Embrace the Beauty
13-10-15
Beauty is one of the hardest concepts in art. It's the most dangerous idea in life, too. It can crush spirits into thousands of little pieces. Traditonal beauty has been worshipped and denigrated as temptation. Today, though, it is simply treated in the art world as a joke, even old-fashioned. This makes much of the previously praised art seem irrelevant, because beauty is everywhere and obsessed by everyone.
Maybe this is why photography, both professional and amateur, is timeless. And perhaps why Instagram has become the rage recently... Photography has no objection to beauty. Photographers feast on fashion and delight on the desirable. Why are other art forms today so reluctant to do so? Do we take pleasure in reveling in the ugly?
This is the result of a long intellectual process that began with modernism. Enemies of modern art complained a hundred years ago that the new art was ugly. We still call art ugly today. They thought the distortions of Picasso were an attack on the classical beauty of the human form as seen by the Ancient Greek. The Surealists were obsessed with the weird and the strangely beautiful. So when did art officials stop being interested in beauty?
It must have been when modern art started believing its own worst critics. We were told again and again that modernism was "ugly", the modernists defended themselves by arguing that traditionally pretty artwork was superficial. At the same time, the 1970s punk rock scene was gaining fuel in England. The anti-art tradition of Dada has been mainstreamed. We now happily mock traditional art with Banksy and Duchamp, sarcasm is a second language to artists. The serious art world of today comes together in a pretentious and totally inaccurate belief that radical modern art has always rejected the beautiful.
So, galleries are full of serious art that shuns beauty. And beauty in itself is a landmine word as beauty is subjective based on the eye of the beholder. I'm hoping the new Contemporary artists might decide to rebel a bit and turn the light back on traditional beauty again. Rot and decay can only be interesting for so long before we turn back to beautiful girls and peacocks.
What are your thoughts?
*Art used in this blog are Girl with Peacock by Seizman and Bullfight by Picasso.
Comments
Laura Graham
Is this nor plagiarism? Jonathan Jones' 2012 article isn't credited anywhere?
17 February 2018