It is a familiar picture. A child bent over a slate, a piece of paper, a lump of clay, concentrating on a task as though her life depended on it. She draws a line or a shape, erasing it or reforming it repeatedly, making sure she gets it just right.
The vegetable sellers arrange their produce in symmetrical piles, green beans next to the smooth red tomatoes, next to shiny purple brinjals... And next door, the mangoes, apples and sweet limes are organised according to size and shape, in a near-mathematical precision — so fascinating and picture perfect for an Instagram post!
There’s a similar impulse that drives both these sets of actions. In the first case, the child is (perhaps unconsciously) exploring the aesthetics of form, a line-drawn picture or a clay shape. In the second, the vegetable vendor draws on an intrinsic desire to create beauty while also catering to an age-old principle of marketing that people are drawn to things that look good.
Art, someone said, is about making something more beautiful than it needs to be. A pile of tomatoes is a pile of tomatoes. A busy shopper is unlikely to pay too much attention to how the pile is arranged, as she picks out enough to make up a kilo. Still, the seller painstakingly — or perhaps automatically — rebuilds the pile after each purchase. Clearly, this is not just commerce.
That something extra
If you speak to a computer programmer about writing code, or to a mathematician about arriving at a proof for a theorem, he will talk not just about correctness, but also about style. He will tell you that anyone might be able to write “efficient” code or arrive at an adequate proof, but it takes something extra to write “beautiful” code or build an “elegant” proof.
In every discipline and every task, there is a dimension that takes it beyond mere adequacy. This is that extra something that makes it more than just “good enough”. In some cases, it is definable and measurable — such as the difference between a vegetable vendor who lays his produce out in unshapely piles and the one who arranged them in a symmetrical stack, or the tailor whose clothes have an unmistakable “finish”. In other instances, it is less clear, as in a dish which tastes good and one that seems to have a secret ingredient that makes it special. The difference usually lies in the level of focus and attention given to the task by the one who is performing it, and this person is usually not satisfied with “good enough”.
If we are to look at everything we do as art — or at least, the things that are important to us — it is about making it more beautiful than it needs to be. This is not about simply dressing up something from the outside to make it appear beautiful but building on the beauty from the inside out. In writing, it would mean paying attention to structure and expression apart from the content. In engineering, it might be going beyond mere functionality to usability and adaptability. In medicine it could take the form of comfort beyond the physical cure.
There are probably many ways in which we can discover, or even introduce, an aesthetic pleasure in what we do. It not only gives the task meaning, it makes the outcome better…than it needs to be.
The author teaches at the University of Hyderabad and edits Teacher Plus. usha.bpgll@gmail.com
