protean beauty

Beauty in art is an evolving value for each of us, despite its being reified by us as a people and anointed absolute. Our individual conciousnesses are forever charting new ground with our lives, during which the vantage on beauty is ever-changing, tied to the flow of time and our experience. This is the basis of sophistication in art, for better AND worse. And where the gulph widens between novitiates and tyros. Which causes many to lapse back into mawkishness--strident feelings for a beauty they USED to sense and advertise to the young vibrant world that they still do. By contrast some retreat deliberately into the esoteric as a refuge from that threat of youth. Better to stand by one's experience and continually coax out the vitality there. If anything is unchanging it is this ongoing debt to art.