“More is different.”
Gerhard Richter, Europe’s most celebrated modern painter, asserts: “When you feel totally empty, you do this — but then I saw that one picture was actually better than another. Both were miserable, but the difference was interesting. I loved this: that there must be something, some higher faculty, some progressive sensibility that we find in abstraction. But it is impossible to describe.”
Beauty?
Yes, I believe so. For Richter sums up his aesthetic theory with this simple sentence: “I believe in beauty.”
There is, then, “something, some higher faculty, some progressive sensibility” that not only perceives, but seeks out in the ordinary fluxions of circumstance that fulsome richness, that passionate vividness, that casual elegance that is denominated beauty. The desire for beauty springs directly from an unfiltered, unedited, and unprocessed imagination — we seek that which we don’t have in our own real lives. For beauty is excessive in its emotional as well as its physical expression. And mankind, the mechanical cloaca, wants to disappear into it, as into a dream.
Unfortunately, though, most of us have been brainwashed into the consumer worldview: to merely enjoy beauty, whether it be a poem, a picture, or a person, is a waste of time. We must produce a poem or a painting. And even that is…
