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On Beauty — how politically incorrect is that? thumb

On Beauty — how politically incorrect is that?

This is a post from the weareoca.com archive. Information contained within it may now be out of date.
 
In 1998, Elaine Scarry declared that for the previous two decades (ie from the late 70s to the late 90s) beauty had been “banished from the humanities”. It wasn’t that beautiful things that had been banished, “for the humanities are made up of beautiful poems, stories, paintings, sketches, sculpture, film, essays, debates…” It was that “conversation about the beauty of these things has been banished…. We speak about their beauty only in a whisper.” (On Beauty and Being Just, a Tanner Lecture delivered at Yale University.)
Why is that? And is it still the case?
According to Scarry, although rarely clearly articulated, there are two distinct political arguments against beauty within academic circles.
i. our preoccupation with beauty draws our attention away from social injustice (and making the world a better place.)
ii. The act of looking at a beautiful thing turns it into an object and thereby devalues it.
There are good grounds for these arguments (for example, the second comes out of feminist theory) but Scarry goes on to counter both, making the case that, on the contrary, appreciation of beauty increases empathy and results in more justice. Hence the title of the lecture.
Is it still politically incorrect to talk about beauty now, 15 years on?
One of the first things you have to do for the course Drawing 2: Investigating Drawing is watch a video of a debate between art historian Deanna Petherbridge and Iwona Baswick, curator of the 2012 Jerwood Drawing Prize exhibition. It’s a fascinating discussion about contemporary drawing. But what particularly caught my attention was the consternation which ensued when a member of the audience posed a question about beauty.
Have a look at around 49 minutes in.

Questionner: You described one of the drawings as not as a beautiful drawing, but as beautifully drawn drawing. I was just wondering what you think constitutes “beautifully drawn?”
Silence. Embarrassed laughter from the audience, nervous clearing of throats and shuffling in seats. An expectant look towards the speakers. Both try to deny that it was them. The questionner insists that it was Deanna.
Deanna: (Taken aback.) Alright…! A terrible slippage, using “beautiful”, I’m afraid…. It’s because I’m so ancient I can be allowed some slippage….”
With a sense of “in for a penny, in for a pound” she goes on to say that if she used the word, it was because she thought the drawing had “the appropriate technical skills, and knowledge of the media which help to promote the ideas of the work.” She then apologises if that might sound as if she is making judgments about what beauty is and what it isn’t, “but I’m afraid I still believe that. And it is these things – that you know your metier, you understand it whatever it is, and that you can use it appropriately to do something new that is going to change peoples’ perception….. Is that beauty? It’s my beauty.”
So yes, judging by the degree of embarrassment and defensiveness, it does seem that what Elaine Scarry said in 1998 is still relevant.
Deanna Petheridge’s is a good definition of an aspect of beauty, in my opinion. There is sense of “rightness”, honesty, and being fit for purpose — similar to the qualities that were identified in Sharon Boothroyd’s blog of that name about what makes a good photograph, and the many responses that followed. There’s also an element of challenge — “something new that will change people’s perception”.
It’s impossible to define what is beautiful in terms of subject matter as this differs dramatically according to time and culture. Mountains were seen to be execrable and deformed aspects of nature at one time, and sublime in another. A photograph of a mountain scene now can often appears cliched. Although it’s difficult to describe, it is possible to talk about beauty with some shared agreement in terms of its qualities and the impact. We all know it when we see it (or hear it, or read it!)
Elaine Scarry talks about a beauty that is not trite, self conscious or complacent. The effect of it on us is undeniable. It takes us out of ourselves and places us “in a different relation to the world than we were a moment before. It is not that we cease to stand at the center of the world, for we never stood there. It is that we cease to stand even at the center of our own world.” She calls this experience “a radical decentering.” This allows us to see the world in a way we haven’t seen before. And that has got to be something worth talking about.


Posted by author: Alison Churchill

15 thoughts on “On Beauty — how politically incorrect is that?

  • I have to say I think Petheridge’s definition of beauty is a very poor one. I can’t take seriously anything that someone so hidebound has to say! It’s incredible that she could be embarrassed about using the word beautiful just because it is out of fashion- sad really. Appropriate use of media and technical skills are useful, often neccessary, but how can that alone amount to something being done beautifully? The ‘radical decentering’ idea is much closer and brings to mind a piece from one of Shelley’s poems- perhaps more about the sublime. ‘I love all waste and solitary space, where we taste the pleasure of believing what we see is boundless, as we wish our souls to be.’

  • The problem with beauty is that it is so slipery.
    this image
    is undoubtedly beautiful…
    but is it still beautiful when you know it is in Auschwitz and your uncle may well have walked on them?\Most people have debased beauty to mean some sort of super pretty and ownable in some way, a masculine (rather than male) fantasy in feminist critique and imperialist in post-colonial critique so difficult for postmodernists. Then again if beauty is truth and truth beauty and there is no fixed truth where is beauty?

  • I think it is beautiful. What is it that makes it beautiful? I can see beauty in it even though I now know what it is. But I am sure I would not see beauty in it if it had been my uncle….. Beauty is “slippery” and problematic raises lots of questions but just because it isn’t fixed doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. There seems to be something that is undeniable, and something that changes.

