- Sunday, February 24, 2008
- Beauty is the new Ugly
- Posted by Zach in News
-
Aaron Greene mentioned that I write posts that are frequently too formal and often too long. Well, I don’t think this one is too formal. Though, it is far, far, far, too long, but only if you read it.
There’s an Albanian story about a guy who comes to New York City. His friends enthusiastically guide him to the Empire State Building. “The Americans constructed it in the 1930s” they say, “It is 1,454 feet tall and it cost over 24 million dollars to build. They built the whole thing in one year and 45 days.” The Albanian looks the building up and down for a moment. He is unimpressed. He puts his hand to his chin, then shrugs his shoulders and says, “We could tear it down in a day.”
Destruction as a creative act is the unimpressive center of contemporary art. When ordinary middle class people look at a modern exhibition and say, “my kid could do that,” they say it in a lowered voice–the voice reserved for secrets. You wacky bourgeoisie, it’s no secret! If you were to tell one of these exhibitors, “I don’t see any beauty in your work,” they would look at you and say, “I don’t see your point.”
Most folks perceive Beauty and art to be intertwined–Shakespeare, the Sistine Chapel, Beethoven’s ninth, and all that. However, the aristocracy of contemporary art (read: NYC gallery curators) sees art and beauty as completely opposite, if not opposing, elements.
The Marxist leanings of the contemporary art scene mandate an adversarial stance toward Western Culture. Essentially, the revolution can’t happen until Western Culture is overthrown. So, for art to have sociological impact, it has to be subversive. This is why the art establishment hates Norman Rockwell so much. It’s not merely because he hides behind something so quaint as skill. It’s because he doesn’t seem to hate Western Traditionalist Capitalist social structures like family. In fact, he paints beautiful pictures about Thanksgiving Dinner! The nerve! It’s hard to bring on the revolution when people are enjoying the romance of baseball and a two car garage. And that’s the culturati’s point. Beauty, they say, distracts us from injustice. If we enjoy something, we minimize the momentum we feel against injustice. We become numb to the pain of those who suffer. When famine ripped its way through Russia in 1891, Tolstoy naively organized a movement to feed the peasantry and ease their suffering. Lenin did nothing because he thought the suffering of the lower classes was necessary to stimulate revolt. Beauty in some sense equals pleasure. Pleasure stifles the call to revolution. Therefore, for the Cultural Marxist, Beauty is bad.
Most Cultural Marxists also consider Beauty harmful because aesthetic appreciation is perceived as a means to dominate an object. Appreciation means objectification and the reduction of value. If I think I enjoy a symphony, I’m wrong. I’m really only enjoying my perceptions of a symphony. Joy then only becomes another way to love myself. The object gets pushed to the periphery and I remain the all important subject. Denis Dutton puts it another way. He says, “Beauty, Marx-inspired social constructionists tell us, is a figment of class interest or social indoctrination, and anyway it only came into existence at the same time as the fine arts in the eighteenth-century. Today, loving beauty, like enjoying cigars or thick steaks, or having a Mexican maid, is something we are supposed to regard as politically awkward.”
If you see a contradiction between these two tenants you’re astute. The first argument assumes that it’s good to acknowledge beauty, it’s just premature. Basically, the Cultural Marxists ask you to save your Beauty dessert until after you’ve eaten your revolution pot pie. However, the second thought maintains that aesthetic response isn’t just premature, it’s a harmful quest for dominance. The revolutionary-as-artist doesn’t split hair over a little lack of intellectual harmony. For them, the important thing is to keep beauty out of contemporary art.
The brittle intellectualism of Western Marxist artists proclaims Morality, Gender, Sexuality, and Reality to all be social constructs. Worse, for Americans they’re more than likely Western constructs (read: Traditional Middle Class). “The Man” is keeping us down because he’s created such a dang thorough system of oppression. Just try and type “Womyn” into Microsoft Word and see if the Fascist spellcheck doesn’t assault the word with a male exalting red wavy line. The reach of male oppression extends even into our language. There’s no escaping the Western Capitalist hegemony. Art therefore is the wrecking ball that swings to demolish oppressive social architecture.
So the art establishment busies itself with ugly conceptual anti-establishment protest (I know, I know, it’s funny). The discontent shall inherit the earth! I know what you must be thinking. Aren’t the Cultural Marxists deflated because the proletariat packed the family into the mini-van and moved into the suburbs? Heck no! It’s a minor detail. Tom Wolfe sums up Cultural Marxist’s contingency plan.
