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January 27, 2004
In picking up on the Stephen David Ross interview conducted by Rick over at Artrift, I had difficulty with the tight link between art and beauty that I discerned, even though I have no desire to place a ban on the category of the beautiful in aesthetics.
I suspected that Ross' aesthetics had identified or equated the two. That troubled me as 'art as beauty' would not have made sense of Dada; the ugliness of Goya (eg., the Black Paintings) or the sublime that I previously connected with historical human suffering.
In the sixth part of the interview Rick raises the relationship between art and beauty. Rick asks:
"You wrote a book titled, The Gift of Beauty:The Good as Art at a time (1996) when the relationship between beauty and art had already become questionable and, in many cases, had simply dissolved or was of little interest to many artists. Do you agree that art and beauty have, to a significant degree, parted ways in the last ninety years or so? Or, is the situation more in line with Agnes Martins thought that all art is about beauty even when it is not about beauty; that when it is not about beauty, it is a response to the lack of beauty in the world?"
Good question.
This is how Ross responds by linking beauty to the sublime:
"Beauty has always been interpreted in the two ways I described: as consummatory, fulfilling, and as transfigurative, excessive. Even to the Greeks, and in other cultures as well, there have always been a sense of beauty closer to the grand, fulfilling, proportionate, and complete, and another closer to the unbounded, infinite, transfigurative, uncanny. Sometimes these have been described in terms of the beautiful and the sublime. Sometimes they have been understood to pertain to art, aesthetics, and beauty in unclassifiable ways. One reason is that the discourse and experience of art is frequently beyond words, beyond categories, a secular expression of infinity. So one might employ Levinas's terms: a sense of beauty in being much closer to totality, and a sense of beauty beyond being, excessive, closer to infinity. Infinity here is beyond comprehension, intelligibility, classification, and sensibility. The point is that art and aesthetics and sometimes nature present us with experiences beyond our ability to know and to grasp them. And yet we can grasp and know and experience that."
I accept Ross' understand of beauty as "the grand, fulfilling, proportionate, and complete" and the sublime as "the unbounded, infinite, transfigurative, uncanny." But should beauty and the sublime be considered separate aesthetic categories? Kant, for instance, set the sublime apart from art, located it in nature and described the feeling of the sublime as a trembling sensation of the subject caught between nature and freedom.
Why can we not transplant the sublime into the art world? The sublime becomes a a historical constituent of art after Kant. Can we not redescribe the sublime as art works that quake and vibrate and transgress what is taboo. What is then etched into the sublime is the awesomeness of domination and power. With the idea of historical tremor we have moved a long way from the formally beautiful.
And what has happened to the ugly as an aesthetic category?:
Goya, Old People Eating, The Black Paintings, circa 1820
To understand the beautiful don't you need the ugly? It's a Hegelian point --to know what something is you need to understand how it defined by what it is not.
Was not a lot of cultural product of earlier civilizations----what the modern art institution now calls art---about religion, myth, dread, sex, death?
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In my view, Rosss comment is not a bad example of a widespread tendency in aesthetics to act as if disciplines such as history, anthropology and archaeology had never been invented. Consider his statement:
Even to the Greeks, and in other cultures as well, there have always been a sense of beauty closer to the grand, fulfilling, proportionate, and complete, and another closer to the unbounded, infinite, transfigurative, uncanny.
This appears to be an observation about how people feel/think in a number of other cultures unless other means all, in which case the observation is intended to be universal in application. (Why the Greeks are mentioned specifically is not clear to me.).
Now, imagine coming across that statement in an anthropology textbook. What would one think? Which other cultures are being referred to? Is this how the Australian Aboriginals felt/thought? The Inuit? The ancient Egyptians? The Aztecs? All African tribal cultures? All cultures in all ages? How do we know? What is the evidence? What is the counter-evidence? Etc.
There seems to a strange belief in many areas of aesthetics that one can just go ahead and make statements of this kind without any attempt to justify them - as if aesthetics were somehow exempt from the usual requirements of good scholarship. Ross is by no means alone in doing this. I could give you many examples from other writers.
It seems to me that if aesthetics insulates itself from other areas of knowledge, it can hardly complain if it is viewed as it often is - as a rather dubious and marginal field of study.