beauty

It's funny how people can't decide whether it's the outer beauty or the inner beauty that matters. When it's about people, they all say "oh, look at the personality, not how a person looks like!". In Art, however, people fo for the outer, directly experiential beauty - and although the 'inner' beauty of a piece of Art is appreciated, it comes second, because Art is mainly an aesthetic thing.

However, both these cases are dependent on the occasion: people will be attracted to beautiful people, as people will appraise a painting with 'inner' beauty more than a painting that just looks nice. And to try and classify rules of behaviour by _ these two caterogires, would be wrong, because they are not two different things, but two sides of the same coin.

The Aesthetic cannot exist without the Conceptual (otherwise there is no final result), and the Conceptual cannot exist without the Aesthetic (otherwise there's nothing to apply/exhibit hte concept on).

"Ah, so a more beautiful piece of Art will be beautiful both aestheticall and conceptually!"

Well, not quite. It's not that it's 'better' or 'more beautiful' - it's just beautiful in a different way. And it's the same for people: you can't say that someone is 'better' or 'more beautiful' ecause they are interesting both in terms of personality and looks - because each person is different to another.

But in a society where competition is so highly endorsed, where you have to fight to get something, where you have to constantly try to be better than other people, the Different gets lost in that sea of effort. People, instead, try to do things that everyone does, because then it's easier to show how much better you are than the others. People eliminate their differences so they can focus their energy in doing better the things that everyone does.

We live in a world of mass production, mass consumption, mass destruction. The only hope is that, just like past, Art will change the way we see the world, because nowadays it's being individual and having your own voice that matters (in Art), and now how 'good' you are compared to the Masters. I believe Art has a similar function to language in that it doesn't represent the things we experience, but shapes how we experience the world.