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Portrait of John Keats, Oil on canvas by Joseph Severn, 1821-1823. London, National Portrait Gallery

This piece was originally posted on October 2023 on Substack


What is Beauty?

For most of my life, I assumed I knew what the word beauty meant. Something was beautiful if it was visually pleasing. When I became an artist I realized that it wasn’t that simple and that my earlier thinking was vague at best.

Different cultures have different ideas of what is beautiful. They have different definitions of what Beauty means. Add to that the fact that philosophers have argued for centuries over the definition. Plato said Beauty wasn’t found in art or in the natural world. Centuries later Iris Murdoch said it was. Decades after Murdoch, Arthur Danto reminded us that Beauty and Art are not necessarily connected.

The more I learned about how others define Beauty the more the questions challenge my assumptions. That challenge isn’t always easy but it is very exciting. Learning about Beauty is a philosophical inquiry and philosophy helps me be a better thinker, a better partner, and a better person.

One of the first big questions I learned that philosophers asked about Beauty was where is it located. Is it a concept in your mind, as in “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” (subjective) or is it something instilled in the object or place itself (objective)? Most thinkers today would say the answer lies somewhere between the two.

Over the ages, a lot has been written about beauty and art and much of the language used isn’t always easy to understand. Even the books written in an attempt to explain what Plato meant when he says that Beauty is in the “forms” are not easily grasped.

The more I work at trying to understand all of this the more I feel that Beauty as a concept is something truly useful in my life. I can use what I have learned about the qualities of Beauty to make my life full. Beauty can be brought into my life through the objects around me; by the art I look at or by the handmade ceramic mug I use every day. I can look for Beauty in the natural world around me, and I can strive to experience beautiful works of art, beautiful architecture, and people who live a beautiful, thoughtful life.

John Keats, in his famous poem ‘Ode To A Grecian Urn’ 1819, went as far as to say that Beauty is truth.

%Beauty is truth,truth beauty, that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know%


I have had those evocative lines of Keats's poem pounding in my head for years. How does he define Beauty and Truth? That question has been debated over and over. I can only say that the poem makes me feel that Beauty is something true. It feels true because it is so powerfully different than our obsessively fact-based rational minds.

Two years before Keats wrote this poem he wrote a letter to his brother saying,

“I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination—What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth—whether it existed before or not—for I have the same Idea of all our Passions as of Love: they are all, in their sublime, creative of essential Beauty.”

Keats's romantic notion of Beauty as a form of truth has been often pushed aside, disappeared, and corrupted many times since his lifetime. You can find lots of interpretations of Beauty that disagree with what Keats might have thought was beautiful but the idea that Beauty is real, that it is something important, even to the point of being Truth, keeps showing up all throughout the literature of aesthetics.

The author Toni Morrison said this about beauty…

“I think of beauty as an absolute necessity. I don't think it’s a privilege or an indulgence, it’s not even a quest. I think it’s almost like knowledge. Which is to say it is what we were born for. I think finding, incorporating, and then representing beauty is what humans do.”

I think that’s true. I think that is beautiful.

Portrait of Iris Murdoch

This piece was originally posted in October 2023 on Substack

Sitting at my kitchen table looking across our field at the blazing fall colors, I take a needed break and tune out the news of war and killing here in the States and in the Middle East. I long to reconnect with Beauty now more than ever, not out of avoidance, but for what it can teach me.

Iris Murdoch was a philosopher and novelist who spent her life thinking about questions of goodness and beauty. Born in Dublin, Ireland in 1919 she studied philosophy at the all-women’s Somerville College, Oxford where her education was dominated by the ideas of men: Plato, Kant, Hegel, and Kierkegaard to name a few. At the time science was the major paradigm, rationality the goal; philosophical ideas had to be proven to be considered true.

Iris Murdoch would end up arguing against most of this. She thought in terms of Metaphysics and Metaphors. Metaphors she believed provided us with new images and perspectives that allow us to look at philosophical questions in new ways.

Her most assessable philosophy book, The Sovereignty of Good, was a compilation of three essays she wrote in the 1960s where she argued to replace the reigning moral question of the time - how to be free in the world, with - how can we be good.

