Art and a sense of Aesthetics

Appreciation of beautiful things is an integral part of our lives. The fact that we look at a picture and like it because it reminds us or fits into our idea of what we consider as beautiful or should be, is in essence, our sense of aesthetics.

I have had a terrible time in the past agreeing to someone else's sense of aesthetics, be it in clothes or choice of colour or decor. Till I realised that a sense of what is beautiful may be categorized into two broad categories, namely the widely accepted bandwagon of what is right and the elevated nuance-filled abstract expression. What then is the dividing line between the two?

To answer this question, it becomes important for me to think of myself as a person who has recently been introduced into anything 'beautiful'. I put myself in the place of someone who has never seen anything ever, other than the grey walls of my brain. Ofcourse, a bare minimum of aesthetics is bound to exist because without it, one cannot live at all. For example, the liking for cleanliness and sanitization directly affects our sense of well-being and is in effect a basic aesthetic instinct. The degree to which this particular instinct exists in each one of us varies from the squalid to the paranoid, but nevertheless, it exists.

From such bare minimum, I see that one of the greatest things that affects my aesthetic sense is logic. If there is a representation of something that is illogical, like trees growing upside-down or a game of hockey being played with a duck egg, it does not register as being what 'should be' and therefore, our aesthetic sense rejects it for the content. Remember, I have only bare minimum faculties provided by a science education based entirely on facts.

Likewise for representation of bloodshed, cruelty and things that we consider as being ugly or bad. If I block out my faculties further still and say that I do not even have logic derived from a science education, everything is a revelation and that programs my sense of aesthetics. At the end of it all, I know nothing else but that trees grow upside down in pictures and so can hockey be played with a duck's egg in pictures. Because, after all, they are only a representation of something fantastic.

Here, I come to the second half of what I consider the greater part of human aestheic sense (or the lack of it); that of being aware, as one would put it, of a sense of 'style'.

It is my style to keep long hair or wear a goatee or tear my jeans is such a way as to tease and seduce. It is my style to be ostentatious and carefully careless.

It is my style to look organized. To have neatly trimmed hair, clean shaven face and perfectly creased trousers with just the right coloured shirt and strategically placed accessories starting from the belt buckle to the pair of sunglasses hanging from the neck of my shirt.

There you have it. A sense of style.

So having spent a great deal of effort in trying to come to terms with what my sense of style really is, I was greatly alarmed to realize that in most cases, they were governed by what I picked up these last 27 years. From the fact that pink is very gay and red is very hot. From the fact that black is sexy and yellow is gaudy. From what is considered 'Govinda' style to what is considered subtle and refined. And to discard these widely accepted norms and rebel against it all to develop my own sense of style is in my definition a form of Art. And there lies the dividing line between a sense of aesthetics and Art and why something very abstract and 'illogical' is still a great form of expression.

But in a round about way, that is also a great sign of pseudo intellectualism. The ravings and rantings of something I do not understand plainly because of the fact that the painting in question is composed of ugly blotches of paint at best. That, if I were to go inside the artist's head, I would have seen that he had painted the piece in rebellion against the cruel world which did not offer his single mother a respectable source of livelihood. That the art critic nearby, found the painting representing the artist's psyche in religious fervour, pleading with God in penitence.

Then I realised. There really is no art. Only artists. Both. The one who painted the picture and the other who derived meaning from it. Thus I understood E. H. Gombrich's opening line in his book, 'The Story of Art'.