Nowadays, there are so many things that we seem to perceive as “beautiful.” Each clementine-moscato sunset, each creek water droplet descending a rock moss ladder, and each parking lot oil rainbow holds a certain beauty society has come to accept. I’ve never looked upon an oil rainbow in disdain or treated a sunset as if it were second-rate. I’m not sure I know anyone who doesn’t enjoy a lackadaisical stream current, content with its position in the universe.
Sure, our perceptions of beauty within humans may differ significantly on an individual basis, but nature and the non-living world seem to evoke a consistent flow of admiration, despite their variations. But are these things actually beautiful?
Although this is a yes or no answer, essentially, Charles Bukowski takes his response one step further through the introduction of a concrete image, the ocean, in his poem “I Met A Genius”:
I met a genius on the train
today
about 6 years old,
he sat beside me
and as the train
ran down along the coast
we came to the ocean
and then he looked at me
and said,
it's not pretty.
it was the first time I'd
realized
that.
Because Bukowski presents no deep rationale for why specifically the ocean is “not pretty,” he’s demonstrating the fact of the matter that there is simply no debate. After all, beauty is not an objective thing, as it requires individual perceptions to exist. Although this may seem depressing and exclusive at first, it is the most inclusive concept, because everything, literally everything, can be viewed as beautiful, especially art, which is why a spoonful of honey slathered on an upright 2-by-4 could be considered art. In the same right, a seemingly blank canvas can also be considered art. Even though this subjectivity is hurting the art market by depriving deserving artists of studio and gallery space, and some people aren’t down with minimalism, subjectivity is making art a more approachable and creatively diverse craft.
I’ve heard it countless times, people refusing to draw or paint just because they’re “not good at it” or can only draw stick figures; but does that devalue their work any? Art is a creative visual expression meant to express the soul of the artist, or at least that’s how it should be, as some “artists” merely recreate famous souls to conform to what the market is looking for. And at the same time, there are famous souls’ works mounted in famous galleries that aren’t worth the stretched canvases they’re painted on. There are acrylic masterpieces on the backs of pizza boxes hanging up in bedrooms, and the reason they haven’t bathed in track lights isn’t because a greasy cheese pizza box is any less worthy of art than a wall-sized canvas. If your soul is a pizza box, that’s how it is. If your soul is incomprehensible squiggles, polygons, and thick brushstrokes, that is your soul. Whether your soul is hyper-realistic depictions of teeming sunflower florist shops or abysmal hell in brass shopping carts, that is your soul. If that is you, that is art.
This world and everything in it is both art and not art at the same time, creating an earthly society of both perspective beauty and non-beauty, which oftentimes overlaps, allowing equal light to shine on both the dregs and the extravagance of life.
