In the May 2006 edition of Modern Painters, Jerry Saltz spends a few thousand words on some great art by contemporary female artists. Along the way he pays a few paragraphs out working with the relationship between art and beauty.
"With all due respect to the many who argue otherwise, it is bogus to claim that art is about beauty or that the two are even connected. Goya's stupendous Saturn Devouring His Children isn't beautiful, nor is Duchamp's bottle rack, or Thomas Hirschhorn's recent blood-and-modernism installation at Gladstone Gallery. .."
...
"Kara Walker's work is sometimes great. It is rarely beautiful."This is a minor point in a spacious and intelligent article, but it's worth addressing because it comes up repeatedly. There's an anti-beauty contingent that roars rather loudly from time to time. And they've justified some pretty heinous work because, after all, art isn't about beauty.
Obviously art is much broader and deeper than any given quality it can display. But, for me, an object's beauty does not in and of itself prevent it from being serious art, and it doesn't necessarily hide vacant thoughts.
I'd also argue that Goya's work has its own strange beauty. It's eerie, it's fantastical, and it's exciting to see even independent of the subject matter.
Kara Walker, "rarely beautiful?" I'd beg to differ. From the few shadow-puppet video pieces I've seen I'd say that their formal aspects, independent of their meanings, are quite beautiful to see. I recall a lemony background in one, which flickered somewhat as a velvety black figure moved across it, all of this projected large across a wall.
Sure, Duchamp's bottle rack makes my eyes bleed, but Pollock's Autumn Rhythm tears my heart out. More recently, Thomas Nozkowski and Chris Martin have slain me through their command of a kind of immediate, forthright beauty -- or a beauty that masquerades skillfully as being immediate and forthright. Tara Donovan's Untitled (Plastic Cups) is sublimely beautiful.
Beauty's taking a beating, folks, and it's entirely undeserved. It's what people do with beauty that can drain art of its depth and value. But beauty just wants to hang out and sing for you.
Be nice to beauty. Don't loan him the car keys. Don't tell him where you keep your liquor. But, heck, why not take Beauty out to dinner? Let him know you appreciate him.
"Beauty don't mean no harm." Sphere: Related Content
9 witty retorts:
Honestly, I so bored with people bagging on beauty like its some punch drunk bastard. This kind of 1970's self-righteous fundamentalism of the 'ugly' as some legitimate binary totem of excellence is stupid. Please go away.
Beauty is as much an intellectual endeavor as any other 'criteria'. Its all about the 'why' and to what you have to say or investigate. I would argue that beauty may actually be a democratic approach to connecting to a wider audience on important issues and concepts. But then again what's democratic about the artworld?
And by Beauty I don't mean shiny poly paintings or candy resin porn art and the current ubiquitous crop of 'kooky' bedroom doodle surrealism.
Onesock, you said a mouthful. I'm with you on all your points. It is amazing how many in the art world seem stuck one way or another in the 1970's, or even earlier.
That end point especially -- porn-like art is getting all kinds airplay these days.
It puzzles me because it's so Hugh Hefner.
So unbelievably 1970's-played-out.
I can almost smell the sweaty polyester and stale cigarette smoke just looking at the gallery's images.
Makes me think that dealers and collectors could be one heck of a sexually frustrated population.
Makes me think that dealers and collectors could be one heck of a sexually frustrated population.
Not to mention frustrated in other ways. It seems to me that the popularity of some art is due in part to the vicarious and voyueristic tendencies of a public that does not have enough drama in their own lives. So they borrow it through the patronage of artists'passions.
I think beauty can be used to make a concept palatable, to incite the viewer to examine an idea that might otherwise be overlooked.
Defenders of beauty (like hickey) are actually more for aesthetic pleasure. Sometimes this pleasure can come from dark realms (goya), but if we didn't enjoy looking at it - why would it exist? Seems like all these critics merely have vocabulary differences. I think they share more ground than they let on. Even Hickey likes Baudelaire:
"Art is the axe that falls on the frozen lake within us." Baudelaire
Great point chrisjag. A few whiskeys later even Derrida is sure to weep over
Rembrandt's 'eyes'!
I'm not sure if beauty is a universal principle, but i will say that i find a work full of beauty if it is compassionate. If the subject was painted with compassion. If the concept is explored with compassion. beyond sympathy and condescension, illustration or patronization. the work that erases boundaries between things, the work that vulnerably admits that we are the things at which we are looking.
I'm not, however, saying that all work needs to be this way. Some work needs to shout, and some needs to mourn, and some just needs to spin its wheels a bit.
I think it's interesting, but no mystery, that Art Inc. has such trouble defining beauty. I honestly think that the reason for this is so simple and cliche that to admit it would drive most crazy... it is still the basic confusion we all experience when we are little of mistaking beauty for pretty.
(to take it just one step further, we might also start erasing the border between "us" and Art Inc. and realize that its all still "us" no matter where we live... after all, let's not forget Art Inc. doesn't exist anywere except our own thoughts).
Highlowbetween said: A few whiskeys later even Derrida is sure to weep over Rembrandt's 'eyes'!
hahahahaa.
even the october people are noticing "texture" in mondrian.
hmmmm.
I am still thinking about Highlowbetweens remark about Democracy. I can't help but think there is something awfully un-civic about those statements from Saltz. October ? Please.
mr.foont
Well I like some of what Saltz writes, but we all have to remember he was a truck driver for years.
Its old hat this beauty argument.
Who cares if you think something is beautiful, moveing is that not fine?
What is it with postmodern art and being so ugly?
I have heard Coltrane ballads that make me weep with there beauty, and then Trane goes of and does ascension.
Lucian Freud makes beautiful and sometimes distubing paintings, Saltz would not approve.
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