beauty

 ...Have you ever come across an idea that you found perplexing and you felt compelled to share ?

How exactly will beauty save the world? 

For me, was such a question.

If beauty was to prevent humanity from rendering the earth un-inhabitable, would art play a part?  

Or, would nature itself speak so clearly that humanity would begin to understand? 

I would say that "mother nature" is starting to make  herself heard. 

How could I help?

For years the word "Beauty" has been banned from anything to do with contemporary visual art. Using the word in an essay or a grant application triggered automatic rejection.

Like fashion, political correctness is as ruthless 

as it is whimsical. How would banning the word "beauty" effect contemporary visual art ?  

If there was an intention, what might that be? 

My sense of visual order, whether in choosing a canoe design or deciding when to stop work on a particular painting, comes primarily from my experience of the natural world. Where else would our sense of beauty come from ? So, why would an "art world" that includes, publicly funded schools, galleries and granting organizations agree to exclude  the word "beauty," if not to keep a safe distance from nature? 

Why is  "natural environment " correct whereas "nature" and "beauty" are not?

Is it as simple as, arty urban sophisticates won't use a two dollar word where a twenty dollar word will do, or that they resent getting their shoes dirty?  

My suspicion is that there are rewards for conformity.  "Natural resources"  make money in extraction, whereas "natural beauty" costs money to protect.

Years ago, and far away, a man named Dostoyevsky had written, "beauty will save the world" and another man was intrigued. 

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote  " Works steeped in truth 

will attract us with a great power and 

no one will ever presume to negate them. 

Perhaps that old trinity of Truth, Goodness and Beauty 

is not the worn-out formula it used to seem during the 

heady days of our materialistic youth. 

If the three branches; Truth, Goodness and Beauty join together 

…but the too obvious, too straight branches of Truth and Goodness 

are crushed and cannot reach the light— perhaps the 

whimsical branches of Beauty will make their way through 

and perform the work of all three."  

In that case it was not a slip of the tongue for

Dostoyevsky to say that  “Beauty will save the world,” 

but a prophecy. After all, he had the gift of insight, 

he was a visionary."