Reviving Beauty; reflections on a new aesthetics
John Baldessari
1967-8
They don’t have to buy it to have it – they can have it just by knowing it
Lawrence Weiner
Stage 2
• All remaining presentations tomorrow
9.30
10.30
12.00
• All parts of the assessment must be
completed to pass this part of the Module
Stage 3
• Workshops on Thursday
10.00
11.00
• Discuss and finalise research question
• Review Sources
Written Assignments: Hand In
• Stage 2 - Monday 28 November
• Stage 3 – Friday, 9 December
• Stage 3 - New York students ONLY
Friday 16 December
• Sign sheet and leave in Box outside GP20
Key Readings
• Copies outside GP20 from Tuesday (oops
– late this week)
• Readings from previous weeks - Hannibal
Lecher shall see you in GP20 unless
you return these for the use of others
• Option of copying texts on Academic
Reserve
Reviving Beauty; reflections on a new aesthetics
John Baldessari
1967-8
They don’t have to buy it to have it – they can have it just by knowing it
Lawrence Weiner
Piero Manzoni. Merda d’artista. (human excrement in tin)
1961
‘I threw the bottle rack and urinal in their faces as a
challenge and now they admire them for their aesthetic
beauty’
Duchamp. 1917
Urinal. (Ready-mades)
Marcel Duchamp. 1917
Michelangelo Pistoletto. Venus of the
Rags. 1967
Vanessa Beecroft. Show. 23 April 1998. The Guggenheim. New York
Visitors to an exhibition of avant-garde art….wear jeans or
designer clothes, wear their hair according to the model of
Beauty offered by glossy magazines, the cinema or television,
in other words by the mass media. These people follow the
ideals of Beauty as suggested by the world of commercial
consumption, the very world that avant-garde artists have been
battling against for over 50 years.
Class, gender, power, taste and consumption and finally;
a trivial and ‘relative’ value
• Paduang girls in Burma
can be fitted with metal
neck coils from the age
of 6
• Different cultures will see
and find Beauty in
diverse places
• If Beauty is subjective
and relative, it has no
absolute existence or
value. It is unworthy of
analysis
And so:
to make beautiful art was to bring art further
within the circles of power, class, commerce and
consumption; to render it ineffective as critique
Art’s purpose is intellectual and analytical, its
function, social and political. Beauty trivialises
and does little to contribute to this purpose
And further, if beauty is a learned response,
dependent on class or culture, then there is no
absolute of Beauty. Beauty remains subjective
and differs infinitely. It is therefore unworthy
of analysis
One evening I sat Beauty on my knees; and found her bitter,
and I injured her.
Arthur Rimbaud. 1873
Enter the dragon:
I was drifting, daydreaming really, through the waning
moments of a panel discussion on the subject of ‘What’s
Happening Now’……..when I realised I was being
addressed…..A lanky graduate student had risen to his
knees and was soliciting my opinion as to what ‘ the issue of
the nineties’ would be. Snatched from my reverie , I said
‘Beauty’…..The issue of the nineties will be beauty
Dave Hickey. The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty. 1993
Dave Hickey. Chapter 1.
Enter the Dragon: On the Vernacular of Beauty.
1993
The arguments these artists mount to the detraction of
beauty come down to one simple gripe: Beauty sells,
And although their complaints usually are couched in
the language of academic radicalism, they do not
differ greatly from my grandmother’s haut bourgeois
prejudices against people ‘in trade’ who get their
names in the newspaper’…..if it sells itself, it is an
idolatrous commodity…..
Grant Kester. The World He Has Lost: Dave
Hickey’s Beauty Treatment. 2003
Art dealers are in Hickey’s account, no
different from the guy who runs the Billabong
Surf Shop: bubbling over with excitement
and eager to share it with any passer-by,
collector or not….. Rich collectors don’t
really ‘own art’ they are more like caretakers
or hobbyists, but academics are another
matter…..
Dave Hickey. Chapter 1.
Enter the Dragon: On the Vernacular of Beauty. 1993
For more than four centuries, the idea of ‘making
it beautiful’ has been the keystone of our cultural
vernacular….the single direct route from the
image to the individual without a detour through
church or state……The route now detours
through an alternate institution…..we are being
denied any direct appeal to beauty…to sustain
the jobs of the bureaucrats….The priests of the
new church are not so generous. Beauty in their
domain is altogether elsewhere….
Grant Kester. The World He Has Lost: Dave
Hickey’s Beauty Treatment. 2003
Hickey provides the comforting assurance that all those
annoying artists during the 1980’s and 90’s who raised
questions about racial privilege and sexual
representation, or who challenged the cozy
commodification of the gallery system, were really nothing
more than mean spirited whiners….
As we contemplate a return to the art world Hickey has
lost , we would do well to recall that the beauty he
evokes, not unlike the patriotism that surrounds us today,
is something to be felt rather than questioned
Beauty and
Horror in
Contemporary Art
Hirshhorn Museum 1999
Royal Academy 2000
Beauty and the
Beast. Crafts
Council 2004
At one end of the spectrum are artists and critics who disparage beauty
and aesthetics. From their standpoint, aesthetics are inevitably
politicised and thereby an inappropriate avenue for artistic investigation.
The opposing, equally large and committed group embrace beauty but
pose new challenges for it.
Neal Benezra. Assistant Director for Art and Public Programmes. Hirschorn
Museum, Smithsonian Institute, Washington.
Sarah James. The Ethics of
Aesthetics. Art Monthly. March 05
• Referring to Isobel Armstrong:
• A new poetics …means challenging the
politics of the anti aesthetic by remaking
its theoretical base and changing the
terms of the argument
A New Aesthetics?
