beauty

I've been reading a book lately called the Abuse of Beauty by Arthur Danto.

Now Arthur is a philosopher and as such, is very hard to understand. I guess philosophy is aimed at people smarter than me, becuz every time I read a book on philosophy I just don't undertand it. And every time I do pick up a book on philosophy I think THIS TIME I will understand it.

But I don't.

It's sentences such as this (chosen at random) that really have me seeing red: "Beautification as a modality of moral self-consciousness presupposes a fairly complex epistemology and a metaphysics of the self, which may be made explicit by referring to the role the mirror image plays in its transactions."

Well, it might be explicit to you, but it ain't to me. You can't tell me there isn't an easier way of saying what he just said there, whatever it was. And it's too bad because it is an interesting topic.

Actually, I'm sure there ARE people who understand this book and that's great, the author Arthur Danto also seems to be an upstanding individual, he quotes other philosophers and always says something nice about them which I like. He talks about Hegel quite a bit, Hegel had a lot to say about beauty and art, while some other philosophers, especially in the case of beauty, left well enough alone.

What's interesting to me is that philosophers are subject to many of the same limitations that other people are subject to. Hegel, for instance, had the notion that Chinese civilizations were primitive, perhaps not knowing or not wanting to know that they were in existence many thousands of years before European civilization. Hegel disses their art in a very provincial way which to me is refreshing -- you think, I guess, that these philosophers are always right about everything, I mean they sure think about it enough and you wouldn't think that they'd come out with a philosophy unless they were very sure about it.

I had never thought about it, but beauty has gone out of fashion since around World War I when artists of that generation were so disgusted and upset about that war that they rebelled against anything that was associated with the government and society in general that could have gotten the world into such an abomination. So because beauty was associated with goodness and artistic quality, they started making their artwork deliberately ugly as sort of a protest. This is when Dadaism and Marcel Duchamp were big, and beauty has been kept out of art ever since.

Gerhard Richter, the famous German painter, was told when he first started out in the 50's, that his art was too beautiful. And then came Abstract Expressionism, and Pop Art, both movements not too concerned with beauty.

As a person who has had some people say to me that my work is beautiful (some of it, anyway) the whole topic is interesting to me. I am surprised usually when somebody says that to me and will look at what they thought was beautiful with new interest. I guess I don't see it that way myself, and I don't try to make a beautiful painting.

But what I do try to do, though, is to unify a painting, to make everything click together using composition and color and sometimes subject matter and/or words in the painting. I'm not always successful with this, and it makes for frustrating times.

What I might be doing with that kind of approach, although I wouldn't label it that way, is I am trying to make the painting beautiful. But according to Danto, there's beauty and then there's beauty. There's beauty that just is naturally beautiful, and there is beauty that you have to think about before it's beautiful. This is where I stop understanding things.

I guess as a creator of a piece of artwork, you're sort of in a different position than you are as a viewer of artwork -- I think that art comes from a place that isn't intellectual, it's more a connection. Maybe a beautiful piece of artwork connects to a vital life source, maybe that's it.

I tell ya, I might have been a little more coherent about this BEFORE I read the book, but like I said I don't blame the author who I find to be amiable and sincere, as I mentioned.