It's very hard to figure out if Derek is primarily
interested in ridiculing those who think differently
than he does about art or if he's really interested in
art. I think it's the former since he eagerly uses
his secret valuation of artworks and art as a
mouthpiece to shout disdain for anyone having the
stupidity to care about nuanced views of art. For
instance, his unreasoned opposition to 18C notions of
aesthetics and beauty, taste, and the like, are so
rigid and simplified as to demand commonsense
agreement. When issues are reduced to obvious
true-false conditions, one must choose sanely. Trouble
is, the case for Beauty, for example, is not easily
resticted to the true-false choices wherein the only
true Beauty is the pretty and the charming, the
decorative or the pleasing, as Derek would have it.
Even though the concept of Beauty is not part of
philosophy prior to the 18C and may in fact now be
dead, we need to know why. We need to be sure if
Beauty is dead by examining the whole corpse, as it
were, and not simply its extremities.
Beauty can be be a fundamental concept akin to
Aristotelian "Agent Intellect", later developed in
Aquainas' notion of inner enlightenment activiated by
an intuitive and creative transcendence and later
still by Maritan's notion of conscious and unconscious
radiance. These notions are of course very much out
of fashion in our current worldview and they threaten
the dogma that art is a purely subjective, cultural or
"institutional" construction, that objects cannot
have beauty or be art in themselves. I am not so sure
that this one-sided outlook is really correct. I am
thinking of Kandinsky's idea of internal neccessity, a
catalyst for unifying self with nature's spirititual
essence and enlivening both. This idea, and its
anologous ideas in Aquainas, Maritan, (and Hegel?)
suggests that there is some independent quality of
things that is manifested by our conscious and
unconscious extension and fusion with them. It is a
kind of empathy, I suppose, a transcendence that may
indeed involve the formless, the oceanic, the awe and
dread of chaos, that is, the sublime. Is not the
sublime a facet of Beauty? Is not the formless, the
loss of coherence, the negation of order and measure,
a quality of Goya's most distressing art? Is not the
ugly and the brutal merely the Dionysian side of
Beauty, its transcendent formlessness and freedom from
material measure and meaning? Possibly, and possibly
not. It is a issue worthy of thought. Ugliness
subsumed by Beauty is the sublime. Ugliness posed as
Beauty is banality.
Perhaps Derek is right to limit Beauty to the simple
outlines of the pretty, the pleasurable, the nice, the
charming, the graceful, harmonious, the measurable and
ordered. If so, then what is gained thereby? Are we
satisfied to find Bouguereau as the centerpiece of
Beauty? Is that all there is to Beauty, cloying,
saccharine, fussy and trite but pretty and all the
rest, too? No, Beauty is a powerful, very large and
complex, even paradoxical -- no, always paradoxical --
idea, as effulgent in Goya's most frightful works as
in Raphael's most lyrical or in equally diverse
examples from literature, poetry, music, architecture,
etc. In truth, the more squeezed and purified,
simplified and formally warped Beauty is, as in some
Bouguereaus, the less it exists.
I suppose Derek may reply, as he usually does when
subtle thinking is called for, that my words don't
make sense. And why not? Is it because I advocate
Beauty, the spiritual self, the underlying agent
intellect or "radiance" of existence, in existence,
belonging to it, the ISNESS of beauty and the
transcendent? I say go look at Maritan and other
wrongly marginalized philosophers following Aquainas
who offer a way out of the banality of commonplace and
the trivialization of art and beauty. And read
Kandinsky, too.
I know Derek has me in mind when he advises those who
find Beauty in, say, Goya (I'd claim it's a mutual
creation by God, Goya and me) to give up talking about
art. On the contrary, art talk must not be abandoned
to the one-dimensionalists, the simplistic
reductionists, the excluders and the arrogantly
stubborn solipsists tramping around in the cultural
landscape.
WC
--- Derek Allan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
There is an exhibition of Goya's etchings at the
Petit Palais in Paris at
the moment. Anyone (such as umpteen contemporary
aestheticians I have read)
who is still wedded to the 18th century idea that
art is explicable in terms
of beauty should spend some time looking - really
looking - at Goya's
etchings, especially the Caprices and the
Disparates. If he/she comes away
still wedded to the same idea, then in my view
he/she should give up talking
about visual art altogether. It is just not their
thing. Goya's works are
fascinating, powerful, haunting, and disturbing, but
one thing they are
certainly not - and very very obviously make no
attempt to be - is
beautiful. The very word seems ridiculous - derisory
- in their presence.
With a bit of time left I wandered through the rest
of the Petit Palais and
saw their permanent exhibition. In one corner of a
large gallery there is
perhaps the most sickly Bouguereau I have ever seen
- a Virgin with Angels
all encased in a suitably ornate gilded frame.
After the Goyas it was ...
how was it? - like listening to one of those awful
cloying melodies from
Sound of Music after listening to Mozart or
Monteverdi, or being forced to
read some sickly romance novel after reading
Dostoyevsky.
If your famous search for 'a.e's' has anything to do
with beauty, Cheerskep
and Chris, forget it. Much of the world's greatest
art has nothing at all
to do with beauty. Goya for a start.
--
Derek Allan
http://www.home.netspeed.com.au/derek.allan/default.htm