Beauty beyond subjectivity and pleasure; the complexity of an
idea
Relational Aesthetics
Hairy Vessel. M Medbo 2004
Some people think my work is frightening and disgusting like something from a
nightmare, but it has beauty too. Marten Medbo. 2004
Beauty beyond subjectivity and pleasure; the complexity
of an idea
Beauty, it is said, is subjective…and that is the end of the matter.
The argument seems to be that if we cannot hold up even one
object and say ‘This is indisputably beautiful’ then it is begging the
question to ask what the feeling it inspires may be……….the
discovery of what common denominator belongs to every object
which inspires us with a sense of beauty
What I am concerned with is not the objective qualities of the
beautiful, but rather the dynamics of the event of beauty, the
perception of beauty, that is the mental state which issues in the
feeling that a thing is beautiful
James Kirwan. Beauty
‘Terrible Beauties’
loss, grief and death……..Beauty that is bound up with the arousal of
discomfiting emotions….whether an aversion such as disgust might
find some quarter in beautiful art…
…..aesthetic pleasure is better understood as a kind of affective
absorption and that the language of the emotions provides more
illumination than the language of sensation…
Caroline Korsmeyer. Terrible Beauties. In: Keiran, M. Contemporary
Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. 2005
We had found in the War
that Goethe, Schiller and
Beauty added up to killing
and bloodshed and
murder.
Richard Huelsenbeck c1916
Maya Lin. Vietnam Veteran’s
Memorial Washington D.C.
1982
One way to note the emergence of the beautiful out of the
merely pretty is in terms of the intensification of the
experience. Emotions can intensify experience without
colliding with some notional ‘opposite’ which is the case
with pleasure and pain
Can all emotions be transformed by art into a positive
aesthetic encounter, perhaps amounting even to beauty?
Certainly fear can, and grief and sorrow, and
melancholy…..
Ibid. Carolyn Korsmeyer
Emotions …are sometimes set
aside as merely sentimental
engagement. But some of
them…..pity, terror and
dread…are recognised for their
own aesthetic weight and the
understanding they afford. Insight
often demands that one face
truths that one would rather were
otherwise…..
C Korsmeyer
And I then thought of the role beauty plays in the way we respond to
death – associating the dead with flowers, reading poetry, listening to
the deceased’s favourite music…
(if) consolation means mitigating the bitter truth……..It is not difficult to
see what has happened to beauty in contemporary art. It is not art’s
business to console. If beauty is perceived as consolatory, then it is
morally inconsistent with the indignation appropriate to an accusatory art
The time of day may not be appropriate either for philosophy or for
art……Kant may just be right that interest and beauty are incompatible.
Interest and art may be compatible, but it is not easy to see that this is
something the Age of Indignation can accept…
Danto
Beauty and the Beast. Crafts Council. 2004
‘There is only one kind of ugliness which cannot be presented in
conformity with nature without obliterating all aesthetic liking and hence
artistic beauty: that ugliness which arouses disgust’ Kant
I like to show the unexpected and the sensational, to arouse wonder and
amazement. Some people think my work is frightening and disgusting like
something from a nightmare, but it has beauty too. Marten Medbo. 2004
Monica Forster. Mix Vase. 2002
I feel uncomfortable and frustrated until
I get it absolutely right. If it’s half a
millimetre out, it seems like two
millimetres to me
Ingegerd Raman. A Drop of Clear Water
Ingegard Raman
‘The underworld is much more eclectic and unpredictable
than Heaven, a playground for dreams, storytelling and
flights of fancy’
Mia E Goransson
Per Sundberg
A reconciliation of aesthetics and
socially transformative art?
• How do you reconcile an interest in the
sensuous and emotive qualities of painting
sculpture etc. and the social and political
purposes and potential of art?
• How do you reconcile the demands of the
market with political activism?
• Are these relevant questions. Is one actually
opposed to the other?
• Do we need a completely new understanding of
the role of beauty and a redefinition of aesthetics
Symptomatic of the search for
an alternative aesthetics?
Today this history seems to have taken a
new turn. After the area of relations
between Humankind and the deity, and
then between humankind and the object,
artistic practice is now focused upon the
sphere of inter human relations
Meetings, encounters, events, various
types of collaboration between people,
games, festivals and places of
conviviality….
Nicholas Bourriaud
Where are the aesthetics?
• In the idea of art as lived experience –
Dewey
• In the relationship between ‘the perceiver
and the perceived’
• ‘The possibility of a relational art, (an art
taking as its theoretical horizon the realm
of human interactions and its social
context’)…
• ..system of intensive encounters’
Relational Aesthetics:
Suzanne Lacy?
‘When Jens Haaning broadcasts funny stories in Turkish
through a loud speaker in a Copenhagen square (Turkish
Jokes 1994) he produces in that split second a micro
community, one made up of immigrants brought together by
collective laughter, which upsets their exile situation’
Francis Alys. When faith moves mountains.
11 April 2002. Ventanilla. Peru.
With the help of
hundreds of people
and shovels, we
created a social
allegory. This story is
not validated by any
physical trace or
addition to the
landscape – a
response to turmoil,
poverty and instability
following the collapse
of the Fujimori
dictatorship..
A new aesthetics?
• The work of art presents a social interstice ..(a)
term used by Karl Marx to describe trading
commodities that elude the capitalist economic
context by being removed from the law of profit
• This ‘arena’ of exchange must be judged on the
basis of aesthetic criteria ..by analysing the
coherence of its form and the symbolic value of
the world it suggests to us
• This inter-human game goes beyond the context
of what is called ‘art’ by commodity
The beginning?