In the following, Marc Barnes of Bad Catholic writes about the price of beauty. (Emphasis added by yours truly.)
by Marc Barnes of Bad Catholic
…Make something likeable and you’ve increased its value. Make it pleasurable and you’ve increased it even more. Make it beautiful, and something unlike mere improvement occurs. Beauty lifts an object from the realm of human transaction and labels it, quite specifically, as that which humanity has no capacity to price.
Why? What about Beauty makes us say: “This is beyond us, there is nothing we can give that would equal this. Pile up all the money in the world and we’ll still place more value on this chunk of marble.”
As I’ve pointed out before, Beauty is infinite in quality. Beauty is never sated. No man in recorded history has ever said “no more Beauty, please.” No man, gazing on Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel or watching the sun sink below the Blue Ridge Mountains, has ever said, “This is far too much Beauty. Take it away, for I am full.” If a thing can never be conceived of reaching an end point, then as far as we are concerned, that thing is infinite. We can never think of too many numbers — it is an infinite progression. We can never think of too much Beauty. This implies that it too, is infinite.
Thus a beautiful thing possesses an infinite quality. So of course it becomes priceless. All material price is finite. If a thing has been brushed by the infinite, than it can have no more to do with finite, material price than an asymptote has to do with an axis, or love has to do with limits.
To summarize: There exists in reality an infinite, intangible quality that, when held by an object, grants to that object a dignity that renders mankind unable to name its price. The materialist should, right about now, begin to shudder, for while this doesn’t prove anything, it strongly implies the existence of a supernatural order.
For there exists no experience of infinity in nature. There is no forever and ever. Entropy is the true King and Conqueror of the Universe. Life dies, matter disintegrates, stars explode and all things fade, even Time itself – a product of the Universe and thus her partner in death. Continue reading…
From Artprize 2010 – artist unknown
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