  • Just read Robert Adams’ “In defence of beauty” and his explanation/axiom that beauty is something that creates Form from chaos seems relevant here. If this was the working definition being used then I see no reason for anyone to be embarrassed. But it is fairly common – if underhand – debating technique to attack a position by ascribing a debased form of meaning to it – and difficult to refute without seeming defensive.

  • Finally finished the whole Scarry lecture. The beauty invokes justice idea is interesting, and the idea of beauty as “decentering” us, unbalancing our usual self structures strikes me as very important. But I ended up with a sense that the real basis for our contemporary avoiding/undervaluing beauty had not been addressed. I think the main reason has been a distrust of beauty as “just a pretty face,” something only skin deep that often disguises some nastiness underneath– actually a misuse of the beautiful for which beauty has been rather unfairly blamed. The other issue which she does address in the first section, though a bit indirectly, is the invaluable feminist understanding that historically culture has used ideals of beauty in women as a way controlling them and narrowing their possible range of being accomplished and valued. Again, seeing (finally) this (long standing) misuse of beauty has, I think, led us post moderns to be suspicious of beauty itself in general. So we have thrown out the baby of beauty with the bathwater of its culturally appropriated abuses. The latter have certainly been real, but it is exciting to bring back into consideration the idea of beauty as something admittedly positive– perhaps even leading us toward, or representing, the possibility of new understandings of truth and goodness (as with justice) though that is a suggestion that really threatens our post modern structures, of course.

  • The phrase ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ may be a cliche but I think it is a good one. Like ‘love’, ‘truth’, ‘God’ we all have our own ideas about it and can argue forever without coming to any concensus. It is interesting to argue about it, though. For me it is seeing/ hearing/ touching something that makes me feel expansive (not to be confused with expensive).

    • What occurs to me as most interesting here is that, although individually and culturally we, the beholders, may choose different things to illustrate beauty, the idea that there is something to be called beautiful seems to be universal. This suggest to me that there is some category of the beautiful that exists in our consciousness, independent of what is chosen as the ideal of beauty in any particular time and place. If this is true, what could define that category? Its effect on us? Or?

  • The phrase ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ can be interpreted in almost contradictory ways. It’s postmodern interpretation states:
    that because we have different tastes and guts, beauty therefor is an individual and very subjective judgement. Therefore one should not argue about the case of beauty, one person might see it that way and another person might see it differently. A culture that is based on that kind of understanding,uses the term AESTHETICS in a very awkward way. One says “Oh, I like that aesthetically” which means the look, the appearance of something is regarded as beautiful. beautiful has the meaning of being nice, which is only a category that deals with the surface of things.
    The very root of the term aesthetics means ‘aisthesis’, which means receptive awareness and points to different kind of interpretation. It then means, that beauty is not obvious to the eye, it does mot please the superficial look. One has to “wake up” in ones senses of refinement and differentiation to become aware of beauty. Beauty is therefore not a subjective but a objective quality of the manifest that results in “creation”. Becoming able to distinguish between creation and creativity, between the profound and the profane is the aim of aesthetical thinking and understanding. Are we able to grasp beauty, are we developed enough to face it, becomes a question in consciousness, which also points to the aspect, why it might be connected to the term of truth. Or?
    (excuse: I’m not a native english speaker)

  • The objection to the use of ‘beauty’, however inconvenient, has much to recommend it.
    A post-Modernist would have argued that beauty implies an absolute and universal quality and that nothing is absolute or universal thus, like truth and reality, it is a redundant term. Feminists and post-culturalists argue that beauty is a social construct, a product of the dominant ideology and as that ideology is colonialist/imperialist and patriarchal then the term contains these objectionable elements within it and is anti-progressive . Post-postmodernism, when it settles down, may well take a different view of beauty but what these objections do suggest is that beauty, as a term, is often a lazy term, excusing us from a more complex analysis and discussionof the subject thus described. If the objection does no more than make us think before we speak, like objections to sexist, ageist, racist etc. language then it has more than a little value.

    • Yes, but someone who is talking about a sunset (cliche, I know) is not thinking about any of these things. Maybe in an academic framework the word is problematic. ‘Beautiful’, rather than ‘beauty’ is less loaded and can be a powerful word when used sparingly.

      • Maybe they should be!
        Actually I have no problem with beautiful but it is good to contemplate how words have been hijacked, gendered, devalued and how this affects the way we think. I rather hope that post-post-modenism moves away from the arch-cynicism of recent decades.

  • I think this has been a great discussion. The consensus seems that there is something which can be called beautiful, although it is not possible to define what it
    looks like as it is interpreted differently across time and culture. And that there are good reasons for being careful about how we use the word. It’s also interesting as Peter suggests to wonder how post
    postmodernism will interpret beauty!!

    • Alison,
      I just wanted to thank you for posting this, and to appreciate the students and tutors who have contributed to the discussion. ( I won’t add to it as I think the circle has been closed)
      It was a really well chosen topic that is important to us as contemporary artists: the discussion has helped me to see that I can be part of moving cultural expression and belief forward through my own work and how I represent it publicly ( as we all can)
      For me, this was one of the best discussion threads. Well debated, and full of ideas and references that I can follow up and explore in my own studies.
      I’d love to see more posts and discussions on real contemporary art debate.
      Thanks again
      Carol

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