Catalogue essay
Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art
1983

Beautiful!
by Claire Wolf Krantz

This exhibit affirms that beauty is an important and active ingredient in today’s art. The word "beauty" has a variety of uses today: it may denote positive as well as negative emotional responses to objects or experiences. Ideas about what is beautiful, whether positive or negative, inform both the creation and the appreciation of works of art, though these ideas are seldom verbalized or consciously addressed.

Rarely is the creation of a beautiful object one of the contemporary artist’s goals. Therefore, when beauty appears in contemporary art it is often either ignored or disparaged. Sometimes it is associated with weak, trite, or shallow ideas and slick execution, becoming the prey of an elitist prejudice which equates beauty in art with catering to the taste of an undiscerning public. Even those artists who see the value of beauty in art often find it difficult to talk clearly about it.

A recent informal survey of practicing artists revealed multiple uses and conceptualizations of beauty. The survey was particularly interesting in the interest and strong positive or negative feelings shown by the respondents about the subject, in the wide variety of ideas about what constitutes beauty and how it is used in art.1

Though individual artists may think that their opinions are the direct outcome of their own experience, they are in fact linked to a long and living tradition. The concept of beauty is integral to the history of Western art. Although the historical issues, which initiated the old debates about beauty are over, they have left a legacy of feeling. If recognized and questioned the concept of beauty can be an effective resource for the contemporary artist. Some ideas from the past may illuminate the way we deal with beauty in art today.

Ideas about beauty have long been debated in the West. From the Greeks until the eighteenth century, the purpose of art was to reveal beauty for the purpose of bettering "Man". Plato discussed beauty as a universal Idea, which the rational mind could discover, and to which the highest art aspired. Even in religious art, beauty was the universal creative force emanating from God, revealing his nature; therefore, it was considered to be the essence of God. Other theories located beauty in the object rather than in an outside ideal, to be perceived by humans in order to elevate their minds and souls.

For eighteenth century neoclassicism, beauty in nature was an important subject matter in art, and was viewed as part of an eternal cosmic order of being. Art and beauty could be achieved only by imitating "ideal" nature, selected, ordered and arranged by reason in order to reveal metaphysical truths. Since these truths were believed to be attainable rationally, there was a new attempt by philosophers to establish a set of conditions for beauty. They saw beauty as an objective, intelligible property that could be attained by following a set of rules. These rigid rules, based upon Renaissance interpretations of works from antiquity, were thought to reflect timeless, eternal values. They were expected to guide artists in their choice of subject matter and execution, and to standardize the evaluation of objects of art. Unfortunately, these rules ultimately led to what art historians now consider to be pedantry rather than beauty. The academic work resulting from this eighteenth century belief in rational rules for art stimulated further debate about the nature and value of beauty in art.

Beauty was regarded as the sole essence of art, the property that caused art to be different from everything else in the world. By the eighteenth century the accumulated qualities attributed to beautiful objects included harmony, proportion, number or measure, clarity and lucidity, unity amidst variety, objectivity and formal ordering or relationships between parts and to the whole. The totality of these elements, no single one being agreed upon, have shaped both the content and appearance of Western art.

During the eighteenth century the concept of beauty underwent significant change. The notion of the "fine arts" and the idea of the "aesthetic experience" were formulated. Interest in beauty had shifted from the search for specific objective properties to the study of the capacity of things to evoke a particular experience in the viewer. The science of aesthetics was formulated by A.G. Baumgarten as a branch of psychology. This shift in emphasis from the object to the viewer led to questions about whether an objective response to beauty could exist. It was still held, however, that a subjective response could be based upon objective criteria located in the object. Emmanuel Kant wrote that beauty is experienced as if it resides in the object, thus emphasizing the viewer’s response. Kant contended that the factor which elevates beauty from mere subjective pleasure is not that it reveals an ultimate knowledge of things in themselves, but rather that it is a creative force that allows man’s cognitive forces to expand in the free play of the imagination. He also maintained that aesthetic pleasure is disinterested, or non-utilitarian, and therefore exists apart and superior to everyday, mundane existence.

Another aspect of eighteenth century aesthetics was the idea of taste. Lord Shaftesbury and David Hume took the position that the appreciation of beauty, being a subjective response, must be cultivated – through education – to the highest standards of taste. Later the notion of taste expanded to include other areas of life, such as clothing, home decoration, and manners.
In the eighteenth century, good taste was an attribute of a higher, more worthwhile plane of life. This ensured the continued acceptance of the established norms of taste, because who wanted to admit to having "bad" taste, or to not being a cultivated person? Yet, that notion which served to ensure the aristocracy’s elevated social position also provided the basis for later artistic rebellions, for instance, nineteenth century realism. For subsequent artists interested in revolution, such as the Futurists or Dadaists, defying established standards of taste was an effective way to withdraw support from the establishment.

