Would the world in fact be better off if everyone agreed on what is beautiful? There is a school of thought originating with Kant that beauty, far from being a universal concept or even ‘in the eye of the beholder’ is no more than people looking for general agreement of their own biased opinion and given that any judgement is a reflection of personality, upbringing, prejudices and preconceived opinion that is not based on reason or actual experience, who’s opinion would you trust anyway?
Beauty in the hands of public opinion – is that the answer? Public opinion tends artistically towards the sentimental [all of those sunsets] and idealised representations of landscapes and portraits of people no one actually knows. I wasn’t in the least surprised recently when the Bluethumb [think Saatchi for those not in Australia] juried art prize went to a traditional portrait as did the popular vote.
Ah, the weight of public opinion. If you tell enough people and keep repeating the message – the mantra of advertising [but don’t get me started on twenty repeats of the same television ad in an hour when I’m trying to watch the cricket] – they may well turn out in force and blockade the parliament in Ottawa or run down to the supermarket and clear the shelves of toilet paper.
Can we really argue rationally about whether something is beautiful or ugly or do we even want to go down that path? Like all such judgements, opinion and culture both have a role to play and may in the end be worthless as measures of anything. Countless philosophy students have lost sleep over the very idea of defining beauty as lecturers sat benevolently behind office doors and steepled hands with a wry smile of their faces. Philosophy students assume that there is a right answer, something they can look up and quote since they’ve been set the assignment and soon discover that Plato, Kant, Hegel and Heidegger all had very different opinions. Art students though, have enough trouble finding themselves, let alone the answer to the impossible question of what is beauty even when everyone in the world seems to have sorted out and has an appropriate anecdote to suit.
As artists we are expected to have a concept of beauty. It’s part of the contract with the audience but Is it even a concept/idea that we contemplate unless cornered in an art gallery? After all, how is anyone supposed to know in this day and age when the ugliest of toads could be a prince and a work of art that everyone hates could be erected in a public place or alternatively change hands for an extortionate sum thereby legitimising it as a cultural icon of our times?
If general agreement seems unlikely then we are left with beauty is in the ‘eye of the beholder’. Dismissive condescension may be the norm and ‘beauty in the beholder’s eye’ could be little more than a polite and smug way of disagreeing. That smugness could also be based in the myth that there is actually a definition handed down sometime in distant posterity but known only to the elite and initiated. I seem to have met more than one scholar of this particular school. For example, this week I saw the abject dismissal of the work of Cy Twombly with ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’, accompanied in a parallel comment by the equally dismissive ‘my two-year old could do this and make me a fortune’. Apparently, maturation being what it is today, two is the new five.
The critic of Cy Twombly no doubt went away with a migraine while his neighbour saw the array of colour and arcane poetry and went into ecstasies about a vivid memory of a sunset and sex on the beach. Equal and maybe opposite reactions. At least the Twombly comment was an objective reaction to the work [I hate it and don’t understand it] whereas the colour-poetry devotee was limiting the experience to a sense memory that had little to do with Twombly at all. Does it matter in the end? A Twombly may well go for $75m a piece and give great pleasure to an investor who sees endless profits down the line or even a collector building his reputation as a discerning voice even if no one ever gets to see the collection. And of course, once the Twombly museum was inaugurated in Houston, and the Whitney presented a major retrospective, there was a general nod to this American artist who chose not to live in America. Whether the visiting public find beauty in his quotations and drawing of penises is something else entirely.
Are there actually objective standards of beauty? In the view of Plato (427-347 BCE), beauty resides independently. Beauty is objective. It is not about the experience of the observer at all so it doesn’t matter who’s eye we are talking about. Plato’s conception of “objectivity” is atypical. The world of forms is “ideal” rather than material; forms, and beauty, are non-physical ideas. That puts it squarely in the domain of all of those other mythical non-physical states such as democracy, nationhood, monarchy, divine intervention, society and good and evil. By general agreement we support all of them in our various ways. Beauty has to exist simply because ugliness is everywhere and bombards the senses daily. A bad smell, an ocean loaded with plastic, child pornography, poverty and petrol prices can all get the sensual juices flowing and may well be considered, if not downright evil, then the product of evil, whatever that is.
Culturally speaking, centuries of religious indoctrination precluded the notion of freedom of choice or decision when it came to art and beauty. As the principal sponsors of Art over several centuries the church dictated the essence of beauty. Even when the Academies took their turn it was just another arbitrary formula – things are what they are because. But by the time the 20th century rolled around questions of beauty were swamped by more materialistic concerns and it became more important to label artists and their works according to philosophies. In fact, the uglier side of humanity was lauded.
Another definition of beauty recognises that which brings enjoyment to the person who looks or contemplates allowing a person to recognize beauty wherever he or she finds it. Does that actually solve anything? Sooner or later you get down to pleasure. Ah, pleasure! A chemical reaction. Now that makes more sense. We are hard-wired to generate those. Adrenaline, dopamine, stomach acidity, migraines – all chemical reactions and all likely to be initiated by Art.
Margaret Wolfe Hungerford is credited with coining the exact phrase ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ in her novel Molly [Bawn, Brown, Brawn – take your pick], published in 1878. A more updated version was Mark Zuckerberg and his college offsider creating a digital tool for rating the women on campus out of which came Facebook. Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder but as with the Zuckerberg classification of ‘hot’ women, decisions thereof are more than likely cultural rather than aesthetic. Aesthetics – countless words have been written in the cause of definition by philosophers. A published compendium such as Aesthetics: A Comprehensive Anthology – Cahn & Meskin 704 pages, lists examples and explains the shifting tastes of historical eras but predicting what someone will like about your precious work of art or whether they will see’ beauty’ at all is a whole other matter.
I’d be the first to recognise that the audience provides at least fifty percent of the meaning of a work but questions of beauty, not being given to sentimentality personally, is enough to give you a headache. There is no actual agreement about what it is and in the spirit of perversity [my word of the week], where a dark horse can be a right cow, where do we as artists actually stand? – probably in the corner of the room, backs to the wall, while everybody else spouts their two cents worth in the knowing condescension of ‘I know what I like’.