Re: 'The beauty of a painting is not the same thing as the beauty of the represented subject. '
I was not suggesting it is. That is why in my view Cabanel's Birth of Venus is not a beautifiul painting - if the (rather vague) word 'beautiful' carries any weight at all as an artistic descriptor. (Remember, Marilyn Munroe was 'beautiful' and so is the Veronese I was talking about. But a photo of Marilyn Munroe is quite a different thing from the Veronese.) To call Saturn," or the Isenheim Altarpiece, 'beautiful is to my mind a nonsense. Their power as paintings comes precisely from the fact that they make no appeal whatsoever to beauty. (Contra the Veronese) The constant almost knee-jerk reference to beauty in aesthetics is completely counterproductive in my view. By applying it indiscriminately to all art, one obscures the fact that there are many paintings to which the concept *is* in fact applicable; and by applying it to works to which it is simply beside the point, one simply turns talk about into confusion and mystification. Perhaps indeed that is part of the aim? DA On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 10:01 PM, Michael Brady <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The beauty of a painting is not the same thing as the beauty of the > represented subject. In fact, you can make a beautiful painting of an ugly > subject (e.g., "Saturn," Isenheim Altarpiece, Soutine's "Side of Beef," > etc.). Or a beautifully ugly painting of ugly-beautiful subjects, as in > almost all of Lucien Freud's works. > > Many people fall into the habit of speaking of beauty, first, as a > superficial aspect of conforming to a pleasant standard or paradigm of form. > > Art "is" "about" more than exclusively beauty; it's about something else. > > In my view, first and foremost in visual and representative modes, > artworks are fictitious representations that exhibit probable existences. > "Here's an old, grizzled giant eating his child. like the stories say. Are > you repulsed?" "Ever hear the one about Jacob wrestling with the angel? This > is what it might have looked like, with nuns watching. The squiggly lines > kind of give me a weird feeling." "This overweight middle-aged woman [man] > laid naked on my couch and spread her [his] legs without any concern for > modesty. I made her [his] skin green in places and, basically, > over-exaggerated how she [he] looked." > > When you stand in front of the subject (figure on a couch, old man > drinking from a goat's udder, a bridge across the Seine), there is only one > realm of representation, namely, the transferral from your sensory > perception to your interpretive cognition (where your perception is > "re-presented" internally). But in "art," there are at least two realms: the > image painted on the canvas or embodied in stone or metal--which is separate > from both the original subject and you, the viewer--and your own internal > representation, how you process and interpret the sense perception of seeing > the artwork. > > That's where the fiction of art is evident and where it is possible to > speak of beauty in the midst of ugliness, or at least non-beauty. > > Again, I find it useful to remember the old-school unity of Good, One, > True, and Beautiful, and the fact that in any existent thing, these > qualities are all present, because they are a unity, but the qualities > manifest themselves to our perception and understanding only to various > degrees at different times and under different conditions. > > > | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | > Michael Brady > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > -- Derek Allan http://www.home.netspeed.com.au/derek.allan/default.htm
