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"He who has access to
the fountain does not go to the water pot."
The above quote from Leonardo da Vinci sums up not only what
the first Renaissance leaders did but also what we in
America must do. The fountain? Now, as in Leonardo’s
time: Ancient Greece and the prototype of the human ideal.
It is my conviction that in order to engender an all
encompassing American Renaissance, we, too, must begin, as
did the ancient Greeks, with the moral and spiritual
nourishment of the individual, the “undivided” self.
Individual excellence of personal character, of physical
fitness and of spiritual wholeness was the Greek
ideal. Further, it was the Greek thesis that individuals
striving toward this ideal would, by virtue of the striving
alone, create a diverse yet mutually beneficial society.
And further, it was their novel idea that art could be
wrested from its primitive origins and usages to become a
universal language with the power to communicate abstract,
philosophical ideas via concrete forms that speak directly
to all individuals as individuals. How right they
were! Still today, in a vastly altered world, their great
art uplifts the spirits of people all over the globe,
reminding us each of the beauty, the possibilities and the
glories of human potential.
For most of America’s short history, we held ideals of
individual excellence similar to those of our philosophical
ancestors. But by the early mid-twentieth century,
individualism—following the European paradigm of angst—began
to turn into rampant subjectivity; individual liberty
(bereft of responsibility) turned into license; moral
principles turned into pragmatism; tolerance turned into
permissiveness; and (most) art turned into an excuse for
emotional purging, political activism and the enshrinement
of wanton violence and human degradation. In art, Duchamp
became the lingering muse: objective standards of judgment
were ridiculed; anything and everything was called art if an
“artist” said it was and got one critic to agree.
Predictably, self-proclaimed twentieth century American
iconoclasts (again following their European models) became
nihilists, as all must do when promulgating the annihilation
of cherished values and ideals without offering better ones
to replace them.
Today, as we approach the end of this century, we who would
set our feet upon a path to a Renaissance of high culture
face strong opposing forces already well entrenched and hard
at work to further debase our culture. There are many in
the country who would return us to a period of “Bread and
Circuses” at best or an era of primitivism, tribalism,
collectivism, occultism and all manner of escape from
reality (and responsibility) at worst. There are many also
bent on creating divisions where none need exist: between
black and white, between men and women, between mind and
body, reason and emotion, art and meaning. Raw
sensationalism pervades TV, movies, the visual arts, popular
fiction, music and sex, as it must in the absence of
values. The media mongers trip over each other in their
rush to explore the souls of serial killers, rapists and
child molesters, but few even think to explore the souls of
heroes, creators and achievers. We live in an age that is
emotionally conflicted, and much of our art and most of our
institutions reflect this conflict. Without valid values as
guides, we are offered the false alternatives of emotional
indulgence or emotional denial, encouraged either to let our
feelings run hot and wild without the restraint of reason or
else accept reason sterilized into a cold rigid formalism
that anesthetizes feelings; look to contemporary music for
especially salient examples.
But let us not despair! If nothing else, the destruction
has been so devastating that a new path may now be cleared
to redirect our culture toward re-examined and redefined
values. In order to gain energy for the charting of a new
map from the ideological starting point, however, we need
fuel—emotional fuel. This means nurturing not only the
mind, but the heart and the soul as well. This means
championing beautiful and life-affirming art and the ideas
that inspire it. Or to put it in reverse, we must champion
rational, life-affirming values and the art that expresses
them, for fine art is values made physically
manifest. In a society where increasingly militant group
identity causes polarity, we must seek commonality among
individuals who share universal values and eternal truths
that hold for all humankind. In a time when “decaditis” is
fracturing contemporary history literally into ten-year
bits, we must honor timeless verities. In an artistic
climate that glorifies ugliness, we must revere beauty.
Beauty: Order. Proportion. Balance. Harmony. Grace.
Beauty possesses redemptive powers all of its own, as in
nature. But when beauty is created by human hand, it can be
even more redemptive, more powerful, because it is created
with intent. In their elevated art forms (beyond
utilitarian function and decor), some expressions of beauty
are also permeated with the highest of human values, letting
each of us, individually, experience our own best self as
surely as if our own soul were turned inside out and visible
to us reflected clearly and sharply from a mirror.
Mathematical beauty can become an end in itself in art as
exemplified by the best abstract sculpture and painting; but
this is not the highest purpose of art because it lacks
human content. Nor is beauty, per se, the raison d’etre
of high art—“high art” is here defined as art expressing
such a depth and universality of humanistic meaning that it
transcends not only its local subject matter but also its
own time and place and becomes a projection of a heightened
reality; thus, it acquires metaphysical relevance and the
power to strike a spiritually sympathetic chord in the very
center of our beings qua human beings. In short,
high art, in addition to an expression of aesthetic values,
communicates timeless and universal human values.
Beauty can be, however, the “charm,” the form, the vehicle
that incites the “aesthetic arrest” in us, immediately
capturing our rapt attention while delivering deeper
messages in slower tempo for our inner contemplation.
Beauty, then, can exist in many forms both natural and
man-made without being high art, but high art cannot exist
without beauty of form. Beauty can be both physical and
mental; it can be both an identification and an evaluation;
this is why beauty and truth dovetail so perfectly, why the
greatest art is both beautiful and true: art and ideas. In
Western heritage art forms, this means representationalism
in the visual arts, tonality and melody in music, grace and
intelligible expressiveness of movement in dance, and the
reverberating interaction of structure, rhythm and meaning
in written works, all of which afford artists an immensely
rich vocabulary for unlimited communication through the
combined power—via a supremely thoughtful integrative
process—of both aesthetic and metaphorical means.
