Extravagant Beauty: Makoto Fujimura

If you don't know who Makoto Fujimura is, you would do well to find out. He is a master artist and master thinker about creativity and humanity and God. I met him at an International Arts Movement (IAM) conference in February 2007—he took a group of us on a tour of Ground Zero in New York City, where the World Trade Center once stood. Tall, thin, and quiet, Mako embodies humility and radiates a wise serenity that is at once peaceful and restless, always probing for new depths of truth. I am on the email list for his newsletter and have excerpted this from his most recent essay:

In the famed Joshua Bell experiment at L'Enfant Plaza subway station, The Washington Post had the violin master play as folks rushed to work, to see if anyone would stop and pay attention. Only a few people did (out of 1070), and he "earned" $32.17 in the 43 minutes of experiment, a repertoire that included "Chaconne" from Johann Sebastian Bach's Partita No. 2 in D Minor, and Franz Schubert's "Ave Maria." But one person, a demographer at the Commerce Department, did recognize him: "It was the most astonishing thing I've ever seen in Washington," Furukawa says. "Joshua Bell was standing there playing at rush hour, and people were not stopping, and not even looking, and some were flipping quarters at him! Quarters! I wouldn't do that to anybody. I was thinking, Omigosh, what kind of a city do I live in that this could happen?" Joshua Bell regularly plays for concerts in which the best seats go for over $100 (he played at such an event the previous evening), and yet his playing could not slow folks down, rushing to work. What kind of the city do we live in? Well, it's clear from the experiment that it is not the kind that recognizes beauty, classical or avant-garde, so readily. So, if Joshua Bell with his 3.5 million dollar Stradivarius cannot stop people, none of us who creates music, art or work in iambic pentameters should expect much. But then what good are the arts? Why would artists spend time collaborating, spending days working on something that would not be well paid, or pay nothing at all, without anyone to stop to take it in? But we should note that this wasteful excess is being exercised in many hidden places, in homes where a child protégé plays his violin, on the canvases of self-taught artists, or on a humble square table filled with poetry. They may or may not turn out to be Joshua Bells, or Grandma Moses or Emily Dickinsons, but the prerequisite for the arts never seem to be a guarantee of an audience, or income. Artists are clearly not driven by mere monetary capital, but they are driven by another form of capital - creative and relational capital, the discovery of new ideas and thoughts and cultural geography. But it is worthwhile to ask, "is Joshua Bell's exquisite playing, or Susie [Ibarra]'s quiet percussion, useful for society at all?" Is there a utilitarian reason for valuing their art? The heartbeat of the arts resounds with internal significance that quietly pleads for Art to be more than a mere tool. Art is the "organ of human life," as Tolstoy would have it; co-joined with our deepest humanity. We cannot "use" the arts, any more than we can "use" a human being. This pervasive utilitarian view is a symptom of our greater cultural malaise, a view that can dehumanize the entire river of culture. Artists need to transgress against this truncated reality that views utility above the life of art. Thus, the essence of art needs to be useless, or use-less, because of the intrinsic nature of our excess. What is extravagantly beautiful is a deposit toward a greater fusing of purpose and design of our universe."

Amen.

If you would like to subscribe to Mako's newsletter, go to his website (linked above) and click on "Blog," then on the blog page click on "LINKS TO THIS POST" which will open up a small window for you to enter your email address to "Join the Refractions Mailing List." This is not one of those mailing lists that trigger annoying amounts of emails—Mako is as quiet and humble in his newslettering as he is in the rest of his life.