Cultivating beauty
Yes, of course, one would first need to agree on what beauty is. And yet it is quite simple, and it arises from the feeling of any human being who still has the good fortune to be deeply human, despite all the formatting imposed since childhood and all those to which one is led to consent in order to survive in society.
And we shall leave aside the avatars of the digital: QR codes, SMS, MMS, disembodied virtual communications that seal one's solitude, even one's isolation.
The society that daily makes the apology of ugliness, that cultivates it, promotes it, and raises it to the pinnacle of the false values on which it rests, seems to have dismissed without regret what constitutes the very essence of beauty. And for a sensitive being, still in touch with the richness of his or her perceptions and intuitions, there is no need to define it. It implies first and foremost a relationship with Nature.
Is Nature not, after all, the provider of inexhaustible beauties? So of course it is banal to repeat it endlessly: we must constantly reconnect with Nature. Provided, obviously, that one is still able to do so.
But what of those millions of children throughout the world who are disconnected from it, because, as Georges Moustaki so well expressed it in that wonderful song Il y avait un jardin: "They are born and they live between steel and bitumen, between concrete and asphalt, and they may never know that the earth was a garden"?
And it is not in the educational barracks of misfortune—where, under the pretext of new "sexual rights" (!), the French school institution (as in other Western countries) claims to initiate them from the earliest age into "emotional, relational and sexual life," carrying out psychic intrusions that will potentially destroy their capacity to be happy—it is not in these places where they are supposedly educated that they will be able to grow and flourish in harmony with the wonderful beauty of the Earth.
And what of art, of which Balzac said: "The mission of art is not to copy nature but to express it"?
Could one paraphrase it thus: "The mission of contemporary art (and where, moreover, does contemporaneity begin?) is not to copy ugliness but to express it"?
Indeed, does not ugliness in all its forms and manifestations, as it imposes itself mainly in the daily life of urban populations, particularly in the West, and notably through the mass media but also of course on the Internet, find itself magnified in feeble works of appalling insignificance, when it is not a matter of aberrant perversity—such as that painting depicting the sexual abuse of a child, titled "Fuck abstraction" (!), which in effect seemed to confirm and banalize the ambient pedocriminality, a painting long exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in 2023 and impossible to remove in the name of "art" and "freedom of creation" despite powerful protests. It had, however, been vandalized by a discontented individual who sprayed it with paint…
That said, there is no need to discourse at length on this apology of ugliness now regarded as a criterion of art. And it is not because one legitimately cultivates beauty that the physical ugliness of a human being— in fact a hazard of nature—should suffer any kind of rejection. Thus, for all that he cultivated beauty, Socrates was very ugly. Physical ugliness is a right.
And to return to true art, it can also draw inspiration from the marginalized child, the different contemporary (and this is not necessarily museum art)… such as that street-art fresco, a free, ephemeral and transitory expression, photographed in a street in Paris from which it quickly disappeared many years ago, and of which this photo is the ultimate testimony.
And since the question of education has been raised, one can only be distressed by the poverty of artistic teaching in the educational barracks, for even if one can read on a page of the French national education system such pretty things as: "The classroom is for the pupil the privileged place for the exercise of practices, the acquisition of knowledge and encounters with works and artists…", even if options with reinforced hours exist and many specialised teachers do excellent work, it must be admitted that in a good number of schools, mainly lower secondary schools (collèges), especially when they are located in disadvantaged urban areas, these teachings, integrated into the disciplinary slicing-up of the main subjects, are often experienced by the pupils as moments of collective release of which the first to suffer is of course the unfortunate teacher. As for the pupils…
And yet these pupils of such diverse origins in the neighbourhood collèges, just as much as those in the "good establishments", would not be insensitive to the openly transcultural beauty of this short choreography gleaned on X. And even if it is a product of artificial intelligence, as suggested in the comments, it remains relevant.
The search for beauty, as much as the cult of beauty, is immemorial. Thus in her magnificent novel Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar has this Roman emperor, whose life is drawing to a close and who is recalling the great moments of his existence, say: "I felt responsible for the beauty of the world." This responsibility we can, we must feel in our own lives and communicate very early to children.
So yes, by opposing the ugliness that is proposed and almost imposed upon us through the invasion of advertising, satanic representations, the deliriums and debilities of so-called contemporary art, we must cultivate beauty in human diversity and in the diversity of all its forms of expression, in the contemplation of true works of art, in the practice of these arts (music, painting, sculpture, dance, and why not a return to the antique), and always, by opposing moroseness, defeatism and the perverse intimations of the system, create original beauty through the quality of feelings, of authentic relations, in the spontaneity of contacts and encounters, of smiles, of words exchanged in the innocence of the moment—a virtue proper to children and to those who, having reached adulthood, have not for all that denied the one they once were.
Pasolini expressed it so well in his poetry:
An Adult? Never.
Never: like existence
That never ripens, always remains green,
From one splendid day to another.
I can only remain faithful
To the wondrous monotony of mystery.
That is why, in happiness,
I have never abandoned myself. That is
Why, in the anguish of my faults,
I have never reached true remorse.
Ever equal, always equal to the inexpressible
At the origin of what I am.
In Pier Paolo Pasolini : An adult ? Never
Finally, we must never forget what was imposed on children in virtually every country in the world under the pretext of a pseudo-pandemic that was supposed to decimate a large part of the world's population — a plan that, fortunately, failed, but not without harmful consequences. The mistreatment that children suffered has caused a great deal of suffering among the young and will leave lasting marks on the adults of tomorrow.
However, children are and always will be bearers of hope, as this musical video so beautifully expresses: The Face of Tomorrow.