Response to Connotations of Beauty

The “Hands Arts for Humans” (HA4H) livestream has started encouraging daily writing exercises. Common prompts are being shared. This has actually motivated/inspired me, so yay! See M’s Patreon or Vi’s Patreon if hand arts sound good, and hang out on the Discord with the hand-artist crowd.

in response to the Connotations of Beauty prompts. I won’t respond to all of them because some are giving me the snark in a bad way and sometimes I embrace that but right now I won’t.

There’s a bunch of things to unpack here. First:

How do you respond to [Agnes] Martin’s statement [“All artwork is about beauty; all positive work represents it and celebrates it. All negative protests the lack of beauty in our lives.”]?

I disagree with that. I think you can probably contort art into always being a message about beauty, but I think you can get some that’s just about connection. Do you see what I see here, without it needing to be beautiful or not? Is the judgement necessary, implicit or not? I really don’t think so. Maybe the connection itself is beautiful? If art is always about beauty it seems to lose some of the versatility it could otherwise have.

How do you feel when you see, feel, or hear something beautiful?

I feel like I’m going deeper. Getting to something more fundamental. Even in movement or music, it feels like I’m suddenly understanding things I didn’t before.

Does [beauty] have any connection to authentic emotion?

Absolutely. It seems like beauty passes by the non-emotional and lands solidly in the emotion pool, to fling emotions back at the non-emotional bits. Sometimes it seems to make brand new feelings, for which words are only capable of acknowledging that they’re insufficient: Wow. Ooooh. Bwuhhhhhhhh

Who taught you what beauty is?

You can’t prove it wasn’t Shia the Cat.

Honestly a lot of credit probably goes to my first real girlfriend. That was formative in a lot of ways.