Toward an American Renaissance in art and ideas.

The above quote from Leonardo da Vinci sums up not only what the first Renaissance leaders did but what we in America must do: provide a renewed vision for our age. The fountainhead? Now, as in Leonardo's time: ancient Greece and the prototype of the human ideal.

In order to engender an all-encompassing American Renaissance, we, too, must begin with the moral and spiritual nourishment of the individual, the "undivided" self. Individual excellence of personal character, of physical fitness, and of spiritual wholeness was the Greek ideal. Furthermore, it was the Greek thesis that individuals striving toward this ideal would, by virtue of the striving alone, create a diverse yet mutually beneficial society. And further still, it was their novel idea that art could be wrested from its primitive origins and usages to become a universal language with the power to communicate philosophical, abstract ideas via concrete forms that spoke directly to all individuals as individuals.

How right they were! Still today, in a vastly altered world, their great art uplifts the spirts of people all over the globe, reminding us each of the beauty, the possibilities, and the glories of human potential.

In order to gain energy for charting a new course from this ideological starting point, however, we need fuel--emotional fuel. This means nurturing not only the mind but the heart and soul as well. This means beauty.

Beauty: Order. Proportion. Balance. Harmony. Grace. Beauty possesses redemptive powers all of its own, as in nature. But when beauty is created by human hand, it can be even more redemptive, more powerful, because it is created with intent. In their elevated art forms (beyond utilitarian function and decor), some expressions of beauty are also permeated with the highest of human values, letting each of us, individually, experience our own best self as surely as if our own soul were turned inside out and visible to us reflected clear and sharp from a mirror.

Mathematical beauty can become an end in itself in art as exemplified by the best abstract sculpture and painting; but this is not the highest purpose of art because it lacks human content. Nor is beauty per se the raison d'etre of high art. High art is defined here as art expressing such a depth and universality of humanistic meaning that it transcends not only its local subject matter but also its own time and place and becomes a projection of a heightened reality. Thus, it acquires metaphysical relevance and the power to strike a spiritually sympathetic chord in the very center of our beings qua human beings. In short, high art, in addition to an expression of aesthetic values, communicates timeless and universal human values.

Beauty can be, however, the "charm," the form, the vehicle that incites the "aesthetic arrest" within us, immediately capturing our rapt attention while delivering deeper messages in slower tempo for our inner contemplation. Beauty can exist in many forms both natural and human-made without being high art, but high art cannot exist without beauty of form. Beauty can be both physical and mental; it can be both an identification and an evaluation. This is why beauty and truth dovetail so perfectly, why the greatest art is both beautiful and true: art and ideas.

This is why American Renaissance for the Twenty-first Century (ART), a new, not-for-profit arts foundation headquartered in New York City, was created to cultivate and promote the established Western art forms which have come down to us from ancient Greece through the European Renaissance and the nineteenth century, until tomorrow. Representationalism in the visual arts, tonality and melody in music, grace and expressiveness of movement in dance, and the reverberating interaction of structure, rhythm, and meaning in written works all afford artists an immensely rich vocabulary for unlimited communication through the combined power--via a supremely thoughtful integrative process--of both aesthetic and metaphorical means.

Sight, touch, sound, and intellection--not to mention the mysterious and wondrous realm of the imagination--can all be stimulated and satisfied through these art forms because the forms themselves are malleable and limitless; they can stretch, bend, twist, turn, expand, and reduce to accommodate endless meanings. In humanistic art, form (physical presentation) always serves content (ideas and values). The attributes of beauty reside inherently in the human form and in the forms of the natural world. Beauty can be found also in the integration of harmonies and the variations in melodies, in the order and complexities of rhythms, in textures and colors--all variously shaped by human intention into images and sounds that stir recognition, aesthetic pleasure, and emotional-intellectual connection.