When there are commonly accepted standards of beauty, an artist can make a rebellious social statement and gain attention for innovation by deliberately making work that challenges these standards – or even by making purposefully ugly work. Obviously, there must be an established standard of beauty that has some consensual validity in order for artists to be able to react against it.

Other profound changes occurred in the eighteenth century, altering the way people thought about beauty. The German art historian, Johann Winckelmann. proposed that art exists in relation to its history. He challenged the notion of universal standards of beauty by showing that what his contemporaries held to be universals were actually stylistic properties of Greek and High Renaissance art – not of all art.

New ways of viewing art necessitated new fields of study: art history developed as a specialized field; aesthetics took its present position as a branch of philosophy. The task of aesthetics was to provide a definition and a raison d’être for art, i.e., to find the characteristics in art which are peculiar to art and to nothing else. The idea that all art must share a common and peculiar "essence" is still operative but it is disputed by many.

For a long time, beauty and art were thought of as synonymous. But, by the eighteenth century, other qualities appeared which could either co-exist with beauty, or replace it. Beauty became one ingredient among many in the aesthetic experience. Burke and Kant, for example, introduced the notion of the sublime: a feeling of amazement, awe, emotional intensity, and possibly terror accompanying the confrontation with art or nature.

During the nineteenth century, philosophers continued to look beyond beauty for the essence of art. Art as individual expression was explored. Tolstoy believed that the communication of feelings is the identifying characteristic of art. Hegel saw creativity as the physical manifestation of consciousness and deep-seated unconscious forces – as the complete expression of and participation in the fullness of life. By the twentieth century, Croce was calling beauty "successful expression." He felt that intuition – a kind of non-cognitive thinking – combined with expression was the essence of art.

As the focus for art changed at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the stylistic opportunities for artists expanded. Nature was no longer connected to beauty, nor was beauty the sole validation for an object’s being considered art. As beauty became less important in the aesthetic scheme of things and other ideas were proposed, style became important as the vehicle to incorporate the current aesthetic values.

Previously, taste had been connected to the ability of the connoisseur and artist to appreciate beauty, but it now was used to also judge the validity of artistic style. However, the possibility that criteria of taste in judging beauty or any other quality in art could be subjective led to perplexing questions: Can there be universal criteria for evaluating a beautiful object? Is beauty located in the object or in our minds, as Kant postulated and Jung later suggested in his theories of archetypal images? 2 Or is taste completely subjective, based on the individual’s heritage, personality, and the cultural and socio-economic factors which shape his/her response to all of life, including art? 3

Styles in art are associated with ideas, or aesthetic concepts, and their acceptance is supposedly not subject to mere taste (accompanied by its association with class and subjectivity). Yet the above questions, which had previously been asked about judging beauty and taste, are also linked to style. For how do we in fact recognize and evaluate styles in art? Is the mechanism any different from the previous attempts to deal with beauty? If styles are related to specifically formulated essences of art, like "significant form," which style carries the true essence, or the most valid path to follow in art that wishes to be significant? If beauty is no longer the essence of art, and both reason and taste can no longer be relied upon as dependable bases for evaluation, how do we evaluate art, or beauty, at all?

Some exciting alternatives to methods of defining concepts like art were found in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s writings during the first half of the twentieth century. In his section on games and definitions, from Philosophical Investigations (sections nos. 65-67, published posthumously in 1953, but disseminated much earlier), he examined the concept of language. He said that language is like a game and that language-games are understood through use, not prior definitions. "Instead of producing something common to all that we call language, I am saying that these phenomena have no one thing in common which makes us use the same word for all, – but that they are related to one another in many different ways. And it is because of this relationship, or these relationships, that we call them all ‘language’". If we examine particular games, such as board games, "we can see how similarities crop up and disappear. And the result of this examination is: we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and crisscrossing; sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail. I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than ‘family resemblances’, for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, color of eyes, gait, temperament, etc., overlap and criss-cross in the same way. And I shall say. ‘games’ form a family." . . . "Isn’t my knowledge, my concept of a game, completely expressed in the explanations that I could give? That is, in my describing examples of various kinds of games showing how all sorts of other games can be constructed on the analogy of these."

Later, philosophers such as Morris Weitz applied Wittgenstein’s theories to the concepts of "art" and "beauty," repudiating the notion that it is possible to define these concepts in terms of essences. Weitz maintained that one can only elucidate art through understanding the conditions under which it is used. Traditional theories of art are helpful, not for formulating closed concepts for art, but for opening up to examination various features used in art. In this way we can expand our understanding of art.