“…we can find new proletariats whose ideological benefactors we can be–women, non-whites, put-upon white ethnics, homosexuals, transsexuals, the polymorphously perverse, pornographers, prostitutes (sex workers), hardwood trees–which we can use to express our indignation toward the powers that be and our aloofness to their bourgeois stooges, to keep the flame of skepticism, cynicism, irony, and contempt burning … We will show how the powers that be manipulate, with poisonous efficiency, the very language that we speak in order to imprison us in an ‘invisible panopticon,’ to use the late French ‘poststructuralist’ Michael Foucault’s term.”
Some of these protest might resemble something like the one held this past month at William and Mary. The president of the school resigned over his support of a “Sex Workers’ Art Show,” featuring strippers and homosexual prostitutes. The show aims to hurl a challenge to traditional Moral, Gender, and Sexual perspectives (fancy that!).
Frequently, these protest seek to be as not-beautiful as possible. In protest of systemic capitalist evil, Piero Manzoni canned, labeled, and exhibited 90 tins of his own feces. I know what you’re asking. Sold to WHO? in 2002, a British museum purchased can number 68 for about $40,000. Presumably the US couldn’t purchase it because there’s a funding crisis in the arts. Pity. We were THIS close to owning a $40,000 can of excrement.
Performance artist G.G. Allin summed up the hankering to demolish social norms: “To destroy what society has built is to create a new freedom.” He then proceeded to summon the revolution by defecating on stage and flinging it into the audience. Yee-haw! You have nothing to lose but your chains!
Okay, I’ve gotten a wee bit distracted. What about Beauty? Right. Beauty. Elaine Scarry wrote a startling book called On Beauty and Being Just. Rather than pit the self-centerdness of social justice seeking libertines against the self-centeredness of morally conserve consumerists–macro morality vs. micro morality, Scarry backs up and presents the radical idea that surrender to Beauty is the best way to achieve Socially Just ends.
If Scarry is right, Beauty doesn’t sabotage our desire to help the oppressed. Rather, it clarifies it. According to Scarry, it gives us a sense of conviction. Basically, Beauty transmits a feeling of rightness that we try to reproduce in our own lives. Secondly, Beauty encourages a replication of itself. The act of inspiration that we receive from beautiful things frequently results in the creation of beautiful things (at the very least a visit from a pretty girl might inspire us to clean up our apartment, though, I guess that’s not quite the same thing). Thirdly, “Beauty gives us an apprehension of Balance.” It creates an emotional connection to aesthetic fairness. All of these are useful in the construction of a more just society. Far more useful than defaced public buildings (Bansky).
The book has undergone some just criticism, but for all it’s perceived faults, Elaine Scarry accomplishes two things. First, she writes the book in a way that’s generous to the reader and that doesn’t contradict her thesis. Despite being a professor of aesthetics at Harvard, she doesn’t wax on in the obtuse way of academics (unlike say, Judith Butler, who writes sentences like this: “The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation, brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Alhusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure, inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony, as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power”). Scarry gives life to Chesterton’s maxim: “The long words are not the hard words. It is the short words that are hard.” Secondly, Scarry questions the legitimacy of “destruction as a creative act.” Art can, of course, illumine the bad, but she has the courage to suggest that it can also illumine the good. “Beauty stops us, transfixes us, fills us with a ’surfeit of aliveness.’ In so doing, it takes the individual away from the center of his or her preoccupation with self and prompts a distribution of attention toward others.” This is what Theologians like John Piper indicate when they say that the pleasure we get from viewing Niagara Falls or The Grand Canyon is the pleasure to behold something greater than we are. Almost inexplicably, this pleasure isn’t linked to self-esteem, but to the joy we feel towards things outside ourselves. When we’re honest, we have to concede that the unfortunate are helped more by those with a sensitivity to Beauty and inclination to spread it, than by those with a heightened sensitivity to offense and an inclination to spread it.
To conclude, I’m glad that scholars like Elaine Scarry are out and about. Instead of the mindless chant, “we could tear it down in a day,” she argues “I guess I believe that wishing for good things to be the case is always the prelude to good things being the case.” Viva La Revolucion!
categories
Ben
Cory
Justin
Matt
Zachpast articles
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- October 2007
- September 2007
- August 2007
- July 2007
- June 2007
- March 2007
- January 2007
- November 2006
- October 2006
- August 2006
- July 2006
- February 2006
21 Responses to “Beauty is the new Ugly”
Destruction IS a creative act. Watch me punch through drywall and tell me that does not tell you something about the human condition. Because it does. It is what we do everyday.
Some cannot see the forest for the trees, well you sir, you apparently cannot see the forest because it is a decimated, burning wasteland caused by acid rain, Republicans, and automobile emissions. And besides, you are an intellectual pebble in that shell of a forest anyway.
