I've been reading Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now, which I cannot praise enough. However, one paragraph about "modern art" surprised me:
Because we live in such a mind-dominated culture, most modern art, architecture, music, and literature are devoid of beauty, of inner essence, with very few exceptions. The reason is that the people who create those things cannot--even for a moment--free themselves from their mind. So they are never in touch with that place within where true creativity and beauty arises. The mind left to itself creates monstrosities, and not only in art galleries. Look at our urban landscapes and industrial wastelands. No civilization has ever produced so much ugliness. -- p. 98
In my own experience, visual art, music, and literature have been a means of transcendence and a refuge from the noise and ugliness of daily living. It is when I am creating art that I am most "out of my busy mind" and present in the "now." This is why reading such a paragraph was a shock to me.
Certainly we can find ugliness in the arts just as we can in the rest of our contemporary world, but being present with a painting, a piece of music, or a work of literature often provides a pathway out of our ego-dominated minds and into the peace of Being. I hope Eckhart will reconsider his judgment.
