Here's a question that shouldn't be controversial but somehow is: Is beauty important?

That's the provocation at the heart of Karyn Gabriel's ceramic sculpture work, and honestly, it's one of the more refreshing things happening in the local art scene right now.

In a city where public art budgets routinely get funneled into installations that look like they were assembled during a fever dream at Burning Man, Gabriel's work dares to center an almost old-fashioned idea — that beauty itself has value, that aesthetic craftsmanship isn't some bourgeois relic to be deconstructed into oblivion.

San Francisco spends lavishly on the arts. The city's percent-for-art ordinance requires that a chunk of construction costs on civic projects go toward public artwork. And yet, walk around most neighborhoods and you'd be hard-pressed to say taxpayers are getting their money's worth. We get abstract steel blobs and "interactive" pieces that stop working six months after installation. Meanwhile, artists like Gabriel are doing genuinely compelling work that engages with craft, materiality, and — yes — beauty, often without the cushy institutional backing.

The question Gabriel poses with her ceramics is deeper than it sounds. It's not just about pretty objects on pedestals. It's about whether a culture that's perpetually skeptical of beauty — that treats it as shallow or exclusionary — ends up impoverishing itself. When every mural has to carry a manifesto and every sculpture needs a three-paragraph artist statement to justify its existence, maybe we've lost the plot.

This isn't an argument against political art or conceptual work. It's an argument against the reflexive assumption that beauty is somehow less serious than ugliness. Gabriel's ceramics push back on that orthodoxy, and they do it through the medium itself — through form, glaze, texture, and the kind of patient skill that can't be faked.

For a city that prides itself on creativity, San Francisco could stand to take Gabriel's question seriously. Beauty isn't a luxury. It's a public good — and one we shouldn't have to justify wanting more of.