This does not mean imitation of ancient work. The success of the Renaissance Europeans lay in the fact that they did not attempt to repeat the Greek ideal. They reached back to Greece, as we must now do, only to create a true rebirth of ideas that they then made manifest (as did the Greeks themselves) through their own great art. They redefined the Greek ideal to suit their own needs, to express their own context--David, not Apollo. Now it is our turn. What will the next millennium's heroes and heroines look like? As we approach the beginning of this momentous turn of a century, we who seek the way to a better tomorrow must dedicate ourselves today to those human values which express the best within us in order to usher in a future culture that can outshine even the golden ages of the past. And how better to express the best within us than through works of art that project the world at its most beautiful and man and woman in their most noble state? The following quote (from an unknown source) seems pertinent here:

Pre-renaissance nostalgia was not self-indulgent and debilitating, but turned into vigorous and revitalizing current which inspired writers, artists, and craftsmen to give expression to the new mood....

Obviously written in reference to the Italian phenomenon, the notion of a "new mood" resonates particularly well today. If we look carefully we can glimpse, as if wafting up like a fine mist from the troubled waters of our age, a rising concern for individual liberty in certain political sectors and a resurgence of a romantic spirit in certain of the arts. It may be that a faint scent of the perfume of hope is in the air.

Most definitely, the desire of those of us associated with American Renaissance for the Twenty-first Century to renew the values of beauty, humanism, and the moral ideal is not a mere "nostalgia" for the past but a "vigorous" commitment to the future. We desire to create a rallying point of view that includes all of the fine arts. We desire to provide an umbrella under which like-minded individuals can join together in camaraderie and good will to enjoy and enrich our moments on this earth through art experiences that lift our spirits, move us to contemplative thought, and remind us why life is worth living. Painters, sculptors, writers, composers, dancers, musicians, actors, poets, audiences, patrons. All! We desire to show ideas in their various and captivating forms through the only tangible means possible other than science: art. Indeed, in a society becoming more illiterate by the minute, art may be the one dynamic powerful enough to envision for us a way to a better future. We desire to offer venues where the art of today's artists who express life-serving values in their work may be promoted and brought to national awareness. Our attitude of devotion to ethos does not deny pathos, but it does emphasize the tenet that human struggle and suffering can become acts of affirmation by projecting visions of why the struggle is worthwhile. We cannot salve (nor solve) the sorrows of humankind by lamenting what is wrong; we must hold up what is right. Ours is a declarative step toward establishing a nationwide, cooperative endeavor to create a rebirth (not a revival) of positive art and ideas that will give "expression to the new mood ... vigorous and revitalizing."

The art and ideas that we of a positive and humanistic persuasion choose to champion must be expressions not of division but of integration: mind, body, and soul in harmony, passions elicited from value stimulation rather than sensory titillation, and brotherhood born from shared values rather than color, creed, gender, or bloodline. Those of us who understand the philosophical premises expressed through art are charged with far more than a simplistic call for a return to beauty or a poignant cry for a lost innocence that never existed. We are charged with the more profound responsibility of giving expression to a deeper mood, one of renewed celebration: a mood that seeks not to escape reality but to embrace it--the joys, the hopes, and the possibilities of life. Human life. We can curse the darkness as we should and do, but that will not be constructive unless we also draw back the curtain and let in the light.

Art imbued with beauty that expresses life-serving values and humanistic ideas (and ideals) is a potent manifestation of that light--the same philosophical flame ignited in ancient Greece, rekindled during the European Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and reflected across all civilizations ever since in a myriad of forms that celebrate individual achievement and excellence. America was founded as the political incarnation of that light. Let us now, like Olympians who celebrate the wonders of physical excellence through sport, lift the torch high and illuminate the way to celebrate the wonders of a spiritual renewal through art. As we approach the coming millennium, let us join together and gather the vision, the courage, the energy, and the talent so abundant among us to open a new, clear channel through which our reborn values can flow from the fountainhead to the future and, in its wake, create the surging, shiing wave of a genuine, lasting American Renaissance in art and ideas that will rise to take its place among the high watermarks of human history.