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As I think happens to a lot of us,
I found myself daydreaming about the performance artist Marina
Abramovic the other day--
in particular, her 1975 piece, "Art Must be Beautiful,
Artist Must be Beautiful," in which she brushes her hair
with a comb in one hand and a brush
in the other while continuously repeating the mantra.
Art must be beautiful.
Artist must be beautiful.
This piece brings up a lot of good questions.
What were the expectations of an artist, particularly a woman,
during that moment in the '70s?
Is it any different now?
And to what extent does an artist and their image
become wrapped up in the commodification
of their artwork?
But today, I just want to focus on that first half
of the mantra--
art must be beautiful.
You often hear that old Keats line,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty."
But personally, I don't think it's that simple.
I tend to be suspicious of beautiful art.
There must be some evil machinations at work, right?
Something pernicious lurking underneath the surface.
Why am I dubious of beautiful art?
Ancient philosophers ponder the nature of beauty,
and I'll recklessly summarize their positions
to say that they found beauty to be objective, something
that rests in the object and not in the response
of the beholder.
Plato thought that beauty was located
in the realm of the forms, and if an object
participated in those forms, it could be considered beautiful.
Ditto for Aristotle, who wrote in the "Poetics"
that "To be beautiful, a living creature and every whole
made up of parts must present a certain order
in its arrangement of parts."
That manifested through symmetry and proportion,
and could sometimes but not always be
boiled down to a formula like the golden ratio.
And there were certainly emotional aspects
to encountering beauty.
Plotinus described the spirit that beauty
must bring forth as, "Wonderment and a delicious trouble,
longing and love and a trembling that is all delight."
Artists and writers of the Italian Renaissance
who revered all things Greek and Roman
had similar conceptions of beauty.
Art and architecture, to be beautiful,
strove to achieve perfect proportions,
an arrangement of parts coalescing
into a harmonious whole.
And for much of this history, that which was beautiful
was closely intertwined with that which was good or moral.
Cultures throughout history-- and believe it or not,
in places other than Europe--
have held differing conceptions of beauty.
Tracing any kind of a global history
is difficult, because the idea of taking pleasure in things
is expressed in many different ways
and in many different cultures.
Like when we're looking for analogs for beauty
in other languages, should we consider Tang Dynasty painter
Xie He's six principles of Chinese painting,
the first of which translates to the breath of life or spirit
resonance in a work of art?
Perhaps a better boundary is the discipline of aesthetics.
The term first appeared in 1735 when Baumgarten
wrote about how the Greek philosophers distinguish
between the noeta, being objects of thought that
could be understood through logic, and the aistheta,
being objects of sense.
Aesthetics for him were the science of perception.
But it wouldn't be until the 19th century
that the likes of Kant and others
drew out these ideas further.
Kant insisted that aesthetics could not be a science,
and that beauty was entirely subjective and never
able to be proved.
For Kant, it is our faculty of judgment-- or critique--
that allows us to have an experience of beauty.
So now we arrive at a point where
beauty is located outside of the thing, referring
instead to the experience of the person taking it in.
It's roughly around this time that Winckelmann, sometimes
called the father of art history,
found beauty to be not something that you could define,
but something that could only be discovered
through deep and sustained observation.
Here again, beauty is located in our experience of a thing
and not in the thing itself.
Winckelmann even imposed upon himself
a rule when looking at art of-- not turning back until I
had discovered some beauty.
And we can't forget Hegel.
Hegel did believe that beauty is objective,
that it's a matter of the harmony of different elements
unified organically.
But he also thought beauty had to do with subject matter.
In his mind, true art gives sensuous
expression to the free spirit and should
make that freedom of spirit graspable to an audience.
"Art is beautiful," so says Hegel,
"when it allows us to realize truths about ourselves."
Which is a super compelling idea,
but for Hegel, this meant almost exclusively
ancient Greek sculptures of gods and heroes.
I'll stop with this litany in just a moment,
but I can't not bring up Hume, who in my mind,
had a totally reasonable take on the topic,
which I would like to have on a T-shirt.
"Beauty is no quality in things themselves.
It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them,
and each mind perceives a different beauty.
One person may even perceive deformity
where another is sensible of beauty,
and every individual ought to acquiesce in his own sentiment
without pretending to regulate those of others."
