Beauty is salvific

I watch myself, almost astonished as I change tastes. In the past, I appreciated those who were able to provoke, through their art, annoying sensations that had to do with degradation or with those slightly sick and "over the top" impulses . But maybe I was mistaking art and beauty for a sort of rebellious message. Today certain "productions" only bother me or simply bore me. Perhaps the age I am living in, no longer has authentic rebels and I find some ways simply ridiculous.

I wonder so often what can be called art and beauty. The only answer and personal synthesis I could find, is that authentic beauty must be able to evoke a sacred dimension. Something that manages to make me glimpse the abyss and the light at the same time. Perhaps a sort of "sublime" Kantian where the sense of beauty is conveyed by a shiver of amazement and a feeling of emptiness.

I always find this beauty in nature, both in the greater things and in the almost invisible, I perceive it in a blow of wind that lifts a now dry leaf. A kind of light in darkness (even darkness in light) or life in death and death in life. Perhaps art and beauty are that perfect mixture of light and shadow that I would call dark light.

Unfortunately, ever so rarely I perceive it in any human product. Modern architecture gives me a sense of a psychiatric hospital, figurative art seems to me a mental pipe club, there is a lack of poets who embody the word. 

I think it's time to make an appeal to the world: art for its own sake and beauty are not useless frills but the only thing that can save us.

m.m.

alessandra quattordio