Anatoly V. MALAFEEV / Galina I. ZABOLOTNI / Vladimir I. IONESOV
(Samara Branch of Moscow State University of Service, Russia)
The history of world culture is a history of a thorny way of man looking for freedom, order in the world and social harmony. Ideal beauty is the embodiment of the order in the world. The most important means of dialogue between cultures is art. Through art, culture reveals beauty to us. Art, as the acme of spirituality, is always oriented towards beauty. And it is only in art that the spirit apprehends the plenitude and sense – in other words the purpose – of existence. In artifacts of cultural heritage of art, beauty looks us in the face, for there “the spirit becomes visible” (Plotin). And that brings harmony to people’s lives, a fusion of the spiritual and the material, the hidden and the overt, the finite and the infinite, the temporal and the eternal.
A need for high art is often more keenly felt at dramatic turns in history. Not a single historic turning point in the development of society has occurred without art and, through art. Beauty to support it. All revolutions are nihilistic, but for all their nihilism every one creates its own art since the romance of revolution can exist only in art. In art, man finds relief from the world’s alienation “Art shows us, through experience of overcoming, the limits of the possible in life” (V. Kraus) and makes of man the true creator of daily existence, inculcating in him, according to Dostoevsky, a “universal responsiveness”.
Cultural heritage is especial emotional and inspirational force in art educational activity. Everything is subordinated to harmony and consonance peace: when the world founders in confrontation, sometimes only the artist can save it from destruction, as history eloquently testifies. Who saved the culture of Egypt, ancient Greece and Rome and the civilizations of the Incas, the Maya and the Aztecs for us? Was it not first and foremost the creative artists, known and unknown, whose works, vanquishing time, have brought the vivid rays of light down to us? Greedy Time has carried off all it can, but art has proved stronger than Time. History teaches us that life can overcome death if it can turn to art for support.