‘One evening I sat Beauty on my knees; and found her bitter, and I injured her I steeled myself against justice ’ Arthur Rimbaud. A Season in Hell. ‘Once.

‘One evening I sat Beauty on my knees; and found her bitter, and I injured her

I steeled myself against justice’

Arthur Rimbaud. A Season in Hell. ‘Once if my memory serves me well’ 1873

Readings are in studios – 2 identical copies left.

(pick up extra page for last week, outside lecture theatre –

sorry!)

Advanced Research Training. Stg 3 students NOT going to

Venice• Jim Fiddes. Lib Rm 434. Thurs 15th Nov• Searching journals, electronic access..

• Group 1: 10.45 (Seminar SA46 9.30)

• Group 2: 12.00 (Seminar SA46 10.30)

• Group 3: 9.15 (Seminar SA46 12.00)

Direct Entry StudentsStgs 2 and 3

• Seminar to answer queries on CCS• Wednesday 14th 12.30pm• Room 434 Library (up one floor, turn left, furthest corner

behind book shelves)

To cover: Critical Notebooks, researchqueries, writing queries, assessment, whatis CCS ….etc.

Venice – Fine Art, Extra Sessions

• Extra Lecture: Monday 26 Nov 1.00pm SB42

• Seminar II: Stge 3 Wed 14 Nov 2.00pm 434 Library

• Seminar III: Stge 2 Tues 27 Nov 9.30 Rm SA46• Seminar III: Stge 3 Tues 27 Nov 12.00 Rm SA46

• Stge 3 Advanced Library Training: • Fri 23 Nov 12.30-1.30 Rm 434 Library

All other sessions as normal

• Stage 2 seminars this week and next

• Tuesday SA46

• 9.30, 10.30 and 12.00

• Stage 3 Seminars this week and next

• Thursday SA46

• 9.30, 10.30 and 12.00

‘One evening I sat Beauty on my knees; and found her bitter, and I injured her

I steeled myself against justice’

Arthur Rimbaud. A Season in Hell. ‘Once if my memory serves me well’ 1873

Elaine Scarry. 1999

• ‘On Beauty and being Just’. (Princeton University Press)

• ..for the humanities are made up of beautiful poems, stories, paintings.. films.. conversation about the beauty of these things has been banished….(we) speak about their beauty only in whispers..

‘anything which alters consciousness in the direction of unselfishness, objectivity and realism is to be connected with virtue’…(the single best or most) ‘obvious thing in our surroundings, an occasion for “unselfing” …is what

is popularly called beauty’ ( Quoting Iris Murdoch)

In the near future, people can arrange things so that there either will or will not be beautiful sky. Do you wish there to

be beautiful sky?’ (p.119-20)

L.H.O.O.Q. (She has a hot bum - ?)Marcel Duchamp. 1919

‘Art retroactively annihilated that from which it emerged’

Theodore Adorno (1903-69)

Adorno. Aesthetic Theory. 1970

Artworks detach themselves from the empirical

world and bring forth another world, one

opposed to the other world as if this other world

too were an autonomous entity. Thus, however tragic

they appear, artworks tend a priori towards affirmation.

The clichés of art’s reconciling glow enfolding the world

are repugnant not only because they parody the

emphatic concept of art with its bourgeois version and

class it among those Sunday institutions that provide

solace

In the face of the abnormality into which reality is developing, art’s inescapable affirmative essence has become insufferable. Art must turn against itself, in opposition to its own concept, and thus become uncertain of itself right into its innermost fibre...By attacking what seemed to be its foundation throughout the whole of its tradition, art has been qualitatively transformed;.......doubtless artworks became artworks only by negating their origin.

Arthur C Danto

‘The mistake was to believe that artistic goodness is identical with beauty and

that the perception of artistic goodness is the aesthetic perception

of beauty’

The Abuse of Beauty. P. 35

Beauty, Art & Pleasure.

High Renaissance. 15th & 16th C

Michelangelo Buonarotti. The Pieta. 1505

Anton Raphael Mengs. Noli Me tangere. 1771

Modern artists ought to have formed their figures of the Saviour conformably to the ideas which the ancients entertained of the beauty of their heroes, and thus made him correspond to the prophetic declaration, which announces him as the most beautiful of the children of men

Winckelmann (1717-68)

‘Study the beautiful only on your knees’ Jean Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-67)

‘It is in nature that one can find this beauty which constitutes the great object of painting’

Titian. Venus of Urbino. 1537 Ingres. Grande odalisque.

