Beauty and stillness

A passage I've come across pointed to something very important about the concept of beauty:

"Part of what gets lost [in the human tendency to think that one's life right now is not as it should be; but next week it will be settled properly] is the present. We may lose joy; we certainly lose the detail of what is before us, and much of the wonder of it. One of the later schools of Buddhism, Zen (which will be discussed in chapter 8), particularly emphasizes this. A persistent idea in the Zen literature is that the world, on a minute-to-minute basis, is beautiful but we lose the beauty (and fail to take in most of the detail) because of our desire-laden thrust into the future." (Classic Asian Philosophy - Kupperman)

What Kupperman's idea connects to is a necessity of a state of mind to recognize beauty. Art is more difficult to appreciate when we are distracted or preoccupied. It is not necessary to be happy or sad, as a person at a funeral can incite one's awareness of beauty. Nor is it necessary to be still or silent, as one can work in a great Museum and not notice its works as they have become ordinary. It seems necessary not to be angry to recognize beauty, that it creates tunnel vision and fear for one's self. Yet art that incites people to political action often makes them angry.

What is required is living in the moment. Art may startle someone and give them pause but true appreciation does not occur until they truly become still and accept art inside.

A deeper, perhaps Buddhist sense of stillness and appreciation of the moment, comes in finding appreciation in everyday things. Perhaps artists who paint portraits of Saints and titanic events are less in touch with art than still life painters? Certainly beauty can be appreciated in things that involve time such as the beauty of a dancer's movements, the beauty of two old peoples' long and happy marriage, but that comes with retrospect, which appreciates a single moment. It would seem that art's focus on this instant or the present.

Appreciation of art therefore requires some degree of stillness.