The Beauty of Everyday Things

Commonplace Newsletter #81

I try not to lean too heavily upon quotation in these pieces but there is one particular soundbite that has haunted my thoughts since I first heard it. It’s from the rapper Kanye West:

“Beauty has been stolen from the people and is being sold back to them as luxury”

I suspect he may be right. I fear that beauty itself is a diminishing force, and that this thing that was once public and plentiful has become a private and precious commodity, only grasped by those who have the resources to hoard it and the privileged understanding of its life-affirming, life-giving importance.

I fear that with each new year, with each new architectural eyesore and with each new fleeting fast fashion craze that beauty itself is slipping further away from the everyday person’s reality. This is a catastrophe waiting to happen. Because a world without beauty cannot endure for long. These are my fears. And like all fears you deal with them by facing them head on…

Photo by Motoki Tonn on Unsplash

Beauty sold back as luxury.

This sleight of hand makes beauty a rarity, a thing for only the chosen few, or exclusive to only set places and occasions. Whereas in a society built on solid foundations beauty should be built into the very infrastructure of it (as this infrastructure is based on human need), it should be as free, abundant and as plentiful as flowers and trees are in nature. Nature is ultimately the model for all beauty and for all art¹, it is the template that shows us how things are done in terms of colour, proportion and form. This truth has been forgotten, or more cynically it has been ignored or suppressed or rendered either passé or trite.

Why has this been done? Well, we could speculate as to the psychology of the would-be uglifiers of the world, at their resentments and myopia and seeming hatred towards the beautiful, but I think in truth this is largely an economic issue. If the environment is beautiful, people are happier, more content. If people are happy, people do not spend money as there is no advertising created escapism that they have to purchase a conduit for. And if GDP and market performance are the scores we are using to tally success then beauty itself becomes an impediment to making the numbers march upwards. Unless, as Mr West said, beauty itself can be somehow syphoned off, commodified and then sold back at monstrously inflated prices via multinational corporations and luxury branding.

Simply put, contented people are bad consumers. And contentment is driven by a felt sense of beauty in one’s environment, which is an eminently controllable thing. Beautiful cars do not have to be radically more expensive than ugly ones, nor do beautiful houses, or clothes, or utensils or anything else. Great design is a decision, not a luxury beyond the scope of the masses. It’s something that can be chosen, that can be deliberately willed into existence. Or out of existence.

The problem is that ugliness, ambivalence for aesthetics and shoddy design all perpetuate themselves. As soon as an eyesore appears in the environment, it encourages others- just as litter begets more litter- and soon beauty is crowded out and it fades until it is no longer remembered. Until it is seen as a luxury that exists elsewhere, in the nice part of town, and something that you must pay top dollar to experience.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. The intellect can be fooled (‘this ugly new building is actually beautiful because of x, y and z’) but the senses cannot, not really. Hence the subtle oppressive weight you feel as you walk through a neglected spraypainted concrete jungle or when you fester for too long in a characterless untidy living room. And the fact that the senses can take this stimuli and turn it into melancholy (or ‘sub-clinical depression’ if you want a less beautiful name for it) or disgust, is the key to getting out of the mess of our often ugly- seeming world.

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Yes, there are forces working against beauty, for whatever reason. But they are not insurmountable. We always have more control than we are led to believe. We always have the ability to stop and to see and to observe the world around us and find the good in it. We always have the ability to be more active in our environment and to attempt to shape things around us.

As much as anything else beauty is a tempo, it is a state that is discovered in the act of slowing down and learning to truly appreciate and take in what is around us. Slowing down is another one of those habits of the contented which is not good for the economy. Slowing down is another freely available thing that we are led to believe is another luxury preserved from an elite who have ‘earned it’. Don’t believe a word of it. Intentionally slowing down and beauty and leisure are all facets of the same thing. The beauty of things is an everyday occurrence and there are objects even in the very room you are reading this in that are beautiful. Plants, books, furniture, utensils, ornaments- there is something beautiful within your sight at this very moment, I guarantee it. We just tend to forget these objects as we lust after the next thing, or as we take them for granted once they have become comfortable parts of our day to day lives. I know that I can be guilty of this if I don’t watch myself.

So there is hope. Once we replace the habits of haste and inattention with the counter habits of slowing down (stopping to smell the roses is as much about the stopping as it is about roses, as STSC member Kieran noted in a recent essay) and in being mindful the world around us will transform. It sounds fanciful but direct experience tells me it is one of the truest things there is. Paying attention brings the details of our environment to life and through that the beauty shines through. And the ugliness we have allowed to creep have become mere weeds that can be removed or at least halted in their tracks. The downward spiral of aesthetic deprivation ends when we see it for what it is. It is not an inevitability, but a lapse in attention which we can counteract.

Because beauty cannot be taken from you and sold back to you as luxury once you realise that you can simply make your own beauty. With every aesthetic decision you make you can spread beauty and in doing so you can lead others to also do the same. To stop the spread of weeds is not enough, you also have to plant anew.

Until next time,

Live well

Tom.

1. In the past, saying ‘for all beauty and for all art’ would have been a needless act of repetition, but today those two qualities are not necessarily synonymous by any means.