"Art is not a luxury, it is a necessity...a spiritual one. At its apotheosis aesthetically, philosophically and psychologically, art provides a spiritual summation by integrating mind and matter--abstract values perceived by the senses. When form and content are exquisitely unified in art to communicate universal truths through beautiful physical presentation in the most technically proficient manner, art offers an experience of complete continuity, a harmoniously integrated experience of mind, body, and soul—both to its makers and to its worthy beholder...
"It is art that best inspires the moral imagination, everywhere apparent in the different art forms, through which the soul of the artist is revealed... Every child like every adult is a precious, fragile, unrepeatable, individual being. Shouldn't we nourish each soul with the beauty, the wonder, and the delight of the mind as carefully as we nourish each body with bread, milk and honey? The thirteenth-century Persian poet Muslih-uddin Sadi counseled us thus:
If of thy mortal goods thou art bereft
And from thy slender store
Two loaves alone to thee are left
Sell one, and with the dole
Buy hyacinths to feed thy soul.
"Yes! It is the beauty of art and the arts of beauty that feed the human spirit by making the invisible visible and the visible more visible, affirming the value of visions, visions that bring values to life. Art and the moral imagination? Art is the moral imagination."
~ Alexandra York, from her book From the Fountainhead to the Future: Essays on Art and Excellence
[Picture: 'Isle of the Dead' by Arnold Böcklin - The Bridgeman Art Library, Object 838233. Kunstmuseum Basel, online collection, Public Domain, Link ]
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