Strolling through a city at night, getting lost in a crowd, and observing different subjects wearing different forms of attire all constitute a form of attractiveness. A particular form of makeup could catch one´s attention and make one attractive. But would this necessarily constitute beauty? Now, if a photographer suddenly captivates a specific moment among the busy crowds, let’s say when a boy drops his ice cream, and his father tries uselessly to pick it up, that photography could be considered a piece of art in its own right. So, we have that the busy crowd making noise in itself is not necessarily within the category of beautiful unless a private eye, an artist´s intimate sensitivity, decides to turn it into it.
Perhaps constant accessibility to things makes them less deep and less impactful, but an artist´s eye cannot be so easily accessed, given, of course, that he is honest about his work. But what does artistic honesty mean? It could simply mean taking the time to express something from within, making the process private and non-dependant on the clichés of the time.
Beauty, therefore, can only be expressed from the depths of one´s internal workshop. In contrast, external mundane reality simply expresses a certain aesthetic form susceptible to change according to different cultural transformations. Without the inspired words of a poet, a flower remains a piece of botanical study, which may appear pretty to the commoner´s eye but is unable to hold transcendence beyond its very existence. A poet shall look within himself to convey the words necessary to exalt a particular aspect of his reality. This process is in itself private and therefore self-affirming.  A form of I am that which I am that soothes the artist from the alienations of mundane life, at least for a short while.
Beauty is developed through an internal workshop that may be influenced by the mundane, but that chooses to transform the mundane and shape it by its own divine right. Artistic beauty is, therefore, born from the privacy of the subject´s mind, something stemming from existential loneliness and quietude. Even if it’s a scenic performance, such a performance which may appear noisy and outwardly in nature, such as a rock concert, for instance, was initially thought of as brewed within the depths of a musician´s creativity, from the songwriting of a lyricist, and in some more sophisticated cases, from the scenic direction of a choreographer.
Just like the photographer had to deliberately focus his attention on a certain image and later on edit it, crop it, and shape it according to his sensitivity, so does the scenic artist need to develop a personal, intimate relationship with sound, script, music, and space itself. It is, above all, an internal action which later on exteriorizes itself. The process of exteriorization of the private sphere can very well corrupt the initial internal image, which is probably one of the artist’s biggest fears, hence leading to the so typical artistic neurosis.
However, the quality of the final delivery has more to do with craftmanship in each discipline, and that is a whole different subject. Much has been written and commented on about the quality and influence of each artistic discipline, but not that much about the spiritual and psychological processes the individual must undergo in order to deliver. As mentioned before, loneliness and isolation are necessary for beauty to be internalized within the artist´s soul. This explains the typical tortured souls found in the art world.
The essence of beauty is the notion that what is typically found is not enough; homogeneity needs to be broken; even if the center of attention is something about mundane life, the interiorization of such stimulus must be done in a fashion similar to a prolonged trance that allows the subject to dwell deep into the many possible variables. If creation ex nihilo, this is, the notion of creating out of nowhere is possible; that is a question for another debate.
But what seems certain is that the exploration that leads to the expression of beauty happens in uncharted, unknown, and intimate dimensions. With the prevalence of social media, the focus has been placed much more heavily on the final, ready-for-delivery product than on the importance of the process itself. The need to keep up with the insatiable demands of digital marketing transforms the artistic endeavor into a sweatshop type of work rather than an actual exploration of the unknown.
It is, however, still possible for contemporary artists to harness the speed of the world wide web and use it as a channelling tool to make the beauty exteriorization process smoother. But in order to attain this the focus must be placed upon the process above all: privacy must be held holy so beauty shall reign supreme.
