Consuming Beauty
‘Art retroactively annihilated that from which it
emerged’
Theodore Adorno (1903-69)
Readings
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Powerpoint Overheads plus list of sources
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
Art acquires its specificity by separating itself
from what it developed out of; its law of movement
is its law of form
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; it itself becomes qualitatively
other.......doubtless artworks became artworks only by
negating their origin. They are not to be called to
account for the disgrace of their ancient dependency
on magic, their servitude to kings and amusement, as
if this were art’s original sin, for art retroactively
annihilated that from which it emerged ...
Beauty, Art & Pleasure.
The Renaissance. 18th and 19th C
Michelangelo Buonarotti. The Pieta. 1505
Anton Raphael Mengs.
Noli MeTangere. 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)
He (Mengs) arose, as it were, like a
phoenix new-born, out of the ashes of the
first Raphael to teach the world what
beauty is contained in art
Johann Joachim Winckelmann
Author of the History of Ancient Art. 1764
‘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’
Art as pleasure. The aesthetic and affirmative
Turner. Lake Lucerne – Moonlight , the Righi in the distance. c1841
Elizabeth Prettejohn. Beauty and Art. 2005
By 1790, when Kant published his major discussion
of aesthetics in The Critique of Judgement, the
enquiry into the beautiful adumbrated in
Baumgarten’s dissertation had become a recognised
branch of philosophy. This was despite fierce
opposition on the grounds, that placing a high value
on sensory experience was mere hedonism, and
thus irresponsible, or indeed, positively immoral
Kant’s narrative of the aesthetic
• To experience beauty in either nature or art, was to
experience delight and pleasure
• This experience was subjective and ‘disinterested’
• Disinterested does not mean ‘uninterested’
• It means independent of knowledge which might affect
that pure experience; moral or other types of judgement,
prejudices or preferences, what kind of thing is being
looked, whether an object is good or bad…
• Beauty is recognised as a ‘feeling of delight’ resulting
from the ‘free play of the mind’
‘Disinterested’ pleasure and the
free play of the mind
The immorality of pleasure
• The ‘free play of the mind’
• ‘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
What might result in a ‘disinterested’
judgement of taste?
• Ornamentation or
elements of charm or
emotion may attract us to
objects but…..require(s)
us to abstract from these
elements and reflect only
on their form. To this
extent Kant advances a
formalist aesthetics.
• D Crawford. The
Routledge Companion to
Aesthetics.
Modern Art and Formalist Aesthetics
• Clive Bell
(1881-1964)
• Roger Fry
(1866-1934)
• Clement Greenberg
(1909-94)
• Fry and Bell divorced
the experience of art
from other kinds of
aesthetic experience
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 do not seek to
imitate form but to create
form; not to imitate life but
to find an equivalent for
life
• (they) shall appeal to our
disinterested and
contemplative
imagination
• cutting off the practical
response to sensations of
ordinary life..setting free a
pure..disembodied
functioning of the spirit
….this re-direction in aesthetics proved as successful
as the revolution in taste….together modernist art and
formalist aesthetics achieved a formidable dominance in
art education, criticism and academic art history for
much of the twentieth century…..
……this in turn produced a backlash which has threatened
to discredit not only formalist aesthetics but aesthetics of
any kind……
Elizabeth Prettejohn. Beauty and Art. 2005
The Abuse of Beauty
Arthur C Danto 2003
The Intractable Avant-Garde
‘for art retroactively annihilated that from which it emerged’
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.
We are re-asserting man’s natural desire for the exalted, for a concern with our
relationship to the absolute emotions. We do not need the obsolete props of an
outmoded an antiquated legend…we are making it out of ourselves, out of our
own feelings (Foster’s ‘space beyond representations’)
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 ALL BEAUTY IS CULTURAL. LS)
In the face of a cultural reaction on all sides, a
practice of resistance is needed
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
• Itself, the object of social and political critique
Umberto Eco
The Beauty of Provocation or
the Beauty of Consumption
Art is no longer interested in providing
an image of natural Beauty, nor does it
aim to procure …pleasure…..it’s aim is
to teach us to interpret the world
through different eyes
Eco; the avant-garde and the Beauty of
Provocation
The Beauty of Consumption
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’
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
And further, if beauty is a learned response,
dependent on class and culture, then there is no
absolute. Beauty remains subjective and differs
infinitely. It is therefore unworthy of analysis
The End of Beauty?