Murdoch thought that we do not see the world clearly, that our minds are constantly active, self-preoccupied, and often under a “falsifying veil which partially conceals the world”. Anything that could change our consciousness to become more unselfish, a process Murdoch called “unselfing”, could help us see more clearly. Looking at Art, she thought, was one way by which we could be shown what had goodness, and through this, we could be a better person.

The appreciation of beauty in art or nature is not only the easiest available spiritual exercise; it is also a completely adequate entry into (and not just an analogy of) the good life…

How does Murdoch define Beauty?

Beauty is that which attracts…. unselfish attention.

Murdoch thought of “unselfish attention” as a type of “loving gaze” during which “nothing exists except the things which are seen.” In The Sovereignty of Good Murdock tells the story of sitting at her writing desk, in an anxious and unsettled mood, when she saw a Kestrel swoop down into the bushes. She watched this majestic hawk in amazement and after a time realized that, through no conscious effort on her part, she no longer was anxious or grumpy. What changed her consciousness? Was it the distraction or something in the natural scene itself?


This particular story is about the natural world but Murdock also believes that looking at Art can have the same effect on us. The experience of “unselfish attention” can happen by chance, as in the experience of seeing the Kestrel, or it can be an intention where we come to a work of art “in order to clear our minds of selfish care”.

Good art reveals what we are usually too selfish and too timid to recognize..

Art is…not a diversion or a side issue, it is the most educational of all human activities and a place in which the nature of morality can be seen.

Beauty is the only spiritual thing which we love by instinct.

Murdock’s definition of Beauty and ultimately what is good in a good work of art is the most encompassing I’ve come across. It is a liberating definition in its scope of what could be considered good art; a holistic idea of beauty. It isn’t saying that everything in nature is automatically beautiful. It’s not. Neither is every work of art that anyone makes. Beauty can reside in any form of Art. Painting, poetry, music, novels, it doesn’t matter. Neither does it matter whether a painting is abstract or realistic; painted by a formally trained painter or someone self-taught. What type, style, or form that beauty can be found in doesn’t matter… IF …and it’s a big IF … it has the ability to cause or enact a sense of “unselfish attention” in us.

You might be able to think of this special attention akin to feelings of awe or wonderment but, if I’m reading Murdoch right, it’s more than that. It’s an attention that connects us to goodness that she believed had a “transcendent magnetic centre”, a type of pure love.

This essay was originally posted in January 2024 on Substack

In the photograph, I am the dapper young boy in the bow tie on the far left. It is summer, the boys are in shorts,the girls,dresses above the knees. All the men are in ties and the mothers are in pearls, hats, and jackets. It is 1962, I was six years old, and my family is posing before boarding a charter flight to the Netherlands. My parents had not been back to Holland since immigrating to the US immediately after WWII. For my two sisters and I, it would be the first time flying on an airplane.

Adults riding bicycles everywhere, a boy openly smoking on the street, large whole cheeses shaped like cannonballs, and women unashamedly changing into bathing suits on the beach; I remember many things from this trip.

One memory had an impact on me becoming an artist.

We were to visit a studio/ storefront belonging to an artist, the husband of a family relative in Leeuwarden, Netherlands. He painted local scenes of the area. A wine-colored, velvet curtain hung in a passageway between an apartment and the artist’s studio.

I recall its weight as I got to push the curtain aside. We moved from the living area into a space where the artist’s paintings were revealed. I did not have words to explain what I felt passing into the studio, but I remember it feeling mysterious, even magical. Standing in a room filled with real paintings felt like a secret.

Being six years old I didn’t know anything about art other than it could be found in museums. I don’t remember any original paintings on the walls of our family home. I had heard my parents say that Rembrandt was an important artist but I did not know why. It would be many years before I had any idea what qualities made art remarkable or how to describe why it was something to talk about.

The memory of the velvet curtain had both a physical weight and a metaphorical weight. Why art differs from everyday things is something I think a lot about. When I am in a museum, a gallery, or someone’s home filled with paintings, I pass into a world that is separated from the outside world. The world of art often shifts my consciousness. That shift, a change in perspective or thinking, also takes place when I enter my studio, surrounded by the paintings I am working on. This change is both intellectually and viscerally exciting, and it also provides me with a much-needed alternative to the disturbing and tragic aspects of the world.

I pull aside a symbolic curtain whenever I start a new painting. The task is to take the four-dimensional information in the world and transform it onto a two-dimensional flat canvas. What I aim to achieve, and it doesn’t happen all the time, could be described as an aura or something that might be considered beauty.