Which is to say,
The point of art is to shock, provoke, and irritate. Listen, I’ll punch through another piece of drywall and you see if someone doesn’t look through the hole and think of Nietzsche.
“We are born to scrawl our own designs upon this morally blank world. [Existence] has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long.”
–Alan Moore
And besides cultural marxists are more morally earnest anyway.
And better dressers.
Is this a joke?
How dare you assume that this is meant to be in any way humorous.
You’re a joke. And you’re ideas are dangerous to say the least. And not in the good kind of dangerous either.
Please don’t take offense if this is false, but due to ambiguities in language, I’m still not sure if you’re serious. If you are serious, forgive my confusion, and let me attempt to address your viewpoint in as honest a way as I can. I concede all expertise about who dresses better than who. It’s not a subject I know much about. Let me also say, that I don’t know what it means to be an intellectual pebble in a shell of a forest so I’ll just shrug my shoulders and say “Sure, okay.” If I may draw a conclusion or three I would like to address three things. First, I would like to talk a little about the punching through the wall business. Second, I would like to talk about the moral earnestness of cultural marxists. Third, I’d like to touch upon your quote from comic scribe Alan Moore.
First, though I have not seen you specifically punch a hole through drywall, I have actually seen someone else punch a hole through drywall. As baffling as this might sound to you, it didn’t cause me to discover anything profound about the human condition. I’m not a fan of Nietzsche so maybe that’s why. While one may paradoxically “creatively destroy” something, it begins a pattern that can’t sustain itself very effectively. It ends lamentably like Erysichton in the old myth. After gobbling everything else up, he eventually eats himself.
I find it odd that you find cultural Marxists morally earnest. I wonder why? I can understand it if you find them more earnest, but the expression “morally earnest” interests me. Perhaps it has to do with their willingness to cause others to suffer for an end that they consider good. Is this a morally earnest condition? Is a person who feeds the hungry with little angst, less morally earnest than a person who dynamites a military officer’s dance, or incites “Days of Rage?” Is excrement in a can a more “morally earnest” gift than soup in a can? I’m reminded of Marshall McLuhan’s frequently quoted statement, “Moral indignation is a technique used to endow the idiot with dignity.”
Lastly, does Alan Moore’s self-refuting quote bother you? Wouldn’t you prefer something that doesn’t deny it’s own conclusions? Would you rather he avoid the pattern of language to assert the world’s lack of pattern? Would you prefer he abandon the assertion that we scrawl designs, so that he might more persuasively suggest that there is no design? Would you rather he abandon a point of view so that he might more persuasively deny the existence of a point of view? I would if I were you, but if you abandoned some of that privileged angst-ridden contradiction, you might have to abandon some of your moral earnestness.
If this isn’t a joke, I hope you won’t mind my taking a swing at your ideological drywall. Thank you for your comments.
(waves hand excitedly in the air) I’m the Muse, I’m the Muse!! I pushed the domino that produced this Homeric life-thesis!
Or, barbaric yawp across the rooftops!
Zach - anyway you can give the cliff-notes version of your post…not sure I can read the whole thing anytime soon.
Get your flimsy fist out the drywall. This is a man’s playground and not the province of babies. I’ve absolutely had it with the soupy-eyed buffoonery going on here.
You and I both know that I am not kidding so you attack me personally? I gave you a piece of drywall (so to speak) and all you do is insult me? I do not understand this. If you get lost in the wonderland of the thoughts and ideas of great men then maybe you have misunderstood everything, ever.
Drywall is a metaphor for life itself. It is like this: Fascist capitalists goats cover the framework of reality in the drywall of lies. In name of making “sense” of the space and supposedly helping people to navigate a room, but it’s all an illusion! They are seeking to keep people from walking into the exposed beams of truth. It is a lie. We must punch through the drywall of lies. The beating heart of humanity rests just beneath the pale, matte surface of this drywall.
But sadly, existence is meaningless. Discussion, pointless. It makes me wonder why I ever got my grad degree.
To add: Nietzsche would’ve wanted it this way. It’s exhausting but he would’ve wanted it this way.
Ha! Who IS this? You’re definitely not a real person, but thank you for contributing. The funniest bits are “This is a man’s playground and not the province of babies,” and “Fascist capitalists goats cover the framework of reality in the drywall of lies.” Thank you for a nice distraction in my day.
unrelated question: why do you get to have a butterfly next to your name? i have been curious about it for some time, and i am quite jealous.
I have no idea. It’s just figured it was because I’m awesome.
