The War on Beauty
What's more important: art or food?
You’ve seen the video: two “activists” threw soup at the Mona Lisa to protest global food shortages (immediately ironic).
In the video, the protesters demand: “What’s more important — art or the right to healthy and sustainable food?”
There’s no denying that food security is a real issue. But France’s Minister for Culture responded by saying that no cause can justify an attack on the Mona Lisa.
So who’s right? Is art the enemy of practical needs, or does food actually need art?
Man Does Not Live by Bread Alone
A healthy society meets the basic needs of everyone who lives in it. But that’s not all it does.
Culture is more than a food distribution mechanism. It’s how a group of people understands reality and interacts with it. It’s the story they tell about themselves and the awareness, memory, and skills they pass on to future generations.
In a word, culture is how we create meaning.
Why do we go to such lengths to create meaning? Because we need it. Just as badly as we need food — maybe even more.
Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl noticed this during his time in Nazi concentration camps. Despite freezing nights, brutal labor assignments, and starvation rations, it wasn’t the weakest prisoners who died. It was those who lost hope and had no reason to keep living.
A truly healthy society engages with all the needs of its members. That’s why cultures bring forth myths, songs, stories, and art — we can’t live without them.
The Useless Beauty Metric
We need meaning just as much as we need food. That’s why you can judge a society’s health by the art it creates.
Some call this the “useless beauty metric.”
Think about it. Great societies of old, from ancient Sumer to medieval Spain, filled their cities with breathtaking art. You’ll find carvings, inscriptions, and paintings:
In staircases
On city walls
Over the family fireplace
Throughout the walls of the home
Out of view on the tallest church towers
Traditional societies fill commonplace objects and places with beauty, even when it doesn’t “need” to be there.
19th century sewage infrastructure, for example, had absolutely no business being colorful and ornate. And yet, Victorian craftsmen poured their love into it all the same:
Meaning creates thriving societies. And thriving societies express that meaning everywhere. That’s why “useless beauty” is the best gauge of cultural health. And if that beauty starts to disappear, that’s the canary in the cultural coal mine.
Cut the Funding?
But what about the activists’ claim that food is more important than art? Is there ever a time to sell the art and buy food?
There’s a fable about someone asking Winston Churchill to cut funding to the arts to support the war effort. The prime minister replied, “Then what are we fighting for?”
In other words, if we sell out art to solve our problems, we won’t just lose the battle at hand. We’ll lose ourselves, too. In times of struggle and crisis, meaning becomes more important, not less.
Our cultural consensus of meaning is what guides us to create solutions, and to choose the right path from a plethora of options. Most of all, it’s what reminds us why our solutions matter in the first place.
Art isn’t the enemy in a food crisis. It’s the source we turn to for inspiration.
The Starving Art-less
Art and food aren’t opposed because our physical needs and metaphysical needs aren’t opposed. They’re two sides of the same coin.
After all, a culture that doesn’t grasp why our lives have purpose will eventually stop treating them as if they do. If your culture is bankrupt of meaning, don’t expect it to feed the vulnerable.
But, if you create a culture bursting with meaning, one that celebrates the purpose of human life, you’ll be amazed at how solutions to food scarcity and other problems will fall into place.
We’re not starving because we have too much art — but because we have too little of the kind that matters.
So here’s a challenge for you this week:
Donate to a food bank or support your local farmer. But do something harder, too. Reconnect with the meaning that enriches our lives and reminds us why we’re here in the first place.
Listen to a beautiful piece of music. Visit an art gallery. Watch a play.
Waste time on useless beauty. Because beauty is anything but useless, and that time isn’t wasted at all.
Artwork of the Week
To say we’ve been overexposed to this painting is an understatement. The Mona Lisa (also known as La Gioconda after the portrait’s model) shows up on everything from t-shirts to postcards to ad campaigns to graffitied walls. It’s saturated cultural consciousness in every possible way.
But do we really grasp what the Mona Lisa is about?
Enduring Mystery
Da Vinci presents us with a haunting facial expression. The so-called “Mona Lisa smile” is really far more complex and mercurial.
The woman’s air of mystery dominates the painting. After 500 years it continues to draw viewers in, prompting questions like:
Who is she?
What’s hidden behind her smile?
Is there really a secret message in her eyes?
Viewers keep coming back to her as if one more look will reveal the answer to these questions. Of course, the answers stay just out of reach.
That’s da Vinci’s genius: capturing mystery with canvas and paint.
Unequaled Skill
To achieve the mysterious effect, Leonardo pioneered a painting style called sfumato. He would blur the edges of figures, sometimes using his thumb, to mimic the blur we see in our peripheral vision.
He was one of the foremost experts on optics at the time, and had studied the human eye in great detail.
This subtle blending of tones creates seamless transitions between darkness and light, and gives the painting intense depth and realism — the likes of which had never been seen before in the art world. It draws the viewer into the hazy world of the mysterious woman.
An Icon of Culture
From the moment of its completion, the Mona Lisa was a cultural touchstone. Da Vinci continued to add to the painting until his death, when it entered the collection of the French king Francis I.
Its colorful history includes time in the quarters of Josephine, wife of Napoleon Bonaparte; a dramatic theft in 1911; a narrow escape from the Nazis’ art plundering; and a visit to President John F. Kennedy:
Touched by almost every significant historical event since its completion, the painting has come to represent beauty, artistic achievement, and culture itself.
It’s no accident that multiple activists have chosen the Mona Lisa as the target for attention-grabbing protests. Attacking the Mona Lisa means attacking the establishment, heritage, and cultural framework of the Western world.
So if you believe the Western world is fundamentally flawed, the Mona Lisa is the perfect target for your thermos of pumpkin soup.
But if you think the Western world has something to offer, it’s the perfect place to start taking culture seriously — and the perfect reason to book your ticket to the Louvre.
Well written! Art is absolutely a measure of the health of society, I agree. Beauty matters!