‘Disinterested’ pleasure and the free play of the mind – connecting art with the aesthetic

response

Caspar David Friedrich. Wanderer above the mist. 1818. Hamburg

A Romantic rebellion?

• ‘the delight we feel, in the contemplation of the beautiful (arises from the feeling) that our mental faculties are in free play, they are not impeded or curtailed by the limits of our knowledge, the needs of our physical bodies, or the demands of our consciences

• Free play of the ‘cognitive faculties- imagination and understanding – in harmony with each other, leading to pleasure’

• A unity of the senses and cognition

Art as pleasure. The aesthetic and ‘affirmative’

Turner. Lake Lucerne – Moonlight , the Righi in the distance. c1841

Modern Art and Formalist Aesthetics

• Clive Bell (1881-1964)

• Roger Fry (1866-1934)

• Clement Greenberg (1909-94)

Clive Bell The Aesthetic Hypothesis 1914

The starting point for all systems of aesthetics must be the personal experience of a peculiar emotion. The objects that provoke this emotion, we call works of art. All sensitive people agree that there is a peculiar emotion provoked by works of art….What quality is shared by all objects that provoke our aesthetic emotions?...... Only one answer seems possible – significant form.

In each, lines and colours combined in a particular way, certain

forms and relations of forms, stir our aesthetic emotions…..

‘it is the business of the artist so to combine and arrange them that they shall move us……..To appreciate a work of art we need bring nothing with us but form’

Roger Fry. The French Post Impressionists. Vision and Design. 1912

(they) shall appeal to

our ‘disinterested’ and

Contemplative

imagination

The Abuse of BeautyArthur C Danto 2003

The Intractable Avant-Garde

Benjamin Peret. 1926

‘for art retroactively annihilated that from which it emerged’

DA DA:

We had found in the War that Goethe, Schiller and Beauty added up to killing and bloodshed and murder. Richard Huelsenbeck

Art is everywhere, except with the dealers, in the temples of Art, like God is everywhere, except in the churches. Francis Picabia

Tristan Tzara (1896-1963)Dada Manifesto 1918

A work of art should not be beauty in itself, for beauty is dead…

…Is the aim of art to make money and cajole the nice, nice bourgeois…the new artist protests, he no longer creates….all pictorial or plastic work is useless: let it then be a monstrosity that frightens servile minds…..

Marcel Duchamp. First papers of Surrealism Exhibition. 1942

Barnett Newman(1905-70)‘The Sublime is Now’ 1948

The invention of Beauty by the Greeks, that is their postulate of beauty as an ideal, has been the bugbear of European art and European aesthetic philosophies

The Impressionists, disgusted with its inadequacy, began the movement to destroy the established rhetoric of beauty by the Impressionist insistence on a surface of ugly strokes.

The impulse of modern art was this desire to destroy beauty.

The value of Beauty’s antithesis – the ugly and horrific

Is it the quiet shore of contemplation that I set aside for myself, as I lay bare, under the cunning orderly surface of civilizations, the nurturing horror that they attend to pushing aside by purifying, systematizing and thinking? Julia Kristeva. Powers of Horror. 1982

Neo Dada no longer has the hope that it will reform the modern nation by abusing beauty. But perhaps by weakening if not destroying the supposedly internal relationship between art and beauty, it has made it possible for art to address the inhumanities that so revolted the generation after World War 1

Arthur C Danto. The Abuse of Beauty. 2003

Jake and Dinos Chapman Fuckface Twins

The Anti-Aesthetic. Essays on Postmodern Culture.

Hal Foster (ed) 1983

The very notion of the aesthetic…..is in question here

Are categories afforded by the aesthetic still valid?

