Appreciation of beauty and appreciation of excellence

Understanding Appreciation of beauty and appreciation of excellence

Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence brings together noticing beauty and recognizing accomplished work. Attention can reveal a pattern, a choice of material or an expressive detail that a hurried glance missed. Appreciation need not mean sharing a critic’s taste or treating the most prestigious object as the one that deserves notice.

Appreciation of beauty and appreciation of excellence: finding the balance

The visitor wants to understand a modest drawing.

Appreciation gains depth through attention to the work, not through the observer’s display.

Appreciation of beauty and appreciation of excellence gives…

Attentive appreciation can make an encounter more particular. A piece of music becomes more than background; a maker’s skill becomes visible in one joint or phrase. Recognizing the detail gives admiration something it can explain without turning taste into a ranking of people.

What Appreciation of beauty and appreciation of excellence makes possible

A familiar place can acquire depth through noticing light, rhythm or arrangement. Another person’s work can invite conversation about choices you had overlooked. Excellence can be appreciated in an ordinary careful repair as well as in celebrated art.

Appreciation of beauty and appreciation of excellence in ordinary life

• Look at one accessible object and identify a detail you would have missed at a glance.
• Ask a maker about one choice of material or method that interests you.
• Listen again to a short familiar passage of music, attending to a particular sound or change.

Nearby virtues, different work

Curiosity asks how something works. Gratitude appreciates received good. Humility lets taste encounter a limit. This inherited appreciation bundle is not automatically identical to any canonical virtue, and technical excellence alone does not establish moral goodness.

Curiosity · Gratitude

Appreciation of beauty and appreciation of excellence and its counterfeits

Prestige borrowed as taste is a counterfeit of Appreciation: the visitor recites prestigious artists’ names while barely looking at the particular drawing. Genuine appreciation has a particular object and reason. Competitive refinement is another counterfeit when cultivated taste becomes a way to belittle someone else.

How to cultivate Appreciation of beauty and appreciation of excellence

Choose an encounter you can enjoy without rushing to rank it. Notice a detail, then ask what it contributes to the whole. Allow a response to develop, including uncertainty or dislike. Learning another person’s account can widen appreciation without requiring agreement.

Try it today

Spend a manageable moment with an accessible object, sound or view. Notice one detail and what it contributes. You may simply enjoy it; no elevated feeling or sophisticated explanation is required.

Keep the practice proportionate

Expense, travel, sensory capacity and fashionable taste do not determine appreciation or moral worth. Do not treat people as objects for inspection. The exercise does not require a transcendental experience.

A question worth returning to

Did my admiration describe the work or advertise my taste?

Quotations and further reading

These historical passages offer different philosophical and literary perspectives. Each note identifies its setting, point of comparison and relevant limits; none supplies an official definition of this strength.

1. Beauty is the moment of transition, as if the form were just ready to flow into other forms.

   Ralph Waldo Emerson · The Conduct of Life

   The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Conduct of Life

   Emerson imagines beauty at a moment of transition. The metaphor emphasizes possibility within an apparently finished form.

2. But in one case the conversion of direct energy into imagination is the starting point of an activity which shapes material; fancy is fed upon a stuff of life which assumes under its influence a rejuvenated, composed and enhanced form.

   John Dewey · Human Nature and Conduct

   VI

   Dewey describes energy becoming imagination that works upon material. His contrast concerns active artistic transformation rather than fantasy alone.

3. At any rate, they are gifts to our country which will always be respected, whether the times better or worsen, and I call upon you to thank their designers most heartily for their forethought, labour, and hope.

   William Morris · Hopes and Fears for Art

   p. 114MAKING THE BEST OF IT [114]

   Morris calls for thanks to the designers of surviving houses and identifies forethought, labour and hope as their contributions.

4. All in the world know the beauty of the beautiful, and in doing this they have (the idea of) what ugliness is; they all know the skill of the skilful, and in doing this they have (the idea of) what the want of skill is.

   Laozi, traditional attribution · Tao Teh King

   PART 1. · James Legge, 1891 translation

   Laozi places beauty alongside its contrasting judgment of ugliness. Appreciation can notice how a judgment is formed instead of treating familiarity as a final standard.

5. Music is the purest form of art, and therefore the most direct expression of beauty, with a form and spirit which is one and simple, and least encumbered with anything extraneous.

   Rabindranath Tagore · Sadhana: The Realisation of Life

   THE REALISATION OF BEAUTY · Linked 1916 Macmillan text; first publication 1913. Chapter VI translated by Surendra Nath Tagore; other English translation contributions acknowledged in the preface.

   Tagore praises music’s relation of form and spirit. His ranking of the arts is an aesthetic conviction to consider, not a universal hierarchy.

6. For instance, when bread is baked some parts are split at the surface, and these parts which thus open, and have a certain fashion contrary to the purpose of the baker’s art, are beautiful in a manner, and in a peculiar way excite a desire for eating.

   Marcus Aurelius · The Thoughts (Meditations)

   BOOK III. · George Long; linked edition

   Marcus notices beauty in the split surface of baked bread. Appreciation may include the irregular results of making, not only polished perfection.

7. As to the bricklayer, the mason, and the like—these would be artists, and doing not only necessary, but beautiful, and therefore happy work, if art were anything like what it should be.

   William Morris · Hopes and Fears for Art

   The Art of the People · ,

   Morris includes masons and bricklayers among makers whose necessary work could be beautiful. Appreciation can recognize skilled ordinary work rather than reserve excellence for a gallery.

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