Is there beauty "in Nature" (out there, objective, in the world,
etc.)? If so, is there also ugly?
And if there is ugly in nature, what things are ugly ... in Nature?
Creepy crawling things? Slimy things? Dull dun brown stuff? Why would
those things (or whatever one might nominate as ugly)--why would those
things be ugly?
As far as I can discern, there are no ugly colors. Nor are there any
ugly beasts, or plants, or landscapes, or textures. Can something be
ugly in smell? or sound? or touch? or taste? Is ugly, and
concomitantly beauty, only a property of vision?
Can there be beauty without ugly? Isn't that like light (luminance),
which is only perceived by comparison with dark?
Beauty is a property of things perceived by humans, who can judge and
evaluate abstractly. And since beauty is considered to be a
culmination or perfection of specific qualities or characteristics,
there is also ugly, the deficiency of those qualities. But these
qualities are socially valued. Remember: there are no ugly things "in
Nature."
Artworks embody, make concrete in one way or another, these qualities
of beauty and thus isolate them, as it were, from the demands of
utility, so that beauty, grace, radiance, quiddity even, can be
contemplated. That's what Aristotle means by catharsis and vicarious
violence.
Because artworks *do not need to be denotatively truthful*--because
WoA's are fictions, because they do not have to have a utilitarian
purpose, because they are free creations--the maker can concentrate on
the accidental qualities of appearances, in order to manipulate the
degree to which beauty or formal wholeness or another property can
exhibit itself.
Art moralizes nature. The artist takes the material qualities of
things and forms and arranges them in such a way to produce an order
to these qualities. Canons and rules and guidelines and other
prescriptions are the socializing of the raw, unordered, un-beauty and
un-ugly of nature, the making of preferences for and against ways of
perceiving these qualities. Art is a social endeavor, and by being
social, it subjects its materials (the stuff of Nature) to the mores
of the group, of the society. Art moralizes nature, imposing
preferences on colors and shapes and forms that, in the wild, occur
for other reasons and purposes.
And Nature, which precedes art, is indifferent to these moral rules of
Art. From time to time, Nature rebuffs art, Nature supersedes art,
Nature is superabundantly more than art, defeating the rules of art:
There are no binding canons of portrayal in Nature. Ultimately, Nature
demoralizes art--i.e., Nature de-moralizes art.
Art moralizes Nature.
Nature demoralizes Art.
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Michael Brady
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
