Response to Mariah on people not appreciating beauty like they used to

I am not inclined to think that people do not appreciate beauty as much as they have in the past. At most I think the locations that people find beauty are less obvious. Some people may spend less time admiring nature or going to art galleries and concerts, but these are traditional places we think of to find beauty. People find beauty everywhere. One of the most common places is in other people’s appearance. When someone puts together a great outfit, wears interesting jewelry, dyes their hair a new color, and tries a different sort of makeup they are creating beauty on their physical person that most of us do appreciate. Many people also appreciate the beauty of homes and gardens that they encounter. There have been many times when I’ll be driving with someone and comment on a house I find beautiful or the flowers in someone’s garden that look beautiful. People also find the views of the mountains in North Adams beautiful. They never have to go out of their way to see them, they are right outside our windows or on our walks or drives to work, but we do find beauty in them. Sometimes we may be walking the same path to class we have walked for months and that day the view will strike us as beautiful. People also find beauty in the way a room is designed. Many people spend a lot of time trying to make their rooms beautiful and may admire other people’s rooms or the room designs displayed in magazines. I do think that people often lack patience and they may have had more in the past. What this amounts to, though, is that a lot of people do not want to spend more than a minute looking at a painting and they may get restless at a concert. In television classes we are told to never have the same shot for more than seven seconds because people will get bored, but this does not mean they cannot find beauty in a quickly viewed shot, a sequence of shots, or the finished product. It is not so much that nothing is good enough for people, but that we often do not want to spend the time that is expected seeking them or that we seek it in ways people do not recognize. Going to the mall when we do not plan to buy anything and just want to see what is there, as I often do, is often more a quest to please the eye with beautiful clothes and other material goods then a search for a new thing to own.

                Has people’s experience of beauty become tied to commercialism?