Objective
Modern man is a literary man, possibly more so than a visual one. Through the written word, with timely examples and with an exhorter’s clarity, I will be able to relay the urgent message that beauty is disappearing.
The book Reclaiming Beauty aims to document the contribution that beauty has made toward our Western civilization, from the earliest records of God’s love of beauty, to a young child who sees beauty almost as soon as he is born. Our civilization thrived, prospered and matured because of beauty. Our great artists, architects, writers, philosophers and scientists have always referred to beauty with awe and wonder. It is in the modern era that beauty began to be undermined and eventually neglected by artists and other intellectual leaders.
Reclaiming Beauty will show that the abandonment of beauty leads to the death of culture, and eventually society. Modern man’s neglect of beauty has initiated the cult of ugliness, leaving us with bleakness and nihilism.
But, people want beauty. And they will surround themselves with some kind of aesthetic quality. Still, beauty is the business of the knowledgeable. The man on the street may be able to recognize beauty, but he would not be able to explain why it is beautiful. That is the task of the experts.
With Reclaiming Beauty, I aim to present my ideas, observations and analyses on beauty, and to provide a guide for recommendations on how to remove oneself from the nefarious influences of our beauty-rejecting world. This way, we can build a parallel world which will eventually form a growing movement of beauty-reclaiming individuals, who can start to shape a world where beauty is not minimized and rejected.
Significance
Reclaiming Beauty will be the first book on beauty to make a comprehensive, historical, cultural and societal review of beauty. It will describe the moment (or moments) when beauty was not only undermined, but eventually abandoned, as a paradigm of civilized life. Rather than attributing beauty to a Godly goodness, philosophers, writers and artists began to view beauty as their enemy, and as their nemesis. They saw God as a judge who would not let them do as they wished. In order to pursue the image of beauty they desired, they began to look elsewhere. They began to abandon God, and by abandoning God, they began to change their world, filling it with horror and ugliness.
I maintain that this was not their objective, which was merely to look for a different perspective on aesthetics. The realization of the horror they have created may have come too late, and too weakly, from cultural leaders, but ordinary people, who are most affected by these changes in worldview, are already incurring changes. But they cannot make useful inferences, and hence necessary changes. They still need an elite to help them materialize their desires and observations.
A new elite that is pro-beauty needs to take the cultural reins, to guide and return our world back to its awe and wonder of beauty. To this end, Reclaiming Beauty will add an element which no other book on beauty has attempted: guidelines on how to renounce this world of anti-beauty, and how to progressively bring beauty back into our culture.
The book will be a manifesto for concrete references to these basic ideas. Along with the book, a website will be developed that will be an interactive continuation of the book. On the website, members can post their original articles, shorter commentaries, articles and excerpts from other authors, and encourage feedback and comments from other members. At some point, this group can develop into a more formal society, which can meet in a physical locations a few times a year, building beauty societies, whose purpose would be to develop ideas and strategies for bringing beauty back into our culture.
Part of the book will be revised versions of what I've been developing over a number of years in my blogs Camera Lucida, Reclaiming Beauty and Our Changing Landscape, and from my full-length articles from Kidist P. Asrat Articles.
All images that head the chapters will be from my own collection of photographs and designs. Some of these images can be found at Kidist P. Photographs and Well-Patterned. Others I will choose from my collection of photographs, mostly in negatives and prints. Others I will take as the project progresses.
The image on the book cover is a photograph I took of the the inner courtyard at the Cloisters Museum in New York. There is a section in the book dedicated to the Cloisters titled: The Sturdy Periwinkle: Linking the New World with the Old, which discusses the Western, European influences in North American culture. The chapter will be a revision of a post at the blog Reclaiming Beauty.
What I plan to accomplish at the New York Public Library
The library’s vast, world class research facilities will assist me in finding the scholarly, historic and artistic information necessary to develop the ideas for my book.
How I plan to use the New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building
I will primarily be using the Arts and Architecture Collections. The material I am interested in is the Western collections (fine art, decorative arts, architecture and design history, as described in the NYPL website). Here are the specific ways I will peruse the library’s facilities:
- Catalogues Raisonnes
This will provide me with specific works of art by specific artists, who played important if not seminal influence on Western art and culture
- Thirty Minute Consultations
Since my time is limited at the library, periodic, short consultations, especially at the beginning of my research schedule, will save me time and help me find relevant and pertinent information.
- Vertical Files
Although vertical files are no longer being catalogued, my research is also concerned with a historical perspective on art and culture, and the perception of beauty. The material that is catalogued between 1910-1950 will be useful to analyze how the detrimental effects of two world wars (1914-1945) affected the culture.
- Photographic Collection
Examining photographic records of recent history will provide me with a documentary of the society's aesthetics when image production started to be more democratic, and more available. Photographs don’t, and don’t need to, eulogize their subjects, as did painters.
- Print Collection
The collection which dates from the 15th century, and which encompasses almost five hundred years of image reproductions, will provide me with a historical survey of how beauty, and beautiful images, were viewed over these centuries.
- Spencer Collection
I will have access to the Spencer Collection through the Photograph and Print Collections, providing me with further material to enhance these two collections, including medieval and renaissance manuscripts.
- The Manuscript and Archives Division
This houses documents ranging from medieval and renaissance illuminated manuscripts, which is also connected to the various other prints divisions in the library, and will enhance my research.
- Map Division
Besides the practicality of maps, there is an aesthetics to maps as well. The Map Division will provide me with this aesthetic survey of maps over the centuries.
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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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