‘anti-aesthetic also signals a practice, cross-disciplinary in nature, that is sensitive to cultural forms engaged in a politic – e.g. feminist art…..that is to forms that deny the idea of a privileged aesthetic realm ( Meaning that art should not be within a distinct, elite or separate realm as implied by Kant )

In the face of a cultural reaction on all sides, a practice of resistance is needed

From aesthetics to ‘critique’

‘Visitors to an exhibition of avant-garde art….wear jeans or designer clothes, wear their hair according to the model of Beauty offered by glossy magazines, the cinema or television, in other words by the mass media. These people follow the ideals of Beauty as suggested by the world of commercial consumption, the very world that avant-garde artists have been battling against for over 50 years’

Vanessa Beecroft. Show. 23 April 1998. The Guggenheim. New York

Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Pierre Bourdieu. 1984

A Grande Bourgeois: Unique among His Kind

..a lawyer, aged 45, is the son of a lawyer and his family belongs to the Parisian grande bourgeoisie…

Their four children are at the ‘best’ private Catholic secondary schools…They live in a big apartment…..In the living room, modern furniture…antiquities, a ‘Greek’ head in stone, authentic and rather beautiful….his father collects all sorts of objets d’art… several paintings, a Paul Serusier, in the Dining Room, a Dutch still life..

When he buys ‘objets d’art’ it’s in no way an investment. What counts for him is ‘first of all the beauty of a thing’….

‘I’m irritated by people who buy things just to show them off, to say they’ve got them or put them in a particular place. The value isn’t what counts, it’s the pleasure it gives you’

At one end of the spectrum are artists and critics who disparage beauty and aesthetics. From their standpoint, aesthetics are inevitably politicised and thereby an inappropriate avenue for artistic investigation. The opposing, equally large and committed group embrace beauty but pose new challenges for it.

Neal Benezra. Assistant Director for Art and Public Programmes. Hirschorn Museum, Smithsonian Institute, Washington.

Hirshhorn Museum 1999

Beauty and Horror in Contemporary Art

Royal Academy 2000

Beauty and the Beast. Crafts Council 2004

Enter the dragon:

I was drifting, daydreaming really, through the waning moments of a panel discussion on the subject of ‘What’s

Happening Now’……..when I realised I was being addressed…..A lanky graduate student had risen to his

knees and was soliciting my opinion as to what ‘ the issue of the nineties’ would be. Snatched from my reverie , I said

‘Beauty’…..The issue of the nineties will be beauty

Dave Hickey. The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty. 1993

Dave Hickey. Chapter 1. Enter the Dragon: On the Vernacular of Beauty. 1993

For more than four centuries, the idea of ‘making it beautiful’ has been the keystone of our cultural

vernacular….the single direct route from the image to the individual without a detour through

church or state……The route now detours through an alternate institution…..we are being denied any direct appeal to beauty…to sustain the jobs of the bureaucrats….The priests of the

new church are not so generous. Beauty in their domain is altogether elsewhere….

Hickey provides the comforting assurance that all those annoying artists during the 1980’s and 90’s who raised

questions about racial privilege and sexual representation, or who challenged the cozy

commodification of the gallery system, were really nothing more than mean spirited whiners….

As we contemplate a return to the art world Hickey has lost , we would do well to recall that the beauty he

evokes, not unlike the patriotism that surrounds us today, is something to be felt rather than questioned

Grant Kester. The World He Has Lost: Dave Hickey’s Beauty Treatment. 2003

And so, to make beautiful art is to bring art further within the circles of power, class, commerce and consumption; to render it ineffective as critique

The Eclipse of Beauty

• A value wholly associated with past art• With suspect bourgeois and middle class values• Providing affirmation and solace; ‘the clichés of

art’s reconciling glow’ • Insufficient – unlike the ugly – to provide critique• Eclipsed by a new art whose purpose is social and

political• Complicit, itself in the prevailing power

structure

We had found in the War that Goethe, Schiller and Beauty added up to killing and bloodshed and murder. Richard Huelsenbeck c1916

Maya Lin. Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial Washington D.C. 1982

And I then thought of the role beauty plays in the way we respond to death – associating the dead with flowers, reading poetry, listening to the deceased’s favourite

music…

It is not difficult to see what has happened to beauty in contemporary art. It is not art’s business to console. If beauty is perceived as consolatory, then it is morally inconsistent with the indignation

appropriate to an accusatory art

‘Beauty is an option for art and not a necessary condition. But

it is not an option for life’

Arthur C DantoThe Abuse of Beauty

p. 160