For what is art? For mil­len­nia they have tried to define it, and all of us keep try­ing, with more, or rather less, suc­cess. It is surely noth­ing arti­fi­cial. Per­haps it is pre­cisely a depic­tion of nature? An exal­ta­tion of every­day phe­nom­ena? A mes­sage con­veyed? Some sys­tem of sym­bols put to work? Or the scat­ter­ing of the frag­ments of a post­mod­ern age that is fall­ing apart?

We may call art the act of a magic­al vis­ion of the world, a vis­ion lif­ted above the every­day and with man­i­fold ties. One side of it is sub­ject­ive from the cre­at­or's point of view – this is the pos­sib­il­ity of self-expres­sion and trans­fig­ur­a­tion. The ques­tion arises – does self-expres­sion still have any reas­on to exist? For we live in an over-talked world, where every­one thinks in terms of com­mu­nic­a­tion plat­forms, even when there is noth­ing to say. Self-expres­sion has mean­ing when someone is curi­ous about it. This is the object­ive side of the magic­al vis­ion of the world, or of art, from the cre­at­or's point of view – but from the point of view of the behold­er, the recip­i­ent, this is sub­jectiv­ity! We may say that aes­thet­ics is the first quantum-like sci­ence, one that also examined the pres­ence of the sub­ject: the exper­i­ences of the recip­i­ent of aes­thet­ic exper­i­ence.

The recept­ive prin­ciple works by the law of sym­path­et­ic vibra­tion, of res­on­ance (the sangit law). If two pianos stand side by side and we strike a note on one, the cor­res­pond­ing string on the other piano res­on­ates with it. If the artist – who glows at a high­er heat than the aver­age per­son – expresses a thought or a feel­ing, it like­wise excites sym­path­et­ic vibra­tion, res­on­ance, in a suit­ably tuned recip­i­ent. This means that who­ever receives what is aes­thet­ic can also rise to a high­er level of res­on­ance.

But art must have a true objectiv­ity, one that points towards the tran­scend­ent dimen­sion. Thus we may say that true art offers intim­a­tions to man torn from the bosom of God, estranged from the prim­al har­mony, orphaned. Accord­ing to Rudolf Top­pfer (1790–1846), the beau­ti­ful is noth­ing other than the radi­ance of the true, and this is the abso­lute essence of the Tran­scend­ent. ‘Everything wears the gar­ment of the Lord!’ – so says ancient East­ern philo­sophy, and if beauty and love belong to the concept of God, or of the Abso­lute, then their seeds show them­selves in the phe­nom­ena of the world, in nature and in man as well. The truly beau­ti­ful is one and not man­i­fold, though the senses sense it and reas­on recog­nises it. Man's ration­al, moral and aes­thet­ic aware­ness is united in the Abso­lute, and through aes­thet­ic insight we can arrive at the Tran­scend­ent as an object­ive real­ity.

But art is no easy pas­sage for all that: accord­ing to Buddha, art is the surest way of for­get­ting the Abso­lute Truth – not exactly flat­ter­ing… René Mag­ritte, on the other hand, main­tains: ‘It is art that evokes the mys­tery without which the world could not exist’.

Is art, then, a cre­at­ive force? Many regard art as the only world lan­guage not yet con­foun­ded, the logos still valid, in which the mute­ness of nature addresses man. It fol­lows that man's aes­thet­ic task is to rise from the par­tic­u­lar to the uni­ver­sal. The desire for pos­ses­sion has no aes­thet­ic dimen­sion, the secret is worth more than know­ledge, and the search is more use­ful than pos­ses­sion. For the meta­phys­ic­al mys­tery – whose priest­hood would be the sci­ence of beauty and art – lies bey­ond man. Nat­ur­al sci­ence is power­less to des­troy it, and the beau­ti­ful will always remain the sub­ject of poetry. And poetry is not pos­sible without mys­tery, without blessed super­sti­tion. The divine secret of beauty knows no laws, rests on the unknow­able, and yet is a world-mov­ing force: the beau­ti­ful is the found­a­tion of love. And the meet­ing of Beauty and Love is the last word in the mys­ter­ies. Set out in search of it – and at once it van­ishes…