The ineffable quality of paintings makes it complicated to completely describe what happens in a painting, a painting worth thinking about. I’ve written dozens of artists statements and I feel there is always something missing in them. When I first began writing this piece I thought it was going to be about my search for the words to describe beauty in art. I thought I would write about how for years I have self-studied philosophy and art, looking for kernels of wisdom that could give me language and articulation.

Reading philosophy is not easy for me. I spend hours reading and rereading its dense language, looking for something akin to a secret code that has the potential to unlock a realization for me. But through all of this study, I often have to remind myself that words describing aesthetics do not fully explain what happens when I pull back the curtain and stand in front of a work of art that will captivate my attention for a lifetime.

It has been 61 years since my experience with the velvet curtain. Have I remembered that day in the painter’s studio correctly? Its impact on my life as an artist? Possibly my immigrant parents, who lived much of their life feeling separate from the Americans around them, instilled in me a desire to remain separate from the everyday or even the rest of the world. Maybe I got lucky in life. I had an experience that opened me up to future experiences where I saw the power that art has in the world. I was in the right place to want to learn more, to experience the sense that beauty in art makes life full and wondrous.

Representative Dick Armey testifying before a congressional subcommittee in 1997

this essay was originally posted in January 2024 on Substack


It is January in Michigan and I am looking out my studio window at the white that has covered the field and trees. Winter is a focused time in my studio. It has given me pause to think about how I came to be an artist.

Over time I have learned there are three essential things that any artist needs to succeed. Time- to be able to make work, a space -to be able to make work, and money- to survive and build an art practice.

I didn’t always realize these were crucial to surviving as an artist. In 1982, eager and fresh out of graduate school, I moved to Frankfort, a small northern town on Lake Michigan, to work in a small wooden boat shop. I planned to work full-time in the boat shop to pay my bills and learn new woodworking skills while working to be an artist in the evenings and weekends.

After a couple of summers, the small boat shop folded. I went to work at a local gas station/store, and then a local lumber yard. With each new job, I felt further away from the art world I wanted to be in. I didn’t have a dedicated studio space. Had anything been available in my small town, I certainly couldn’t afford it. I made do with an extra bedroom in my rental house, but working in a bedroom that says bedroom every time I entered began to erode my drive to make art. It wasn’t what I imagined or needed a studio to be. Weekday nights working in the dimly lit bedroom studio turned into weekends. I was struggling to stay connected to art. Struggling to financially make ends meet. Struggling to still be able to call myself an artist.

Desperately wanting a more committed art practice in 1989 I applied for a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. I don’t remember how I first became aware of the program. More than likely it was a listing of grant and exhibition opportunities in a newsletter from a local artist association in Traverse City. To complete the application I needed to have 20 slides of my current work. I didn’t have my own photographic equipment so I had to hire a professional photographer. The complete application was then mailed in to be reviewed by a national group of professional working artists and gallerists. After several months I received a very governmental-looking letter in the mail. I nervously opened it to read that I had been awarded a grant for $5000.

My mind was reeling with new possibilities. $5000 was more money than my bank account had ever seen. The grant gave me the confidence to search for and commit to a dedicated studio space, which I did find. It was small, only 400 square feet, with a tiny basement window, but it was my first real studio.

Someone suggested I do an up-and-coming art fair in a wealthy suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. I didn’t have gallery representation at the time, and art fairs were not that common. I knew very little about what they entailed but I took the risk. I took some of the grant money to buy an outdoor pop-up tent, build a plywood display, and I bought a 1982 Dodge pickup for $1500. I loaded the truck with everything and drove 8 hours to the two-day event. I remember going back to my Motel 6 room, counting the money, and jumping up and down on the bed to the sum of $2000, throwing the bills into the air. Later that summer I got into the Ann Arbor Art Fair, the biggest art fair in my home state. I couldn’t believe it when I sold almost everything I brought with me. With the same body of work I applied to Objects Gallery, an established Chicago gallery. Ann Nathan, the gallery owner, agreed to represent me and would prove to be a driving force in my art career. I saw that I might be able to be a full-time artist and I took another risk. I quit my job at the lumber yard.

Had I not received the financial assistance from the NEA grant, along with its peer recognition, I might not have continued making art. I was just getting by and had felt myself losing steam. The grant was a symbolic connection to a body of working artists across the country, and it gave me the seed money to be able to build my art practice.

