Is beauty enough?
By Zak Foster
I didn’t grow up in a family of artists. I didn’t go to art school. And even though I’ve made art my whole life, I always had this nagging sense that I wasn’t a real artist. A real artist, after all, made work with meaning. Was I really an artist if I was just making pretty quilts? Is it enough just to make something beautiful?
For a long time, I didn’t think so, but I’m coming to some peace with these questions. Beauty is enough, I believe, because it is the nuclear core of who we are. It can stand on its own as the central meaning of a work. It makes me think of a poem by Emerson I ran across years ago in college. It’s one of the first poems I ever committed to memory and I’m so glad I did, because it has found its way back in my thinking on beauty. In the poem, Emerson is talking to a rhododendron bloom (or as he calls it here, rhodora) and he gives this flower a boost of encouragement, saying:
Rhodora! If the sages ask thee why
This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,
Tell them, dear, that, if eyes were made for seeing,
Then beauty is its own excuse for Being[.]