“The Tao that can be described is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be spoken is not the eternal name. The nameless is the boundary of Heaven and Earth” – Lao Tzu (570 BC).

As with the Tao, so it is with beauty. “Earth” refers to our everyday lives and “Heaven”, the unfathomable perfect state, sometimes accessible through art. To further clarify this idea, as stated by Iain McGilchrist (a renowned contemporary philosopher), “The beauty and power of art and of myth is that they enable us, just for a while, to contact aspects of reality that we recognise well, but cannot capture in words. It is precisely their multi-layered, sometimes paradoxical meaning, well beyond articulation, that gives them value and makes them resonate with us at so many different levels”.

I believe beauty has its own objective ontology (being), which breaks through in our everyday life and makes the mundane routines worth the while and less tragic. “Beauty will save the world”, Dostoevsky said. Beauty is the bread by which man lives. Beauty is a value that transcends the modern pragmatic worldview, which unfortunately values everything to the degree that they are “useful”. Whereas good art is “useless”, as Oscar Wilde facetiously stated. It is because art isn’t supposed to be a means to another end, but rather is an end in itself (The message of the flower is the flower). It is not predominantly that art, music, stand-up comedy, dancing etc., helps man survive (even though it does). It is something higher than that; it makes survival itself a worthy pursuit.

This often segways into a disagreement with the popular statement “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”. As with many philosophies and religious traditions, extremes at both ends always need to be avoided. It is quite a task to combat the absolutists and the relativists at the same time. Just like with moral deeds and moves on a game of chess, one simply cannot successfully approach the task at hand with the philosophy that your own personal will can decide whether or not a deed or move was a good one. Rather, I would argue that one can perceive the world outside you and the world inside you (i.e. a guilty conscious) unfolding with open eyes. In this same “objective” manner, a good song, a great piece of art or a poem can “unfold” in front of you and rock your world without you having any control over the experience. That is, as a matter of fact, what happens when a person calls an Artwork great. This is when one is brought to the nameless boundary between “heaven and earth”. And your willpower to influence the experience was only relevant to the degree that it opened you up for the experience and got itself and other distractions out of the way. The experience was not fundamentally self-created but was because one’s psyche came into contact with something Real and outside of oneself. Yet, great art is a homecoming experience and makes one believe for a little while that “Our citizenship is in heaven”, as St Paul said.

On the other hand, people are incomprehensibly diverse from one another. Each person consists of their own particular combinations of nature and nurture, which undoubtedly influences their perceptions and interpretations of every event, including great art. For me, this doesn’t simply make a case for the subjectivity of art (and subjectivity always plays a role in art). But instead: that a wider variety of cultural and life experiences opens one up for a broader possibility to encounter beauty. It increases the number of available ports one has to heaven.

The absolutist can easily criticise what he doesn’t understand, and the relativist can be so willfully blind to the point where actual shit (not metaphorically) is exhibited at famous galleries. But faeces in art galleries are just as much a mistake as an endless rearticulation of the old would be. If the new artists surrender their call to go onwards and upwards into new territories, and all humanity has left is a perfect parody of the past legends, actual crap being elected to the status of an artwork can almost be justified. Well – almost.