Derek won't tell us what beauty is but he is very quick to limit it to certain artworks.
I guess that Beauty is not in the object nor is it necessarily evoked by an object or by features of objects. I believe Beauty is a concept, an expansive one something like Santyana's Oceanic, something that lifts self awareness beyond the limits of here and now. So I think beauty is a state of mind. That's what I mean by saying Goya's art is an instance of experience that urges us to think beyond the here and now (the depicted) and imagine what is absent from depiction but very much a part of what Goya's depiction arouses -- a heightened consciousness and desire for sensual life, a recognition of its sweet fragility and how it is murdered by human evil. Thinking about that gives us access to Goya's art. It's a pathway, that's all. Any expansion of our experience to a universal awareness of life value and fragility is the beautiful/the sublime, the peak human experience. Derek sees art as something that becomes narrower in its evocation, towards something explicit and unique (and for him that's the unexplained state of art). That leads him to ridicule how words alert us to the many-layered ambiguities of art. I prefer to imagine that there are many avenues to an artwork, all enabing our access but none of them replacing the direct experience and how it may affect us long after the moment. That's what art criticism is, the searching for avenues of access to artworks. I think it's a step by step expansive process where the artwork suggest more and more, not less and less. Interestingly, one of Derek's favorite artworks to ridicule, Cabanel's Birth of Venus, is precisely the sort of narrow, specific, unambiguous, banal, here and now image, that Derek seems to want in Veronese or Goya. In fact, that painting was the 19C equivalent of a girlie picture and was aimed at a voyeuristic audience at the dawn of mass produced pornography. So, if we could follow Derek's art-talk rainbow to the pot of gold, we would not find Veronese or Goya but Cabanel! Words are tools to use. We use them to convey meanings. We can treat them as a sculptor would treat metal and stone. I think the concept of beauty is larger than Derek says it is. It is the biggest word-container concept we have for art. WC