Sight, touch, sound and intellection—not to mention the
mysterious and wondrous realm of the imagination—can all be
stimulated and satisfied through these art forms because the
forms themselves are malleable and limitless; they can
stretch, bend, twist, turn, expand and reduce to accommodate
endless meanings. In humanistic art, form (physical
presentation) always serves content (ideas and values). The
attributes of beauty reside inherently in the human form and
in the forms of the natural world. Beauty can be found also
in the integration of harmonies and the variations in
melodies, in the order and complexities of rhythms, in
textures and colors—all variously shaped by human intention
into images and sounds that stir recognition, aesthetic
pleasure and emotional-intellectual connection. These same
art forms, of course, can be distorted and made dissonant to
serve perfectly proper artistic purposes, but to turn beauty
against itself for the conscious purpose of deliberately
offending human sensibilities and to defile the human
figure, as is being done in too much art today, is to
display a hatred not only for art but for life itself.
Those of us who love life and the art that enhances living
must seek out other like-minded individuals and join
together in camaraderie and good will to enjoy and enrich
our moments on this earth through art experiences that lift
up our spirits, move us to contemplative thought and remind
us why life is worth living. Painters, sculptors, writers,
composers, dancers, musicians, actors, poets, audiences,
patrons. All!We not only need to write about ideas but also
to promote the showing of ideas in all their various and
captivating forms through the only tangible means possible
other than science: art. Indeed, in a society
becoming more illiterate by the minute, art may be the one
dynamic powerful enough to envision for us a way to a better
future.
The success of the Renaissance Europeans lay in the fact
that they did not attempt to repeat the Greek ideal. They
reached back to Greece, as we must now do, only to create a
true rebirth of ideas that they then made manifest, as did
the Greeks themselves, through their own great art. They
redefined the Greek ideal to suit their own needs, to
express their own context—David, not Apollo. Now, it is our
turn. What will the next millennium heroes and heroines
look like? As we approach the beginning of this momentous
turn of a century, we who seek the way to a better tomorrow
must dedicate ourselves today to those human values that
express the best within us in order to usher in a future
culture that can outshine even the Golden Ages of the past.
And how better to express “the best within us” than through
works of art that project the world at its most beautiful
and man and woman in their most noble state?
The following quote (from an unknown source) seems pertinent
here:
Pre-Renaissance nostalgia was not self indulgent and
debilitating, but turned into a vigorous and revitalizing
current which inspired writers, artists and craftsmen to
give expression to the new mood...
Obviously written in reference to the Italian phenomenon,
the notion of a “new mood” resonates particularly well
today. If we look carefully, we can glimpse, as if wafting
up like a fine mist from the troubled waters of our age, a
rising concern for individual liberty in certain political
sectors and a resurgence of a romantic spirit in certain of
the arts. It may just be that a faint scent of the perfume
of hope is in the air. Most definitely, our own desires to
renew the values of beauty, humanism and the moral ideal
should not be mere “nostalgia” for the past but a “vigorous”
commitment to the future. We should desire to create a
rallying point of view that includes all of the fine arts.
We should desire to establish and support places and
organizations where kindred spirits may learn about each
other and combine efforts toward a common vision of fresh
expressions of individualism and the beauties of the world
in which we live. We should support venues where the art of
contemporary artists who express these life-serving values
in their work may be promoted and brought to national
awareness—“contemporary” meaning living artists, not a
particular art persuasion (!). Our attitude of devotion to
ethos should not deny pathos, but it must emphasize the
tenet that human struggle and suffering can become acts of
affirmation by projecting visions of why the struggle is
worthwhile. We cannot salve (nor solve) the sorrows of
humankind by continually lamenting over what is wrong; we
must hold up what is right. It is wasteful to fight
against; it is productive to fight for. Ours should be a
declarative step toward establishing a nationwide,
cooperative endeavor to create a rebirth (not a revival) of
positive art and ideas that will give “expression to the new
mood...vigorous and revitalizing.”
There is no doubt that we live in a dangerous but
exhilarating time. The prize is great but the stakes are
high, for if we do not generate another Renaissance, then
surely we shall suffer the default position of another Dark
Age. The art and ideas that we of a positive and humanistic
persuasion choose to champion must be expressions not of
division but of integration: mind, body and soul in harmony,
passions elicited from value stimulation rather than sensory
titillation, and brotherhood born from shared values rather
than color, creed, gender or bloodline. Those of us who
understand the philosophical premises expressed through art
are charged with far more than a simplistic call for a
return to beauty or a poignant cry for a lost innocence that
never existed. We are charged with the more profound
responsibility of giving expression to a deeper mood...one
of renewed celebration—a mood that seeks not to escape
reality but to embrace it, celebrating the joys, the hopes
and the possibilities of life. Human life. We can curse
the darkness as we should and do, but that will not be
constructive unless we also draw back the curtain and let in
the light.
Art imbued with beauty that expresses life-serving values
and humanistic ideas (and ideals) is a potent manifestation
of that light, the same philosophical flame ignited in
ancient Greece, rekindled during the European Renaissance
and the Enlightenment and reflected across all civilizations
ever since in a myriad of forms that celebrate individual
achievement and excellence. America was founded as the
political incarnation of that light. Let us now, like
Olympians who celebrate the wonders of physical excellence
through sport, lift the torch high and illuminate the way to
celebrate the wonders of a spiritual renewal through art.
As we approach the coming millennium, let us join together
and gather the vision, the courage, the energy and the
talent so abundant among us to open a new, clear channel
through which our reborn values can flow from the
fountainhead to the future, and in its wake, create the
surging, shining wave of a genuine, lasting American
Renaissance in art and ideas that will rise to take its
place among the high watermarks of human history.
Copyright © Alexandra York. All rights reserved. |
