‘One evening I sat Beauty on my knees; and
found her bitter, and I injured her
I steeled myself against justice’
Arthur Rimbaud. A Season in Hell. ‘Once if my memory
serves me well’ 1873
Readings are in studios – 2
identical copies left.
(pick up extra page for last
week, outside lecture theatre –
sorry!)
Advanced Research Training.
Stg 3 students NOT going to
Venice
• Jim Fiddes. Lib Rm 434. Thurs 15th Nov
• Searching journals, electronic access..
• Group 1: 10.45
(Seminar SA46 9.30)
• Group 2: 12.00
(Seminar SA46 10.30)
• Group 3: 9.15
(Seminar SA46 12.00)
Direct Entry Students
Stgs 2 and 3
• Seminar to answer queries on CCS
• Wednesday 14th 12.30pm
• Room 434 Library
(up one floor, turn left, furthest corner
behind book shelves)
To cover: Critical Notebooks, research
queries, writing queries, assessment, what
is CCS ….etc.
Venice – Fine Art, Extra Sessions
• Extra Lecture: Monday 26 Nov 1.00pm SB42
• Seminar II:
Stge 3 Wed 14 Nov 2.00pm
434 Library
• Seminar III: Stge 2 Tues 27 Nov 9.30 Rm SA46
• Seminar III: Stge 3 Tues 27 Nov 12.00 Rm SA46
• Stge 3 Advanced Library Training:
• Fri 23 Nov 12.30-1.30 Rm 434 Library
All other sessions as normal
• Stage 2 seminars this week and next
• Tuesday SA46
• 9.30, 10.30 and 12.00
• Stage 3 Seminars this week and next
• Thursday SA46
• 9.30, 10.30 and 12.00
‘One evening I sat Beauty on my knees; and
found her bitter, and I injured her
I steeled myself against justice’
Arthur Rimbaud. A Season in Hell. ‘Once if my memory
serves me well’ 1873
Elaine Scarry. 1999
• ‘On Beauty and being Just’. (Princeton
University Press)
• ..for the humanities are made up of
beautiful poems, stories, paintings.. films..
conversation about the beauty of these
things has been banished….(we) speak
about their beauty only in whispers..
‘anything which alters consciousness in the direction of
unselfishness, objectivity and realism is to be connected
with virtue’…(the single best or most) ‘obvious thing in
our surroundings, an occasion for “unselfing” …is what
is popularly called beauty’ ( Quoting Iris Murdoch)
In the near future, people can arrange things so that there
either will or will not be beautiful sky. Do you wish there to
be beautiful sky?’ (p.119-20)
L.H.O.O.Q. (She has a hot bum - ?)
Marcel Duchamp. 1919
‘Art retroactively annihilated that from which it
emerged’
Theodore Adorno (1903-69)
Adorno. Aesthetic Theory. 1970
Artworks detach themselves from the empirical
world and bring forth another world, one
opposed to the other world as if this other world
too were an autonomous entity. Thus, however tragic
they appear, artworks tend a priori towards affirmation.
The clichés of art’s reconciling glow enfolding the world
are repugnant not only because they parody the
emphatic concept of art with its bourgeois version and
class it among those Sunday institutions that provide
solace
In the face of the abnormality into which reality is
developing, art’s inescapable affirmative essence has
become insufferable. Art must turn against itself, in
opposition to its own concept, and thus become
uncertain of itself right into its innermost fibre...By
attacking what seemed to be its foundation throughout
the whole of its tradition, art has been qualitatively
transformed;.......doubtless artworks became artworks
only by negating their origin.
Arthur C Danto
‘The mistake was to believe that artistic
goodness is identical with beauty and
that the perception of artistic
goodness is the aesthetic perception
of beauty’
The Abuse of Beauty. P. 35
Beauty, Art & Pleasure.
High Renaissance. 15th & 16th C
Michelangelo Buonarotti. The Pieta. 1505
Anton Raphael Mengs.
Noli Me tangere. 1771
Modern artists ought to have
formed their figures of the
Saviour conformably to the
ideas which the ancients
entertained of the beauty of
their heroes, and thus made
him correspond to the
prophetic declaration, which
announces him as the most
beautiful of the children of
men
Winckelmann (1717-68)
‘Study the beautiful only on your knees’
Jean Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-67)
Titian. Venus of Urbino. 1537
Ingres. Grande odalisque.
‘It is in nature that one can find this beauty which constitutes
the great object of painting’
‘Disinterested’ pleasure and the free play of
the mind – connecting art with the aesthetic
response
Caspar David Friedrich. Wanderer above the mist. 1818. Hamburg
A Romantic rebellion?
