I’ve been asked to do an interview on the subject of beauty’s role in art and culture by Alexandra Dickerman at Three Bridges West (http://threebridgeswest.com/general/beauty-silence-and-finding-home/). That got me to thinking about the nature of beauty, which has always been a tough one. I think I’ve stumbled on a good operational definition that comports with my broader perspective on things: a beautiful thing is something that stimulates the experience of beauty in the audience.
I know that this sounds like intellectual mush, but let me explain. First, everyone has to admit that a definition of “beauty” that attempts to describe the characteristics of a beautiful thing is called aesthetics and is either too complex for a blog or ends up with my definition. For example, Merriam-Webster online defines it as follows:
the quality or aggregate of qualities in a person or thing that gives pleasure to the senses or pleasurably exalts the mind or spirit.
Second, the concept of beauty necessarily involves the human experience of beauty, as opposed to knowledge of the thing causing the experience. Knowledge of the light spectrum says nothing about the beauty of a sunset, any more than knowledge of biology says anything about the experience of a beautiful woman–it isn’t the thing, it’s how we relate to the thing. We need poetry or something akin to poetry to address the experience of beauty. As I’ve noted before, Plotinus’ view that we are fallen angels lost in a material world is helpful in describing the experience we have when we encounter something transcendent like beauty, love, truth, etc. We seem to feel that this material world is alien and that the experience of the transcendent strikes a chord in us, a mystical memory that somehow that creates the need to respond. Art is one such response. Art is helpful here because the response requires something beyond normal language: poetry, music, painting, etc. I experienced this recently. I went to listen to the Bach Cantata Project sing the Missa Brevis in F Major by J.S. Bach at Blanton Art Museum here in Austin on my lunch break. As it began and I first heard the angels (sopranos) sing I was transported; I didn’t care what it was called, who I was with, where I was physically because I was home. I can’t describe what I heard with words because it was a musical thought-experience. Regardless of whether this allegorical explanation is helpful or not, under my definition the thing in question, be it person, object, sound, whatever, causes us to feel good, like we are home again in some sense.
Third, this definition has the advantage of not having to kill and dissect the word “beauty” intellectually in hopes of understanding what the living word was. Instead, it requires that we simply rely on the fact that we all share our humanity and that we all know what experiencing the beautiful is like. Different people may call different things beautiful, but since we are all human these differences are unlikely to be so great that they could not be overcome with an open heart and a little instruction.
Fourth, it also unifies, pointing the audience north as it were, towards where we belong. It does not divide us into warring groups about what art is and whether beauty has any worth. The radical individualism of the 19th and 20th Centuries has divided us to the point that the central debate for much of the 20th Century was: What is art? I am suggesting that for most of Western history art and beauty were soul mates, and it was only when aesthetics became the study of “art” rather than an exploration of natural beauty in the 19th Century that formal beauty and natural beauty were separated. William Blake noticed the deadening nature of empirical, reductionist analysis as early as the 18th Century e.g., “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,”, as Mary Shelley did in the 19th, e.g., Frankenstein, and John Paul II in the 20th, e.g., Theology of the Body. One way back from this dark woods is to demand that “art” necessarily includes beauty as its distinguishing feature.
Finally, it recognizes that as a man is, so he perceives. Thus, the properties of the thing causing the experience of beauty may vary depending in part on the receiver. It might be that I am looking at a wonderful Russian poem, but if I don’t read Russian it will just be a string of meaningless symbols. The poem might then be translated, but then I won’t hear the music of the words or I will miss the intended feeling because the cultural context is too different. Then again with sufficient time, effort and good will I might react as intended and experience the beauty of the poem. This is why studying the thing’s formal qualities is not enough; there is a synergy between the thing and the audience that is missing. Although Post-Modernists like to claim this concept as something original to them, Samuel Johnson many centuries ago said: “A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.”
But this isn’t the end of things because great art also changes its audience. Thus, art, to the extent it contemplates beauty will elicit the appropriate response in the audience. That response will be pleasurable in some sense because it strikes a chord in us reminding us from whence we came and who we are. In turn, that will cause the audience to want more of that feeling, which may result in further study in the hope of enhancing the experience. All of which turns the audience towards the divine and their true nature, which is always a good thing. This isn’t a naive faith in the power of the artist to make the world right such as infected the art world between the world wars. It is simply an approach to thinking about beauty and art that helps one to lead a good life. So, relax, be silent, let beauty speak to you.
No. 46: Where is the Image?
I wrestle with what I am actually doing when I create an image. Am I displaying an aspect of the thing photographed or am I creating an entirely new, two-dimensional image that does not represent anything outside of my own imagination? Romantic Era avant-garde Realistic painters and writers of the Nineteenth Century were expressly not adding anything to their subject; the subject was aesthetically unimportant (as Flaubert said, his desire was: “to write the mediocre beautifully…”). In that era, “[p]ictures and novels lay a double claim, first to absolute truth undistracted by aesthetic preconceptions, and then to abstract beauty, uninfluenced by the world that is represented.”(quoted from wonderful book on the subject: Romanticism and Realism by Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner).
Thus, for these artists any beauty of the subject itself was being left behind and the beauty of the painting or novel as art were rising to the fore, perhaps with the intellectual justification of Kant. This evolved into Impressionism, which dramatically removed the “art” from the subject and theoretically at least showed artfully what a viewer would actually see, as distinct from the thing itself; art and science as one; paint brushed onto canvas. So back to my question. Am I kidding myself when I talk about extracting the subject from the surrounding clutter to show it as I perceived it or am I creating beautiful patterns of ink on paper based on the data a sensor collected? What is the subject? The thing photographed or the image itself?
This brings up a related question: Where is the image? It might be easier to think about if in a musical context: Where is the music? Is it in the score? Is it in the sound waves ? In the mind of the composer? The mind of the listener? Sound waves can easily be dismissed as the location because only people experience music. The score is just an artifact or symbols designed to permit the music to be recreated somewhere else. Thus, it would seem that the only place music could be is in a human mind, either the composer’s or the listener’s. Similarly with the image, which can only be experienced in the mind, mine or yours. Thus, the question that began this riff is misdirected toward the artifact that is the ink on paper. Like the musical score it permits the image to be transferred from my mind to the viewer’s mind through the artifact of ink and paper. I want to print the mediocre (everyday) beautifully out of love for thing itself, stripped naked as it were. So, the answer is: no, I am not kidding myself; I am as serious as a lover. To quote Robert Bringhurst from “THESE POEMS, SHE SAID”: “Self-love is an ending, she said, and not a beginning. Love means love of the thing sung, not of the song or the singing.”