determining aesthetic value

i've been thinking a lot lately on what it means to make art, on whether living for bread (see thelma's post below) or living for roses is more important, or if they somehow mean the same thing. thelma sent out an e-mail the other day that included this quote from li-young lee, and it made me wonder if what i was doing up in my studio alone that night was really as important as bread, if throwing paint and watching it drip could have enough value to merit its appreciation. i don't know, but maybe i really am just a small part of the one great mind - the universal mind - and maybe i am just reaching out to all of you and hoping that really, truly, there is so much import in this.

"The highest thing we can do is practice art. There is only one mind, and so whatever we do in that mind - when we create more beauty there, more opening, more understanding, more light, when we shed more light in our own mind - affects the great mind. So you're creating value when you write a poem. And I mean material value! They've proven that on the physical scale, that when a butterfly flies across Tienanmen Square, it affects the weather in Florida. In minute and inevitable ways, everything is connected. In the invisible realm - which has more reality than the visible realm because the visible is dying and without materiality - when somebody writes a poem, when they open themselves up to the universe mind and the universe mind is suddenly present in the visible world, the poet isn't the only one that gets the benefits. Universe mind comes down and that whole mind is a little more pure, a little more habitable. That's why were the "unacknowledged legislators of the world." I never understood that until recently. We keep the world from falling apart, and they don't even know this! Not priests. Not ministers. Not rabbis. If we stop writing poems, you'll see this world go into such darkness. They won't even know what hit them."

on a related tangent, or at least related to me, i've also been thinking about what it is that makes art important, or how it is that we can create something that won't just wilt, but last, and in lasting, both sustain us and change us. i came across an essay by henry geldzahler called determining aesthetic values -

The work of art must continue to reveal new messages and images on subsequent viewings, and not exhaust itself in what I call the Big Bang, revealing everything to you the first time you see it and then having a lessened impact each time subsequent. The narrative, or the story, is how a picture reveals itself to you through time. The story is in you. It’s an internal story and only you can judge it.

i suppose that in one way this is the key - that just like the bread, which gives us little molecules of nutrient that enter our cells and fuse with our body and become our new core, what we read and hear and see enters into us and becomes us, so that we are living a billion different lives all at once - lives that are really all one life, the one universe mind.