• ‘the delight we feel, in the contemplation of the
beautiful (arises from the feeling) that our mental
faculties are in free play, they are not impeded
or curtailed by the limits of our knowledge,
the needs of our physical bodies, or the
demands of our consciences
• Free play of the ‘cognitive facultiesimagination and understanding – in harmony
with each other, leading to pleasure’
• A unity of the senses and cognition
Art as pleasure. The aesthetic and ‘affirmative’
Turner. Lake Lucerne – Moonlight , the Righi in the distance. c1841
Modern Art and Formalist Aesthetics
• Clive Bell
(1881-1964)
• Roger Fry
(1866-1934)
• Clement Greenberg
(1909-94)
Clive Bell
The Aesthetic Hypothesis 1914
The starting point for all systems of aesthetics must be the
personal experience of a peculiar emotion. The objects that
provoke this emotion, we call works of art. All sensitive people
agree that there is a peculiar emotion provoked by works of
art….What quality is shared by all objects that provoke our
aesthetic emotions?...... Only one answer seems possible –
significant form.
In each, lines and colours combined in a particular way, certain
forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions…..
‘it is the business of the artist so to combine and arrange them
that they shall move us……..To appreciate a work of art we need
bring nothing with us but form’
Roger Fry. The French Post Impressionists. Vision
and Design. 1912
(they) shall appeal to
our ‘disinterested’ and
Contemplative
imagination
The Abuse of Beauty
Arthur C Danto 2003
The Intractable Avant-Garde
‘for art retroactively annihilated that from which it emerged’
DA DA:
We had found in the War that Goethe, Schiller and Beauty added up to
killing and bloodshed and murder.
Richard Huelsenbeck
Benjamin Peret. 1926
Art is everywhere, except with the dealers, in the temples of Art, like God is
everywhere, except in the churches.
Francis Picabia
Tristan Tzara (1896-1963)
Dada Manifesto 1918
A work of art should not
be beauty in itself, for
beauty is dead…
…Is the aim of art to
make money and cajole
the nice, nice
bourgeois…the new artist
protests, he no longer
creates….all pictorial or
plastic work is useless: let
it then be a monstrosity
that frightens servile
minds…..
Marcel Duchamp. First papers of
Surrealism Exhibition. 1942
Barnett Newman(1905-70)
‘The Sublime is Now’ 1948
The invention of Beauty by the Greeks, that is their postulate of beauty as an
ideal, has been the bugbear of European art and European aesthetic
philosophies
The Impressionists, disgusted with
its inadequacy, began the movement
to destroy the established rhetoric of
beauty by the Impressionist
insistence on a surface of ugly
strokes.
The impulse of modern art was
this desire to destroy beauty.
The value of Beauty’s antithesis – the ugly and horrific
Is it the quiet shore of contemplation that I set aside for myself, as I lay
bare, under the cunning orderly surface of civilizations, the nurturing
horror that they attend to pushing aside by purifying, systematizing and
thinking?
Julia Kristeva. Powers of Horror. 1982
Neo Dada no longer has the hope that it
will reform the modern nation by abusing
beauty. But perhaps by weakening if not
destroying the supposedly internal
relationship between art and beauty, it
has made it possible for art to address
the inhumanities that so revolted the
generation after World War 1
Arthur C Danto. The Abuse of Beauty. 2003
Jake and Dinos Chapman
Fuckface Twins
The Anti-Aesthetic. Essays on Postmodern
Culture.
Hal Foster (ed) 1983
The very notion of the aesthetic…..is in question here
Are categories afforded by the aesthetic still valid?
‘anti-aesthetic also signals a practice, cross-disciplinary in nature,
that is sensitive to cultural forms engaged in a politic – e.g. feminist
art…..that is to forms that deny the idea of a privileged aesthetic
realm ( Meaning that art should not be within a distinct, elite or
separate realm as implied by Kant )
In the face of a cultural reaction on all sides, a
practice of resistance is needed
From aesthetics to ‘critique’
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’
Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgement
of Taste. Pierre Bourdieu. 1984
A Grande Bourgeois: Unique among His Kind
..a lawyer, aged 45, is the son of a lawyer and his family belongs to
the Parisian grande bourgeoisie…
Their four children are at the ‘best’ private Catholic secondary
schools…They live in a big apartment…..In the living room, modern
furniture…antiquities, a ‘Greek’ head in stone, authentic and rather
beautiful….his father collects all sorts of objets d’art… several
paintings, a Paul Serusier, in the Dining Room, a Dutch still life..
When he buys ‘objets d’art’ it’s in no way an investment. What counts
for him is ‘first of all the beauty of a thing’….
‘I’m irritated by people who buy things just to show them off, to say
they’ve got them or put them in a particular place. The value isn’t
what counts, it’s the pleasure it gives you’
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.
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
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
And so, to make beautiful art is to bring art further
within the circles of power, class, commerce and
consumption; to render it ineffective as critique
The Eclipse of Beauty
• A value wholly associated with past art
• With suspect bourgeois and middle class values
• Providing affirmation and solace; ‘the clichés of
art’s reconciling glow’
• Insufficient – unlike the ugly – to provide critique
• Eclipsed by a new art whose purpose is social and
political
• Complicit, itself in the prevailing power
structure
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
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…
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
‘Beauty is an option for art and
not a necessary condition. But
it is not an option for life’
Arthur C Danto
The Abuse of Beauty
p. 160