Now, as much as I like this idea,
Hume and others did find the subjectivity of beauty
to be kind of a bummer.
Because if beauty is completely relative,
then it doesn't seem all that important.
And beauty felt-- and certainly still feels--
important.
As Andy Warhol said over 200 years later,
"If everybody's not a beauty, then nobody is."
But that's also good news, right?
Maybe everyone's a beauty!
The ancient Greeks often located beauty
in the form of strapping male youths,
and it wasn't until maybe the 19th century
that ideals of beauty started to be
located more in the image of woman more than man.
The culture industry certainly plays a huge role
in my suspicion of beauty, and here I'm
using the term introduced by Adorno and Horkheimer in 1944.
It describes the late capitalist phenomenon
of all the cultural goods like films, magazines, music,
and radio designed-- so these guys claimed--
to satisfy the entertainment needs of we,
the mass of consumers.
And there have been many important feminist critiques
of the culture industry.
In 1975, Laura Mulvey wrote, "It is
said that analyzing visual pleasure, or beauty,
destroys it.
That is the intention of this article."
She goes on to explain, "In a world ordered
by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking
has been split between active/male and passive/female.
The determining male gaze projects its fantasy
onto the female form, which is styled accordingly.
In their traditional exhibitionist role,
women are simultaneously looked at and displayed,
with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact
so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness."
And it's precisely that to-be-looked-at-ness that
arouses my suspicion when I'm experiencing beauty in art.
What are the codes and motivations
behind what I'm seeing, whether it's
an image of a person or a suspicious sunset seducing me
with its beauty?
In this postmodern age, we've been
taught to question everything.
Something beautiful is, pretty often,
a lure to sell you sneakers.
In the last century, you can see the steady decline
in importance of traditional Western ideals of beauty
for artists and the gatekeepers of art, resulting
in much of the head scratching that goes on daily
in museums around the world.
Some of that we can credit to the succession of avant-garde
movements in the 20th century.
Artists deploying shock, ugliness, and the mechanical
among other tactics, and their reactions against the status
quo, repressive structures, and purportedly golden ratios
that are just like regular ratios.
Dave Hickey sought to understand this vacancy of beauty
in a 1993 essay, summarizing artists' anti-beauty arguments
like this.
"Beautiful art sells.
If it sells itself, it's an idolatrous commodity.
If it sells anything else, it's a seductive advertisement."
Hickey countered that "Idolatry and advertising are, indeed,
art, and that the greatest works of art
are always and inevitably a bit of both."
He defended beauty, reminding us that art and images have appeal
to the beholder throughout history, arguing for things
and attempting to persuade.
So it seems that we jaded citizens of the present
have been depriving ourselves of beauty
even though beautiful images have long
been trying to sell us something-- be it Christianity,
revolution, or what have you.
In 1994, Arthur Danto proclaimed,
"Ours is an age of moral indignation."
And I'd argue that age continues.
But he goes on to connect our aversion to beauty
with a heightened moral sensitivity.
Kathleen Marie Higgins responded to Danto in '96,
saying, "It may be insensitive, at times,
to luxuriate in aesthetic comfort
while human misery abounds.
But the mesmerizing impact of beauty
may, even in miserable conditions,
rekindle our sensitivity."
Beauty might be subjective, impossible to define,
ever-changing and socially inscribed,
but it's nonetheless real.
So argued Elaine Scarry, "It is as though beautiful things have
been placed here and there throughout the world
to serve as small wake-up calls to perception,
spurring lapsed alertness back to its most acute level."
And artists are still making beautiful things.
Whether beauty is inherent in those things
or exists only in our perception of them,
I'd argue that beauty is valuable.
It's just not the only valuable facet of art.
Now, this is a far from complete accounting of philosophies
of beauty throughout the ages, and I
encourage you to mention the many important ideas I've
skipped over in the comments.
But if you started out thinking that art must be beautiful,
I hope maybe we've inserted a question mark
after the statement for you.
And if, like me, you started out dubious of beauty, then
perhaps you may have found something redeeming in it
and become dubious instead of our aversion to beauty.
Rather than condemn or condone beauty,
perhaps the task is putting it in its place, allowing for it--
or even embracing it--
while understanding all that it might mask or distract from.
Let's talk about it in the comments,
remembering always Hume's invocation
that "Every individual ought to acquiesce in his own sentiment
without pretending to regulate those of others."
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