Essay on Art to Save the Earth

Nature as a source of aesthetic experience historically emerged earlier than art, but now art as a cultural institution formulates the attitude to the environment. One of its results is the emergence of total art as a natural and artistic integrity and global aesthetics which treats the unity of nature and the cosmos as an artistic phenomenon.

Today, artists around the world are promoting unindifferent attitude to the environmental protection. Earth may be just rocks, sand, water, minerals, etc., but the spirituality implicit in the art allows us to consider our planet as a living pulsing organism able respond to our care and attention. The concept of nature as a work of art suggests that when the world is generally perceived as a work of art, utilitarianism gets replaced by the protection of environment and its aesthetic estimation, which composite the foundation of the global aesthetics. Therefore, in the era of growing environmental risks, environmental art, environmental design, environmental architecture are seen as the art of the future, the art that allows us to understand the superb power and fragility of nature, as the art that broadens the mind and allows opening the love to the world in oneself, giving hope that this green art will save the world.

Further in this paper, we will focus at the concepts of nature and environmental protection through the prism of eco-aesthetics, as well as analyze contemporary eco-art objects such as ecologically-friendly production of art works (Andy Goldsworthy; Lauren Karnitz; Ron van der Ende), giant art-landscapes (Jim Denevan, Green Gallery), environmental street-art and trash installations as the forms of constructing aesthetic and ecological model of nature as an ecosystem whose beauty lies in natural functioning.