Twentieth century art, until after the abstract expressionists, was obsessed with the question, "What is art?" Artists addressed themes such as the direct expression and communication of emotion and of social or psychological ideas. Clement Greenberg wrote that prior to 1945, significant art dealt with the issues of form and color to depict space. By 1961-62, he wrote that the logic of modernist art is "to determine the irreducible working essence of art and the separate arts." He then asks "What is good art?" and concludes that it has something to do with conception (relating conception to Croce’s theory of intuition). Other leading theorists, like Rosenberg and Fried, looked for essences in the relationship of the art to the artist himself, the viewer and society. The commonly accepted Kantian theory, that the essence of an object could be universally understood by a common set of human faculties underlies assumptions as far back in the twentieth century as the Cubists and the Russian constructivists and as recently as Greenbergian theory.

Remarkably, during this time, no one noticed that the very elements, which the critics used to define a specific field of art often, were the old elements used in defining beauty in art. For instance, an aspect of beauty such as the relationships of the parts to the whole is newly redefined for painting in modern considerations of flatness or depth in spatial relationships, or in the internal relationships of form and edge to the edge of the canvas. The idea of Gestalt, in certain Minimalist sculpture, emphasizes the whole and its unity with its parts. Number and measure are important in minimalist sculpture as well as a fundamental element in beauty. Harmony, proportion, unity amidst variety is all elements of beauty, which are rephrased in the modernist obsession with interrelationships of color, stroke, mass and line in a successful painting. Is it any wonder that – perhaps not coincidentally – successful formalist work is often startlingly beautiful? And while the viewer is certainly aware of the artist’s intentions and involved in the ideas, the emotion and the expression of the work, he/she is also surreptitiously involved in the sheer beauty of the work (surreptitiously, because beauty is not what one is supposed to respond to in serious work). Even though style has usurped beauty’s theoretical role in art, beauty is hardly dead in modernist work.

Yet, beauty as an element in art continues to be ignored; sometimes its neglect is not even benign. While definitions of art are presently expanding, with post-modernism espousing a plurality of styles previously unknown, beauty is still not a factor of deliberate consideration. Current work often couches in new formats a reexamination of old issues in art. For instance, extra-formalist content has been rehabilitated. Some artists use art as an expression of their personal emotional or fantasy life, or as an expression or reflection of their time. Others investigate the boundaries between art and life. People are interested in didactic and social uses for art. The violence currently expressed in art raises issues about the role of morality (or amorality). Truth and originality in art are questioned through deliberate uses of copies as art. The multiplicity of allowable elements and themes in art–previously discarded–seems endless, but seldom is beauty mentioned.

In spite of the current investigations of other revitalized aesthetic issues, many artists know very little about the richness of their heritage of thought about beauty. People have strong feelings about beauty, but do not always understand that their personal opinions are based upon the absorption of partial and particular points of view in art and aesthetic history. Often they don’t know their alternatives. When an object formerly considered ugly is called beautiful, it is difficult to know whether it is really being praised for being an effective work of art, perhaps provocative, interesting, radical, shocking or stimulating, or if it is really seen as beautiful.

The present confusion surrounding the concept of beauty raises a number of questions. First of all, is beauty ignored because it is too confusing? Have the criteria used to define the word "beauty" so expanded through time that the elements formerly considered ugly are now perceived as beautiful? Has the concept of beauty become more inclusive, to the point of being meaningless? Or is the problem linguistic? Are there still basic unverbalized communal criteria for beauty? If so, what part do they play in the evaluation of art today? If a work is seen as extremely beautiful, is it suspect for not being avant-garde or serious enough? Is it seen as too much a part of the "establishment," or too traditional? Could these ideas of beauty still connote notions of class, thereby provoking a reaction against them –as in the nineteenth century? Do people subconsciously believe in the nineteenth century idea of the "Cultivated Man?" Are they therefore unwilling to challenge fashionable tastes in art for fear of being labeled uncultured (or, today, unchic)? Do beautiful ideas necessarily make beautiful work? Or is it possible to successfully deal with ugly subject matter in a beautiful way?

I think the time has come to think more systematically about this resource – beauty – which is used in art far more than it is thought about theoretically or critically. Our exhibit cannot provide a definition of beauty to which we would all agree, but it can show that some artists continue to make beautiful work, whether or not they intend beauty, understand it, or are even aware of it. Even though beauty is now debased, its current use is one proof of a living, though subterranean factor in art. Furthermore, the historical factors which, rightly, led to the decline of the importance of beauty as a focal point of art are no longer relevant issues for us. Only the feeling tones are left as remnants of the revolutions that have long since been won.

Can we move on to make the word "beautiful" again meaningful, a concept that can, with understanding, contribute to the creation and appreciation of a work of art? Could, then, a clearer distinction between beauty and ugliness make the use of the ugly more effective? Finally, would beauty’s clearer conceptual use then add another dimension to art, effectively extending an old element of art into a new fruitfulness for both the artist and the connoisseur?

Claire Wolf Krantz is an artist, freelance critic, and guest curator.
As an artist she works in a combination of painting and photography as well as digitally created images.