I don’t know how much I am going to write about this right now. So come back for future editions. The previous post, wherein Anna Netrebko and Elina Garanca perform the Flower Duet from Delibes’ opera Lakme, has me thinking about beauty and art.

Art is a convergence of emotion and intellect. With exceptions, the art of Jackson Pollack, (perhaps?), art (literature and music included under that term) expresses itself in a discernable structure that touches a common understanding with humanity.

We can see beauty in Michelangelo’s David and an African mask. This David seems somewhat remote from Bible stories, just as the masks evoke a spirit world that we Westerners don’t fully understand, if at all.

But the construction of both are ordered and get points across. David represents a human at a full potential, as a child of God. The masks confront us with the depth of the universe, that there is always more than just what we see.

What I’m leading to are the questions, can there be an aesthetic of chaos, disorder, ugliness and brutality?

This is not to say that art cannot depict ugly or disturbing images. Michelangelo’s Last Judgement from the Sistine Chapel immediately comes to mind. Robert Capa’s iconic photograph of a Spanish Republican soldier at he moment he is killed is another example. No image captures the brutality of war better than that photograph.