Junk for Code

'Should beauty be identified with aesthetic merit?'

The problem that dogs this endless debate (and *makes* it endless, in my view) is that the characteristics of beauty are never spelt out. So everyone, quite understandably, falls back on some vague notion of beauty in the back of their mind. And precisely because that notion *is* so vague, it ends up being able to encompass anything from Raphael to Goya’s ‘Saturn’ to African art, etc.

Suppose I asked: ‘Should swongle be identified with aesthetic merit?’ You would rightly ask me what I meant by ‘swongle’ (a word I just made up). But we don't tend to ask that question about 'beauty' because we have a vague feeling we know, or ought to know, what it means, and it would be silly to ask. But if we are using the term as an 'identifier' of certain things (and thus excluding others) we *need* to ask. Otherwise we fall into the trap of thinking we are using a term with a clear meaning when in fact we are not.

For a long time - from about Raphael onwards - 'beauty' did have a fairly clear meaning in Western thinking about art. It meant, roughly, art 'like Raphael' - ie art that presents the same kind of ideal, imaginary world - and it could quite readily encompass artists as diverse as Watteau, Tiepolo, Delacroix, Titian, etc, as well as a lot of the art of Antiquity. Now that the world of art has broadened so dramatically and takes in the works of all cultures, the qualities identified by that idea have ceased to be plausible attributes of all art. (How much African or Oceanian art, for example, fits the model?) But because the idea has such a venerable tradition behind it – and also because a lot of modern aesthetics still struggles to keep it alive - we are reluctant to give it up. Answer? Make the idea of beauty more and more vague, even if that means turning it into something about as substantial as a thin wisp of smoke. That allows us to sidestep the problem. But it does nothing to help us clarify our ideas about art.

Derek,
I'm sorry I've taken so long to reply. I've been very very busy in that big House on the Hill in Canberra. It's been hard long hours that have left me exhausted.

I concur with your remarks.Beauty has become so vague that it has become everything and nothing and so unable to put into words.

I've little time for those attempts in analytic aesthetics to resurrect beauty as a blanket term for artistic merit, for aesthetic appreciation, or as a way to help us say why X (eg., Duchamp's Fountain) is a work of art.

We cannot say that the Fountain is a work of art because we are struck by its beauty. It is art for reasons other than beauty as are most other objects that are deemed to be art.

Beauty today is no long a transcedendent Form. It means glamour; the glamour of the fashionable jet set. The Platonic Form--Beauty--has been commodified in the society of the spectacle.

Gary

Interested in your comments on analytic aesthetics – which now seems to be making another attempt to breath new life into beauty (conferences on the topic, books, etc.) I think it’s a lost cause. Beauty ceased being a viable explanatory idea for art in general about a century ago, in my view. But it looks like its advocates are going to put up a tenacious rearguard action.

In a speech on art not very long before he died (in a book translated into English as 'Picasso's Mask'), Malraux classified beauty as one of four concepts that makes our contemporary relationship with art ‘unintelligible'. (The others were: vision (in the sense of the artist’s special way of 'seeing' the world), nature, and expression.) Malraux was not shy of throwing out challenges to aesthetics!

Hope you have recovered from your sojourn in the House on the Hill. I worked there for a while in a past life. I know it can be torrid.

Cheers
DA