A Spectacle of Epic Proportions

Does a good design choice flow from real knowledge? Or is it a lucky guess?

When I wanted to better understand why I was put here on this earth to be an artist, I went where few people would think to go: Bible school. I acquired a master’s degree in biblical studies from a local seminary in just 5 short years (includes global pandemic), and seemingly all to gain one single moment of insight that came to me in spite of my professor not having actually made it.

Professor Anderson had been training us in the Van Tillian method, to argue how a simple examination of our everyday moral judgments inevitably leads us to a connection with the biblical god. The same could be done with our rational judgments of true and untrue. These phenomena coincided quite comfortably with a personal creator who had patterned all minds and wills after his own.

I knew enough about Aristotle and the transcendentals (which is not much more than I’m about to tell you) to make the next logical step. If the true (or logos), and the good (or ethos), can be argued this way, why not also the beautiful (or pathos)? The case would go a little something like this:

Whatever you want to say about big-B “Beauty” and whether or not it exists, you cannot deny that human beings make everyday aesthetic judgments. We reserve the right, when the moment calls for it, to say something is “beautiful.” We may say a dress is beautiful, or our co-worker’s kids are beautiful, or the view from our hotel room is beautiful. Even an explanation can be beautiful (how’m I doin', folks?). We regularly assign aesthetic value to things we encounter in life. We say an outfit looks nice, or a design looks cool, or a dance break is killer. The best ones we even evangelize about (“You’ve got to see this!”). We also hold the right to be offended when others make awful artistic choices. We may complain that a bad movie was a waste of time, or balk at a hairstyle the defies understanding. We want to tell others about these things too. All these evaluations assume a context in which we share some common sense for what’s beautiful and what’s not.

Perhaps you object to prescribing a right and wrong way for something to look, summoning a dozen examples of the traumatic effects of impossible beauty standards. I want you to know, as someone who once placed 2nd loser in a baby beauty contest, that I share your objection.

I also assume you share my celebration when someone or some group constructs something so mind-blowingly beautiful it gives you life. I, for one, am not prepared to take on the Swifties (nor economists for that matter) and disagree that the Eras Tour, the highest-grossing music tour in history, was a spectacle of epic proportions. It is precisely this kind of astonishment that raises the question, “How does one come up with this stuff? Is it a lucky guess? Or does it flow from some reliable source of knowledge about what works and what doesn’t?”

Photograph by Paolo Villanueva

“If eyes were made for seeing, then beauty is its own excuse for being.” - Emerson

There must be some relationship between what gives our senses pleasure and the objective world before us. When something is so beautiful that it makes your heart swell, and the hairs on your arms stand on end, it doesn’t just feel good; it feels right.

But for a real sense of beauty to escape the clutches of a powerful few, it would require standards that stood above time, above culture, and above Abercrombie & Fitch. It would need to derive from a transcendent artistic eye, one that didn’t bias any one race, gender, class, or size, because it didn’t belong to one. Who is less partial than the Creator of all things? Who is more suited to attribute value than a God who loves the world? Who is more welcoming of diversity than the Triune God who is Himself endlessly diverse?

Surely a dozen pushbacks still stir. I have heard many. I will address them. But for the moment, let me ask you this:

We agree that great artists are extraordinarily skilled…but is that all? A surgeon has extraordinary skills, but that’s not why we value surgeons. We value surgeons because their skills improve quality of life. Oftentimes they save it. When a person professes that Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors saved their life, they don’t mean it ironically.