Ossigeno

78 79 And then it comes the peacock, which, over the centuries, in the face of its predators and with all due respect to Darwin, pushes the instinct of conservation into hell, to do with pride what the whole world acclaims it for. Spreading its tail. the exception of the peacock It is the world-renowned cardiologist Philipp Bonhoeffer – first in the world, in 2000, to implant a transcatheter valve in the muscle pumping life, eliminating for humanity the need to open a chest to insert a heart valve – to tell us the parable of the peacock, with his eyes shining from enchantment, in a video contribution preserved in the Rai archives. The peacock, who stubbornly spreads its tail in the face of danger, despite the fact that it represents a conspicuous impediment in the need, vital for its sake, to be able to escape. Aesop, Phaedrus, the Grimms and Prophets from various latitudes teach that a parable cannot be called such, if it does not contain a universal morality. The moral of the parable of the peacock, here biologically validated, is that of the very powerful need for beauty . No one’s been able to say it better than Dostoevsky, in a passage universally known as «Beauty will save the world»: «Mankind can still continue to live without the Englishman, can continue without Germany, can continue all too well without the Russian, can continue without science, can continue without bread — it is only without beauty that we cannot continue, for there will be nothing at all to do in the world» Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons , 1873 «aesthetics without ethics are cosmetics» So, let's face it, this blessed beauty. Let's wrestle with it, and let's make peace with it, if only to redeem it from the mortification it incessantly undergoes, thrown into chatter for public and private parlours, because mortifying a vital engine such as beauty, selling it, selling it off and saturating it, takes now the shape of a sacrilege. «Beautiful are the packaged products, the brand clothing with its stylized logo, the bodies, reconstructed, remodelled or rejuvenated by plastic surgery, the made-up faces, treated or lifted, the personalised piercings and tattoos, the interiors furnished with creations of design, military equipment inspired by cubist-futurism, the constructivist or ninja-style uniforms, the dishes with artistic decorations, or more simply packaged in supermarkets with colored envelopes, such as lollipops. Even corpses are beautiful, if carefully packed with plastic slipcovers and well-aligned at the foot of ambulances. If it is not yet beautiful, it has to be. Beauty reigns. It has become imperative: be beautiful or, at least, save us from your ugliness» Yves Michaud, The art in gaseous state. Essay about aesthetics triumph , 2007 Appearance sufficient unto itself, without giving a damn about essence. Form despoiled of substance. But beauty can’t stop there; and, in fact, it doesn’t. As a further demonstration of the fact that the search for beauty is an innate need of man, a standard and not an optional equipment, at the origins of thought there is a first definition of beauty, which is platonic, which in its purest degree joins the Greek formula of an ideal: kalòs kai agathòs , beautiful and good, ultimate aim to tend to. To tend . Tension, therefore, to achieve that promise of happiness which is Stendhal's definition of 'beauty'. That Stendhal himself, author of training masterpieces such as The red and the black (1830) and The Charterhouse of Parma (1839) who, leaving Santa Croce in Florence, was so overwhelmed by beauty that he was struck by tachycardia and dizziness, symptoms attributable to what psychiatry has christened, in his honor, Stendhal Syndrome . Because beauty leads a heavy game. A diseased oyster can cause the growth of pearls . What makes art an artwork is a gaze not ending within the object, an ulteriority of meaning to which it refers that, on the way toward its research, really fills existence. Thus, beauty oscillates between the two poles of this opposition: either it remains on the surface, contenting itself with an immediate pleasure bound to burn quicky in its will-o'-the-wisp, or it can try to recompose itself within the ethical framework of beauty as project and knowledge . A (beautiful) contemporary artist such as Ulay said it perfectly: aesthetics without ethics are cosmetics , volatile and artificial, like a powder. fabiola triolo revolutionary like beauty. adriano olivetti’s lesson