Beauty and Truth

This is a banner year for wildflowers. They are frolicking in their banners. Drunk on rain, bulbs are bursting, dancing the hora, petals trumpeting. A thing of beauty.  One kind of beauty.

Then there is the beauty in truth and here’s where it gets murky. In some cases, beauty kills…

Claude Monet, you were dangerous once,

upsetting the order in plein air.

Now we’ve made you a cliché.

You rhyme with lily pond and footbridge.

We have taken your measure with coffee mugs,

Devoured you with magnets on the fridge.

You keep the gift shop going.

We have loved you to death.

I yearn for your fractured light.

 

In his Ode to a Grecian Urn, Keats ends the poem with the lines, Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty / That is all you know and all you need to know. However those deathless lines were in quotes as if the urn itself were speaking, not necessarily the poet and that has sprouted over two centuries of head-scratching. Keats seems to be raising the ordinary to high art and the truth therein as he celebrates the urn. The beauty also lies in his inspired words the urn evoked.

For example, I find my urn in everyday Japanese ashtrays, saucers and bowls. The simple contours and minimal strokes rendered casually, so it seems, touch me as much as most museum pieces. They seem to say, look at the commonplace for beauty.   

Edward Weston found eroticism in the close-up of bell peppers with beads of perspiration and their shapes writhing. He dared us to see as he did, voluptuously. His camera made a mistress of shifting sand; the thigh of a dune and the shadow of a gull upon it.    

Truth itself got decapitated a couple of centuries back. Big TRUTH became dethroned to small truths, deconstructed into points of view, the way Picasso saw in his Cubist paintings.

Santa Monica is a thing of beauty. If I didn’t live here, it would be a destination with its palms as tall as lighthouses, the pier, palisades, promenade and the sweep of its coastline. And then there is the life on the streets and the funk.

There is even a certain beauty in the truth of the ugly. We are transfixed at the sight of the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima. At the same time prettified art is hard to look at.

Some things are so ugly they are beautiful in their deviation from the agreed-upon standards of beauty. There is the beauty embedded in the creases of an aged face, a sunset smeared with the day’s pollution, the patina of old masonry; the beauty of authenticity.

Lincoln Blvd is no Champs-Elysée’s. It is void of pedestrians or arresting sculpture, no striking architecture or greenery. It is a boulevard devoted to wheels starting with the homeless and their shopping carts filled with life’s leftovers. It is choked with traffic, fast-food joints, car washes, auto repair shops, gas stations, quick lubes, and used car lots, A mirror of Americana.

Beauty is one of those words under constant revision. My preference is for inclusion from the jacarandas on Eleventh St. to the all-night laundromats on Lincoln Blvd.

On the other hand so much of what passes for art is simply a matter of decontextualization. Put a band-aid on an orange and it becomes an exhibit. Perhaps beauty, in the art world, is no longer an operative word except as experiential. I would replace it with transformation. Art needs to alter our ways of perceiving, however imperceptible that may be. What happens in this act might be called beautiful.