Reading 5

I really enjoyed "On Beauty and Being Just" by Elaine Scarry.  She's a wonderful writer, and it is fitting that this examination of beauty is quite beautifully written.  For me one of the most interesting parts of the reading was the discussion of beauties place.  Does it belong in the realm of the real or the ideal?  Scarry says "Permitted to inhabit neither the realm of the ideal nor the realm of the real, to be neither aspiration nor companion, beauty comes to us like a fugitive bird unable to fly, unable to land." This is an idea that I think artists can understand.  Is an actual object inherently beautiful, or is it the idea that is beautiful, or both, or neither?  Supposedly art is subjective right? So when we look on a "beautiful" painting, what are we seeing, and why do we think that painting is beautiful?  Is anything objectively beautiful? It seems to me that beauty is conditioned.  Different cultures have different ideas of what is beautiful, and people have different tastes in art.  So perhaps beauty can live in the realm of the ideal more effectively then in the realm of the real.
Later on Scarry suggests that "The beholder, in response to seeing beauty, often seeks to bring new beauty into the world..." This is another idea that I would imagine resonates with artists.  It is the idea of beauty as muse.  Perhaps this is just a side effect of being an artist, but I often find myself studying beautiful elements of the world that surround me.  Patches of light on the floor, the patterns made by shadows on architecture, the way trash and debris move across the ground on a windy day.  When I look at these things my mind often spirals off into the mode of creation, because I see beauty, I want to create beauty.  Is this why we pursue beauty? So that we can in some sense harness it's power, and use it to create?