and rectangle in our visual cortex, tonal music over atonal noise in our cochlea, correct syntax in our poetry. The ability to see "beauty" in works of art that disobey these psychophysical principles, I believe, depends greatly on cultural learning or else Jackson Pollock and Arnold Schoenberg must forever remain strangers to our individual aesthetic capabilities.
Of course, I think immediately of Keats and what he said famously. Also, of this little book called On Beauty by Elaine Scarry. I have not read it yet and have been meaning to ever since Marie Ponsot suggested it in a workshop at P-town some years back. I think actually the title also reads: and Being Just. If you don't already know it, you might check it out.
----
Beauty is simply truth, resplendent
----
A rusty old fence hand made from wire or metal.
----
Beauty, Hm? I'm not good with contemplating concepts like "beauty" and "aesthetics," partly because I protest. I feel manipulated by the general reverence for these ideas. I think that in the end, beauty is an idea, and an ideology, based in the stories we tell ourselves of who we are or would like to be, and what we believe in -- the truths we defend as Truth. Keats said: Beauty is truth. Truth beauty./ That is all ye know on Earth and all ye need to know." For me, beauty is not Truth at all. If anything, Truth needs to be broken down into truths; "Beauty" becomes "beauties," and these humble little entities are nothing but convincing lies, brilliant ideas that have the ability to kindle my imagination like good stories do, and that ring their truths in a place I can't quite locate -- my heart? my unconscious? my intellect?... there you go, my thoughts on beauty.
----
1. Beauty feels absolute; it must be written with a capital 'B'; it conjures a frozen perfection and paralyzes me. 'Beautiful' feels less daunting because to be 'ful' of it, even filled, still allows for a few motes, stray hairs, warts, wrinkles, if only to help us see the over-weening, preening Beauty.
2. I was browsing in an antique store in Hampden when a woman reached for a silver cup on which was engraved 'Beauty is truth'. She read it aloud with a sneer and pronounced, "What a lie." Was she beautiful? Discuss.
-----
Somewhere along the line beauty became a cop-out, a word synonymous with vacancy. Maybe because the Modernist's pursuit of the sublime never panned out? Maybe because conceptual artists demanded content over aesthetics? Maybe because something beautiful is easy to sell, and no one wants to admit that art acts in tandem with money? Maybe it is beauty's ability to put us at ease that has made it taboo. We should be skeptical of beauty. How vulnerable we are when under its spell! Beauty must be a cloak, the rouge and lipstick hiding the monster, the pearly white smile worn by politicians, a siren's song. Beauty invites people in, begs them to open and receive what it cradles. It is dangerous to let yourself go. At its best it is a reassurance that the sublime can still be touched. At its best, it is a place where a logical line of questioning is replaced with a sigh of relief.
----
Updated, July 2, 2017
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