Pulchrism: Championing Beauty as the Purpose of Art/Chapter 5
The Question of Beauty in Current Discussions
There have been two very recent examples of the question of the importance of beauty being brought into the public sphere in the United Kingdom. The first is the current exhibition taking place, mentioned previously, at the British Museum entitled Defining beauty: the body in ancient Greek art. The description for a related event which I attended at the British Museum in May 2015, which was named On beauty, reads as follows:
"Greek ideas of beauty have profoundly influenced Western art and how we think about ourselves today. This panel discussion will consider Greek perceptions of beauty, and how ideas have changed, from Greek sculpture's impact on art in the 19th century to recent neurological insights into how the brain generates experiences of beauty."[27]
During the symposium On beauty, neurobiologist Semir Zeki demonstrated that the human brain’s response to beauty is indeed contrastable with its response to ugliness, and that studies on the human brain prove that the medio orbitofrontal cortex of people of all types (race, gender, age, etc.) universally recognizes beauty in specific facial proportions and also gains pleasure from viewing art works which are commonly considered beautiful; whereas a different, and more basal, protection-oriented part of the brain – the amygdala – is stimulated by images commonly considered ugly.
To quote Semir Zeki: "The Neurobiology of Beauty: What is beauty? And is there a single characteristic or a single set of characteristics that defines it? The answer is 'yes'. The question has been pondered and debated for centuries without adequate resolution. Art and beauty were brutally separated by Marcel Duchamp when he sent a urinal which he called euphemistically The Fountain to an art exhibit."[28]
Also taking place this summer of 2015 is a colloquium at the University of Oxford, Mansfield College, called Making Sense of Beauty: The Beauty Project. It is entertaining reading the description of this conference, as it seems to go out of its way to include ugliness and death as being part of beauty, but these glaring attempts at asserting relativist subjectivity only succeed at emphasizing the awkwardness of shoving the polar opposites of beauty and ugliness together into an uncomfortable, repulsive, falsely-fused dichotomy, which causes cognitive dissonance in any healthy mind. Witness the following:
We see beauty; we experience beauty; we think beautiful words, beautiful thoughts. It raises us up, comforts, inspires, thrills, takes us out of ourselves to the sublime and the sacred; it also challenges, disturbs, discomforts and brings us to the most unlikely and unexpected places of death and destruction.
Some find no beauty in life, or claim they are unable to see the beautiful any more.
It is many things to many people. But it is never neutral or detached and you cannot 'take it or leave it'; without fail, it elicits a response.
What is beauty? The flickering shafts of light playing through the leaves of a tree, the nuanced strokes of an artist's painting, nature's rich abundance of animals, the interplay of light and shadow on a human face, the angles and curves of a building, the structure of a snow flake or (diseased) molecular cell, the simplicity of a mathematical formula, the manner of a death: all have been labelled beautiful. What is it – if anything – they share in common that allows us to call them beautiful?
Jesse Waugh
Rain at the Arno
2014
Is the word itself a problem? Are 'beauty' and 'the beautiful' the same thing? Or are we dealing with something which is literally in the eyes of a billion beholders, eliciting a billion reactions and consequently a billion unique definitions?
Does it matter? Is preoccupation with beauty a distraction from other considerations, such as functionality, utility or practicality? Is beauty merely one of life’s luxuries, or is it directly related – in both positive and negative ways – to health, happiness, well-being, sense of self and other essentials for survival? How does beauty inform the way we cultivate personal relationships and experience love and romance? How does it shape our values and our perceptions of the broad spectrum of human creativity? What is at stake when we talk about art, literature, film or music in terms of beauty?[29]
The writers of this pitch dance around their own relativity dogma like butterflies on fire. And then they go on to state "The Making Sense of Beauty conference seeks to explore these questions in an inclusive environment that welcomes participants from all disciplines, professions and vocations. As we come together to engage in a rich interdisciplinary conversation we will wrestle with issues that cross the boundaries of the intellectual, the emotional and the personal." But something tells me that if I go to that conference and state my sincere belief that Beauty is objective and absolute, I will be crucified by relativists who only give the slightest lip-service to the possibility that the 20th century excommunication of Beauty might have been a giant, colossal mistake, and I will also be ostracized for behaving in any sort of an assertive, masculine manner, which behaviour will be seen as suspect and potentially dangerous.
No, I don't think my assertions would be welcome at all, as they would only serve to threaten the entrenched and now fossilized counter-intuitive subjectivist dogma that Beauty is always in the eye of the beholder, and that there can never be any valid consensus which would prove otherwise – i.e., that there may be even the slightest something objective about Beauty. According to the new status quo, ugliness is only a relative form of Beauty; and destruction, deconstruction, decomposition, demolition, decadence, debauchery, decay, death, disease and excrement are only negative manifestations of Beauty masquerading in ugly guises which are only seen as ugly or negative – or not beautiful – by uninitiated, naïve, provincial, idiotic philistines.
This relativist ideology that they are advocating is one of irony because it transposes beauty and ugliness. And irony – which became the de facto religion of the 20th century art world and its adherent nihilist pseudo-intelligentsia – is so dated. That irony so widely celebrated in the Anglosphere as being the antidote to Old World hyper-ornamentation with its hokey and sentimental decorative excess, has itself become backwards, retrograde, passé, hokey, suburban, common, provincial, philistine – it's even become a nostalgic, sentimental reaction to the uncertainty of the New Age which is dawning and threatens to sweep away many 20th century fixtures such as Modernism, Conceptualism, etc. The irony game is over but its dogmatists are clinging onto it for dear life.
Beauty is not ugly.