In 1989, the year I received my grant, Ronald Reagan was leaving office, replaced by George H. W. Bush. Conservative politicians like Jessie Helms from North Carolina had been attacking the NEA for grants given to artists they considered offensive. Over the years I followed these political attacks and began to research the history of the NEA. I learned that in 1963 President John F. Kennedy gave a speech at Amherst College shortly before he was assassinated. In that speech, he said:

I see little more importance to the future of our country...than full recognition of the place of the artist...Society must set the artist free to follow his vision where it takes him...And the nation which disdains the mission of art invites...the fate of having nothing to look backward to with pride and nothing to look forward to with hope.

President Kennedy believed not only in the importance of the arts but in the individual artists’ role in society. His vision, some say it was Jackie Kennedy’s, planted the seed for what would become, under President Johnson, the National Endowment for the Arts. The first Annual report of the NEA (which was initially called the National Council on the Arts) is a remarkable document. It lists the first board members which included composer Leonard Bernstein, journalist David Brinkley, fashion publisher Eleanor Lambert, writer Ralph Ellison, and architect Minoru Yamasaki, just to name a few. The report is filled with historical quotes from St. Augustine to George Washington, to President Kennedy, all emphasizing the need for the cultural development of art and individual artists.

For the next 25 years, the NEA would continue to grow and support new and established artists with direct, no-strings-attached grants. But the future of the NEA Artists Grants would not survive.

The Republican campaign to eliminate the NEA, which was coined the culture wars, not only attacked funding the NEA but also the character and artistic ideas of those who were deciding how the funds were being spent, and the artists themselves. Artists like Karen Finley and Robert Mapplethorpe were singled out as degenerate and their work obscene. The conservative right framed the source of contemporary art as decadent and corrupt, urban and elitist, while their preference for populist art was centered in the heartland and based on simple values and purity.

In 1997 then-Senate Majority Leader Dick Armey (R) of Texas would become the face of the aggression against the NEA. During a House subcommittee meeting, he testified that he had been personally offended by the very idea of the NEA ever since he took office and that the NEA should be defunded, claiming individual donations would do a better job of supporting the arts than the government. He stated that if needed he would teach the children art:

..because their learning of art from their grandmas and grandpas, and their neighbors and cousins, and their appreciation of learning to love that which is loved by the people they respect in the community, will sustain them far further in life than money and instruction from Washington.

See Armey’s full testimony here


The NEA no longer awards grants to visual artists. Shortly after Armey’s testimony, the NEA succumbed to the political pressure from the Right. The endowments appropriation was slashed and it stopped awarding grants to individual visual artists completely. Today what meager amount is yearly appropriated goes to art institutions and arts organizations on the state and local level, depriving artists of direct assistance.

Stay with me, it gets even weirder. The NEA doesn’t even use the word artist in its mission statement any longer. (see below to read the current statement)

As the snow continues to fall, I realize that this disturbing period of our cultural history is something that I often think about. Over the years I have questioned what is lost when art is attacked by a destructive political ideology. It is personal. I get angry that the program I benefited so much from, the program that offered me the time, space, and money to grow as an artist in society was destroyed by politicians and individuals who knew little to nothing about art, making decisions as if they did. I worry how far this disregard for artists has reached in our society. I worry that the word artist is being erased out for the word creative.

I fear what we have lost is the very seed Kennedy planted when he started the National Endowment for the Arts. We have lost the understanding, that art, poetry, music, theater, and dance provide us with the basic human truth which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment. Once that is lost, will we ever get it back?

Notes:

The current NEA Mission Statement:
The arts strengthen and promote the well-being and resilience of people and communities. By advancing equitable opportunities for arts participation and practice, the National Endowment for the Arts fosters and sustains an environment in which the arts benefit everyone in the United States.

Rep. Armey (R) retired in 2003 receiving a yearly salary of $430,000 as chairman of Freedom Works, a conservative think tank that he chaired for over 10 years. After a disagreement on the future direction of the Freedom Works Armey accepts an $8 million dollar buyout.
It is unknown how much money, if any, Dick Armey ever donated to supporting the Arts in America, or if he ever taught art classes to children.

President Kennedy’s 1963 remarks at Amherst Collage