Useless Beauty

Quite a good day for listening to soothing sounds: Paul Weller, The Kinks, kd laing, Polly Harvey all got a spin in the early afternoon. It was whilst playing kd's version of Neil Young's Helpless that it occurred to me that her voice is so beautiful in and of itself that I should perhaps have re-thought my fairly dismissive comments about beauty as a factor in our appreciation of Art in my lecture on TOK and Art of the previous week. I get a bit fed up with students blandly assuming that Art = beauty, or the creation of beauty, hence my dismissiveness. But letting Ms laing transport you to another, better, place is a reminder of just how important our appreciation of beauty in itself is in these matters.