Analytical Overview Of  Topics

To give an overview of the site I begin with a brief survey of some of the topics to be included, using a characteristic analytical tone to consider the beauty and truth of the artworks. Any worthwhile aesthetic appreciation might begin with an immersion in poetry, where one can be arrested by pithy observation and a beautiful choice of words. For example, Denise Bennett opens her Sally Port amid family strife, remembering ‘when all our mornings/were a week long’, and she provides excellent description of Portsmouth Harbour. She changes pace with a soundbite: ‘one clap of pigeons scuppers my dreams/of her childhood’, and inserts a closing inscription: ‘Let there always be a way through water’. Especially when this appropriate, it is always stylish to end with a quotation.

Sylvia Oldroyd shows good poetic observation; ‘You sit stolid in Arran sweater, poker-faced,/Arms folded, legs planted firm,/Like a trawler skipper on the bridge’ (Piano – Grade 1), while Ron Hansford tingles the spine; ‘Out of the white millennium/I charmed you/my potent sorcery; you enter the pristine body with a weary scream. . . . I have you/I bow my head towards/the magic North’ (Poem for a Son). Bridget Joseph’s poetry is especially inspirational; each detailed phrase is placed on the page with tender care: ‘Tomorrow is the Day of Christmas’ (Angels in the Window); ‘Atlantic seas: a dance floor/dazzles . . . the colour of crystals moves towards me’ (Tintagel); ‘In the chill of the coming months/the cross will look less new’ (Epitaph for a Tabby).

There is a wide field of poetry to provide a stimulating diet. Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters is a collection of poems exploring his ultimately tragic relationship with Sylvia Plaith. It is a total contrast to immerse oneself in the romantic visions of Keats. His To Autumn begins in the ‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’ and ends as ‘ . . . gathering swallows twitter in the skies’. Matthew Francis has a 1980s answer to this with City Autumn, beginning ‘Offices have no seasons’ and ending with ‘. . . the sky a whirl of commuter black, the swallows passing through’. The metaphysical poet George Herbert called prayer ‘the Church’s banquet’; equally these poets – who wrap us in their atmospheres and crystallised feelings – have ‘the soul in paraphrase’.

The poet shares many qualities with the novelist: both must be adept at description, narration, plot, character development, and control of dialogue. Like travel writers such as Bill Bryson, both begin from true experience. But even the least fantastical novelist must bring extended verisimilitude to the created world. Ian McEwan’s Saturday is detailed enough to follow just one day in the life of a surgeon, and research is evident in the medical aspects. Michael Connelly’s The Lincoln Lawyer weaves an exciting story around the central idea of a lawyer’s car; it is highly informative on the practice of law. The same author’s The Poet is a self-conscious work beautifully interweaving literary quotation with horrific police investigation. Charles Dickens also explored criminality and decay in Great Expectations; but beauty shines from the character of Estella, to the point where the smitten Pip ‘saw no shadow of another parting from her’.

Unlike the poem, the novel is not perhaps aiming to be beautiful in itself, and the same may be said for the stage play. While beauty is central in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, it is less obvious in plays such as Macbeth, where witches gather at their cauldron and royalty commit bloody murder. The eponymous King Lear tries to quantify his daughters’ love and relinquish his responsibilities, unleashing the wrath of the gods of nature and losing his family and his reason, whilst in the parallel plot Gloucester symbolically loses his vision. There are significant moments to savour: ‘nothing will come of nothing’ (Lear); ‘He hath ever but slenderly known himself’ (Regan). By the tragic end, Lear hopes that with daughter Cordelia ‘we two alone will sing like birds i’th’cage’, and the conclusion is in verse:

The weight of this sad time we must obey;
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most: we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

The beauty in such a work is twofold: firstly in the quoting, as the play enjoys its own literariness, and secondly as characters like Lear learn to ‘see better’ (Kent) about their own faults and characteristics. The same can be said of Murmuring Judges by David Hare, a pessimistic reading of the conditions and mindsets present within contemporary prisons, police stations, and courtrooms.

One might suppose that the modern media is interested less in beauty and more in accurate representation. Nevertheless, investigations show that much attention is given to presentation. The 2007 Good Friday edition of The Daily Telegraph carries a front page solely featuring bad news. Despite appearances the main headline accompanying a photograph of Big Ben is historical, so the ‘Terror plot to blow up Big Ben and London Eye’ actually dates back to July 2005. Then, ‘Bomb Kills two British women soldiers: Iraqis gloat over wreck of Warrior armoured vehicle’, an article that caries some fact but is mainly a discussion (by a male journalist) of the pitfalls of women serving in warzones. In addition, ‘Easter exodus gets under way as 18 million cars hit the road’; ‘Half of drivers defy speed limit’; and ‘Early grubs killing lawns’. Riding off the stylised authority of television magazines such as BBC News 24, the page gets attention and sells without necessarily reflecting a balance of world events that day.