I have been around before. I do not know if you have or not. Clearly by writing and posting such you have not.
I have been around before and I am well respected by my book and wine club. (Currently reading THE AUDACITY OF HOPE!) Your nonsensical, ill-informed, and quite possibly racist article has been the discussion (or should I say DERISION!) of our two most recent meetings.
Take a vacation, sir. In deed if your mind is not so small as to think that a trip to the local drugstore is a genuine holiday.
I wave my hand at your face and cry “Reason!” but you stop your ears with the cornbread of insensibility.
I wash my hands, so to speak, and return with cold, dripping fingers to punching the drywall of lies that men like you mud for the working class, women, and oppressed minorities of this jewel of world.
Hey Zach, thanks for the posts - you do with words what others do with painbrush and canvas. An inspiration.
P.S. - I just finished some drywalling of my own - nasty stuff . . .
I love this part:
“When we’re honest, we have to concede that the unfortunate are helped more by those with a sensitivity to Beauty and inclination to spread it, than by those with a heightened sensitivity to offense and an inclination to spread it.”
Isn’t that our purpose as artists? Beauty transcends time. I remember when someone I knew died a few years back, and walking out of the funeral I realized with wonder that it was the kind of autumn day that was breathtaking in all its fire and glory. Simply because someone ceases to exist (namely, us) doesn’t mean that the beauty we enjoy in this lifetime stops once we do. It has an eternal aspect that renews itself, and I beleive that’s because beauty is so closely related to Divinity. God is the source of all beauty; that’s why it always renews itself and has this eternal aspect. Thanks for posting
Gee…thanks. That was one great read. A little scary though…hehe.
I’m a bit jarred that the Butler quote never received a closed quote. In its present state it’s even more unwieldy than advertised.
Good catch. Sorry you were jarred. Hopefully, with the closed quote we can prevent any further unnecessary jarring.
Loved the post, Zach. Great writing. You presented the facts of the opinion you argue against well and objectively, and the article itself was illuminating. I largely agree with your conclusion.
I am a lover of beauty, and beauty for each person is subjective in regard to their aesthetics; everything and anything can be seen as “beautiful”. The true core characteristic of beauty is that it is pleasurable; it inspires. To define beauty/pleasure as unnecessary or negative would be ridiculous– the lack would be in itself a state of suffering.
On the other hand, the overabundance, overemphasis, or homogenization of what is seen as beautiful can cause just as much pain. And unpleasant emotions– shock, revulsion, sadness, fear– can stir us just as much as positive ones can.
Both beauty and ugliness can open our eyes, and both are necessary. The human tendency toward extremes and the dichotomy of our views are the problem.
But that’s only my own opinion.
And to “not influenced by aggregated ‘affluence’ “: Reading the first lines of your first post (”Destruction IS a creative act. Watch me punch through drywall and tell me that does not tell you something about the human condition. Because it does. It is what we do everyday.”), I found something earnest and real, and perhaps even profound.
Unfortunately, I could not follow the rest of your argument because it made absolutely no sense. It seemed to consist of inappropriate metaphors, arrogant and rather blind statements of your opinion, and unrelated insults to the author. If even you were commenting in all seriousness (and not just trying to stir up attention/conflict)! Chill out, bud. Take a nap. Smile a bit. Not everything has to be acid rain.
Yes!
And related to that . . . Mr. Not-Influenced, I’m afraid there’s this little thing called entropy ruling the physical universe, and everything’s (physically speaking) going downhill. Sorry to say that punching through drywall sounds more like helping it out that giving rise to anything great or truly helpful to society. We’ve got enough destruction.
Cheers,
AGB
This is in response to Catherine’s comment on beauty: “I am a lover of beauty, and beauty for each person is subjective in regard to their aesthetics; everything and anything can be seen as ‘beautiful’.”
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, after being at a secular art school where the inversion of goodness, truth, and beauty was the norm. Many believers would say that goodness and truth are absolute/objective, not subjective. But many believers also assume that beauty is “in the eye of the beholder”–completely subjective.
If you do a quick concordance search of the word “beauty” in the Bible, you see that often the word “beauty” is used in reference to God or in conjunction with the word “perfect” or “perfection” (ESV).
I don’t pretend to have this all figured out. I’m wondering what your thoughts are. I’ve started to think along two lines for starters. First, that we may have been taken captive in our thinking by Critical Theory/the Frankfurt School/Cultural Marxism (whatever you happen to call it) and to popular culture to the point that we don’t really know which end is up anymore. Second, that even though “beauty” is objective, there may be a wide window of acceptability (not one “style” of beauty).