Above Shock and Stimulation, Beauty

Reminders from the Arts of the Past

Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait (1659)

There is a show called Beef on Netflix. It’s about a prolonged feud between two people, who almost bump into each other’s car in a parking lot. One gives the finger, the other doesn’t let it go. The chase and revenge begin, gradually escalating to robbery, kidnapping, and death. There’s a particularly haunting scene in the show. A woman, trying to escape a house robber, runs towards her panic room. A second before the door is about to shut, she throws herself into the room. But she lands a meter too short. Only the upper half of her body is inside. Thud! The iron door slams on her. The woman screams in agony. Second thud! her guts squash. Third thud! “obstruction”, the security system announces. After a few more thuds, her bones crush, her guts spill, and the door finally seals. Horrific. This “comedy”-drama won 8 Emmys and 3 Golden Globes. 

Shock and stimulation seem to be the main ingredients in today’s visual culture. Movies increase in sexual and graphic imagery. Fashion dresses people in nudity. Architecture becomes ever so taller and grander. Even food has become orgiastic to the point of owning the label #foodporn. In our age of overabundance, ubiquitous streaming, and limitless scrolling, everything seems to have reached the status of pornography to steal our attention.

There is also art. A century has passed since Marcel Duchamp shook and shocked the art world with a urinal. And today’s artists don’t seem to have strayed too far from that moment. Jeff Koons, for example, considers vacuum cleaners to possess human sexual qualities. Marina Abramovic works with blood, skeletons, and nude people. Maurizio Cattelan sells a license to duct-tape a banana on a wall for $120,000. And the 2023 Turner Prize was awarded to Jesse Darling, for making sculptures out of detritus. The most esteemed contemporary art emerges as provocative, often acrimonious, commentaries about the socio-political contexts of our time rather than as something beautiful. Thus, for the general public, contemporary art doesn’t elicit much reaction beyond OMG, HAHA, EWW, WOW, ‘is this really art?’ or ‘I don’t understand it.’ But the novelty of shock and amusement wears out. As a result, little is memorable and little prompts contemplation in much of today’s art. 

Art imitates life, the saying goes. And it seems that in our life too, much has become about shock and stimulation. Save the climate! Save our democracy! Save our humanity!… Everything is allegedly dying and requires our immediate action. But with our attention commodified and the culture extremified, how does one find mental peace in a constant state of alertness? How does one pause, contemplate, and ponder upon anything when everything demands our immediate reaction? On second thought, maybe Beef received accolades for echoing similar anger-triggered tragedies that I increasingly witness in real life.

To enlighten my spirit in times of distress, I’ve always turned to art, music and literature to find solace. But not to Beyoncé, or to Jeff Koons. Singers twerking to electronic beats and sexualized vacuums hardly provide a spiritual consolation. Instead, I’ve turned to the ancient and classical times to seek shelter. 

When I lived in NYC, the Metropolitan Museum of Art became my spiritual sanctuary. Being surrounded by beautiful things was my antidepressant, my therapy. I loved looking at the Mesopotamian sculptures and their architectural motifs. Contemplating on their craftsmanship uplifted my spirit. The concentric diagonal lines on the wings of a 10cm bird-human deity were so simple, yet so right, that those small additions made the tiny figure radiate effortlessly. The floral carvings, mounted as large wall decorations, were so elaborate, yet harmoniously and beautifully patterned, that I felt like the mystery of the cosmos was contained in them. These 3000-5000 year-old artifacts revealed to me the enigma of another civilization that no amount of beef in my life seemed worth mulling over. Then it dawned on me that humans always strove to create beautiful things, because beauty is a value fundamental for humans. 

When it came to the Greeks, they had depicted their sorrows, joys, and courage on their funerary vessels. Which showed what system of judgments people lived by and how those beliefs shaped their emotions. In turn, I got to think about my own judgments and beliefs that shape my own emotions. Most worries became quite meaningless when confronted with the footprints of their worship for a life after death. The outlook on the possibility of a next life prompted me to get my priorities straight in the present moment.

And as for Rembrandt, his portraits made me wonder about the lives of those painted, because their faces revealed something about their inner character. Like a portal to a soul. A face is truly a mystery to be unfolded in Rembrandt’s work. Because it’s not about capturing joy or anger. But about a feeling higher and deeper than the facile tempers of the flesh. Dignity, nobility, honor, pride, obstinance…  a man’s character hardened by time, and, perhaps, a woman’s jealousy matured as she aged. It also made me reflect on portraiture in contemporary painting and what it says about us. As in Chuck Close’s pixelated portraits (painted after his permanent paralysis), have our faces simply become dots to one another? A pixel in a digital world, a data point for the sales metrics? And I wondered, 3000-5000 years into the future, what the people would say about us then, represented with vacuum cleaners, skeletons, and bananas. 

Arts from times past provide a spiritual communion with the creators of another era and another civilization. Transcending time and space. Making me reflect on the profound things that came before me, and in turn, understand my own self as a human being. They remind me that I am a spiritual being, and that my existence can be beautiful. Even if the current culture favors anger-triggering and pornification. 

As Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet: 

“What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form, and moving, how express and admirable in action, how like an angel in apprehension, how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals.”

Let us not forget that.