The films and advertisements of the media networks would have their effects dampened without music, a branch of the arts which itself recycles myths and practices. Some performers and conductors, such as Sir Simon Rattle, have attained perhaps disproportionate celebrity status, although they aim to bring true musical representations to audiences. As Edward Said has argued, the examples of orientalist tropery found in Western opera lack realism, although one cannot deny the beauty of the Eastern representations. Many examples of musical beauty were found at the courts of Renaissance Italy, but the overriding humanist practices here were true to the courtier’s book of etiquette. John Cage developed an aesthetic which eschewed beauty, aiming only to ‘let the sounds be themselves’. If John Blacking (1973:54) is right that ‘music confirms what is already present in society and culture’ then the investigation of any historical or world music culture discovers a valid representation, even if Walter Benjamin would argue the loss of music’s ‘aura’ due to industrial recording and distribution practices.

Music has a large part to play in the liturgy of the church, along with other arts such as word, visual art, theatre, and dance. Within the aesthetics of liturgy, beauty is carefully rationed so as to bring about significance. The Roman Catholic Easter Night ceremony, for example, begins with a candlelit procession with all participants singing ‘The Light of Christ’ before the clergy make a triumphant proclamation. But prior to this - during Lent - the most joyful musical items, such as the ‘Gloria’, are omitted from services. According to Church writings, all arts are included in the worship ceremony as signs ‘of and for faith’. Their practice demonstrates the faith of those involved and, because of the beauty of the arts, encourages the faith of others. Whilst it may appear that beauty here takes precedence over realism, interviewed clergy argue that liturgical actions are full of truth. Father Ray Lyons said, ‘Music is absolutely essential in giving us the emotional courage to fulfil our basic baptismal requirement . . . to spread the Kingdom of God on earth’. Revd. Stephne van der Toorn said, ‘music makes people aware of His presence, and in a special way that talking will never do’.

For Agnes de Mille ‘the truest expression of a people is in its dances and its music [because] bodies never lie’, perhaps the reason that Revd. Van der Toorn always encourages the expression of word and music through dance within the liturgy. Whether street dance or ballet, the art form has links to the deepest of human instincts, and for many commentators it is key to the ideas of truth and beauty. For Dr Maya V. Patel, dancing is ‘as great a mystery as painting or drama . . . as much a part of human life as food gathering and sleep’, while for Sheldon Cheney it is ‘the earliest outlet for emotion and the beginning of the arts’. Dance is a communication between souls (Ruth St Denis), an expression of something ‘greater than all selves’ (Isadora Duncan), it is ‘glory on earth’ (de Mille), and ‘the rhythm[s] of all life’ (Patel). The value of dance might be encapsulated by Mikhail Baryshnikov’s point that ‘the essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure’ (Exley 1993).

The aesthetics of visual art and design may also be considered. The Impressionist artists emphasised the beauty of their depicted scenes rather than the detailed reality, whilst the Expressionists aimed to portray the essences behind the viewed realities. Surrealists aimed to bend the truth, sometimes quite literally as in The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali. Futurism paid attention to the likely progress of technological society, although from the viewpoint of the artist this must have included artistic licence! Schools such as Dadaism neglected beauty, but their stance may have been truthful in expressing living conditions between the World Wars. Three-dimensional art such as sculpture has added realism, and we may sometimes even step into the created scene as with Capability Brown’s landscape designs at Stowe Gardens in Buckinghamshire. Every vista includes a tongue of water reflecting a folly, carefully framed by trees.

Graphic designers usually start with a two-dimensional drawing but create our everyday objects and they are therefore responsible for the aesthetics of our lives. As well as giving us readier access to all of the artworks described above, today’s technology surrounds us, as Sean Cubitt notes, with Digital Aesthetics: everything from the Sony Walkman to the Hubble Telescope, which gave the multicultural age its own iconic view of the globe. Today’s sharply-styled vehicles develop their own aesthetic of advertisement; a ‘Number 2012’ London bus formed the choreographic centrepiece for Britain’s contribution to the Beijing Olympics handover ceremony in 2008, and the petrochemical delivery trucks of a major refinery wear the colours of parcels couriers as testament to the merger and synergy within modern industry. Meanwhile, Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s bridges remain a graceful legacy of nineteenth-century industrial might. Unlike the quasi-natural creations of landscape gardeners, these aesthetics from the centre of our working society have a truth of their own.