Pulchrism: Championing Beauty as the Purpose of Art/Chapter 1
Championing Beauty as The Purpose of Art
Up until the early 20th century, beauty was assumed by most people to be the purpose of art. It was a given. Following is a quote from Arthur Danto's The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art:
"A century ago, beauty was almost unanimously considered the supreme purpose of art and even synonymous with artistic excellence. Yet today beauty has come to be viewed as an aesthetic crime. Artists are now chastised by critics if their works seem to aim at beauty.
In the past few years, however, some artists, critics, and curators have begun to give beauty another look. The resulting discussion is often confused, with arts pundits sometimes seeing beauty as a betrayal of the artist’s authentic role, other times working hard to find beauty in the apparently grotesque or disgusting."[1]
When beauty is brought up as a subject in the context of higher education, it is striking just how far those supposedly benefitting from higher education will go to excommunicate beauty from its natural place in art. They deny with zealous piety the importance of beauty, and almost invariably seek to crucify any unfortunate soul who dares to espouse it as a purpose for art.
Adolf Loos famously declared "Ornament is crime"[2], Walter Serner "Art is dead"[3], Paul Delaroche "Painting is dead"[4], Nietzsche "God is dead"[5], Fukuyama "History has ended"[6]. Nihilism spread across the spectrum of art, science, culture and politics throughout the 20th century – but to what end?
The worst nihilistic proscription comes from Georges Bataille: "Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it."[7] What was the purpose of removing Beauty from its natural place as the purpose of art?
If I were to put forth the argument that this obliteration of beauty, art, purpose – and life itself – was indeed deliberate and even orchestrated, I would be severely derided by those who fail to question paradigms because they cannot see the forest for the trees. So instead I will cite various examples of artists, scientists, critics and commentators, who wrote or lectured during the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, and who acknowledged in some way that the annihilation of beauty was a principle theme of Modernism.
This thesis will be concerned primarily with the Modernist murder of beauty which occurred after World War One – as during the long nineteenth century movements such as Impressionism, Aestheticism and Art Nouveau were most definitely pro-beauty to one degree or another[8][9], though they can be seen as proto-modernist.
The Harvard educated head of History of Art at the University of York – Elizabeth Prettejohn – has written extensively on 19th century artists including John Singer Sargent and Frederic, Lord Leighton, as well as on 19th century art movements such as Aestheticism and the Pre-Raphaelites. She has also written a book dedicated to the history and theory of beauty in art entitled Beauty and Art 1750–2000. In it, she states "a number of artists, critics, and curators have begun to call for a new attention to beauty as a significant issue in both contemporary life and contemporary art".[10]
Jesse Waugh
Beauty is Truth
2015
Oil on canvas
Elizabeth Prettejohn is also involved in the Defining Beauty exhibition on show at the British Museum at the time of this writing. I attended a symposium hosted by the British Museum in May of this year – 2015 – at which Prettejohn and others panelled a discussion on the topic of what defines beauty, which was entitled On Beauty.[11]
In certain art circles, beauty is rigidly relegated to the realm of purest subjectivity.[12] No possibility of any objective qualities is afforded it. But this is a recent phenomenon, as is demonstrated by the many opposing viewpoints expressed by historical figures who were not afraid to speak their minds on the matter of beauty's purpose – or supposed lack of purpose – in art.
Take, for example, the following quote by Prussia's Kaiser Wilhelm II from 1901:
"Art that disregards the laws and limits... is no longer art: it is factory work, trade.... Whoever... departs from the laws of beauty, and from the feeling for aesthetic harmony that each man senses within his breast... is sinning against the original wellsprings of art."[13]
Contrast this with what abstract expressionist artist Barnett Newman stated in 1948:
"The invention of beauty by the Greeks, ...their postulate of beauty as an ideal, has been the bugbear of European art and European aesthetic philosophies".[14]
In other words, according to Newman, beauty as an invention can be dismissed as an abstract artifice. Newman and his ilk were reacting to what they perceived to be pious veneration of artificial constructs of beauty by artists and philosophers in centuries preceding theirs. But they were also being funded by what could be perceived as nefarious agenda-laden forces who had designs on beauty and were also working against figurativeness in art.
From The Independent, in an article entitled Modern Art Was a CIA 'Weapon', dated Sunday 22 October 1995, written by Frances Stonor Saunders, we read:
"For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art – including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko – as a weapon in the Cold War. In the manner of a Renaissance prince – except that it acted secretly – the CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years."[15]
Why would the government encourage and even orchestrate the production of modern art? The Independent article goes on to state that "this new artistic movement could be held up as proof of the creativity, the intellectual freedom, and the cultural power of the US. Russian art, strapped into the communist ideological straitjacket, could not compete."
Jesse Waugh
Galatea
2013
Oil on canvas
But I think it went much deeper than this – and frankly, American Abstract Expressionist art was not really much better than the art coming out of Soviet Russia. In the early part of the 20th century, there was a concerted effort by a nefarious cabal, which included Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, and which operated under the guise of the Institute for Social Research – otherwise known as the 'Frankfurt School' – to destabilize the very foundations of art, and what could accomplish this more thoroughly than the deposing of Beauty as the highest aim of art?[16]
If the above-cited "conspiracy theory" pertaining to the Institute for Social Research is nothing more than naïve conjecture, then so are the assertions that beauty has no purpose and that ugliness is beauty – which destructive false hypotheses are founded on, and reinforced by, pseudo-academic mumbo-jumbo or hearsay inherited through murky channels from mock-counter-culturalist, agent provocateurs, bankrolled[17] revolutionaries and art-murdering critics such as Adorno, Benjamin, and Bataille.
Aestheticism
Fortunately, we have solid historical records of the mid-19th century art movement which overtly championed the creation of beauty as the noblest human endeavour, and as the highest human ideal: the Aesthetic Movement.
In his Phaidon-published book Art Nouveau, scholar Stephen Escritt writes:
"The Aesthetic Movement, which reacted both against industrialisation's ugliness and Arts and Crafts' social moralizing, made an equally important English contribution to Art Nouveau. Attracting support among a fashionable stream of English upper and middle-class society between the 1870s and 1890s, it promoted the supremacy of beauty and the notion of 'art for art's sake', a philosophy that often spilled over into the kind of hedonism characterized in the lives of the playwright Oscar Wilde and the artist Aubrey Beardsley. It was in fact a Frenchman, the poet Theophile Gautier, who coined the phrase 'l'art pour l'art' when discussing Symbolist poetry, but it was in England that this religion of beauty was most widely applied to the visual arts."
He goes on further:
"In 1873 Walter Pater, an Oxford don and mentor of Aesthetes such as Oscar Wilde, famously invoked the aesthetic spirit in his Studies of the History of the Renaissance. Pater wrote of 'the desire for beauty, the love of art for art's sake'."[18]
So what happened to English, American, and European art between 1873 and 2015? Beauty was murdered. Striving for beauty in art was replaced by striving to excise beauty from art. Most artists and critics still refuse to see what is staring at them in the face: that they have been hoodwinked. When beauty was removed from its place as the primary purpose of art, art lost its purpose. Pure concept was foisted upon art as an impossible substitute, which was bound to spiral down into the chaos and nothingness we have as "art" today.