Dennis Hollingsworth

Saturnalia

Sorry to hit and run, but I felt it best to at least note a couple of interesting rabbit holes via Iconoduel here and here. The second involves a run-around-the-tree about beauty provoked by a Danto claim to a lack of consequence of it in art. Click all the links. Modern Kicks hammers what I consider to be the central question:

Just What is Beauty, Actually?

While I'm no philosopher, I had a somewhat technical question: where is this beauty that Danto is talking about? My understanding is that Kant, whom he discusses at length, argued that beauty was something that happened within us, it was a judgement we made. When we say, "the flowers are beautiful" we are not predicating a quality of a group of objects so much as saying they cause us to feel a certain way. For other writers, beauty is a predicate, which raises the question of to what in the object it adheres, or what gives rise to it. Danto sideskips the issue while by turns blending and comparing the different ideas.

Modern Kicks' JL arrested me with this, the very painting which started me on my path as an artist:

Goya's Saturn Devouring His Children may be called many things, but to say it is beautiful is perverse. It simply is not. It is a great work of art, powerful, perhaps sublime, surely horrifying, and done with a great deal of skill and understanding; but beauty is neither its aim nor accomplishment.

Without figuring out what we mean when we talk about beauty, it's an open question as to why the sublime can't be a form of beauty in itself. I thought that the story of Modern Art was the story of how the terms of beauty shifted around group to group, movement to movement, time to time. You win wars by redefining the battlefields. (Hmmm, the artworld as a theatre of war. Hmmmm.)

As for Goya's Saturn... there's a beauty in the courage to depict the extremities of inhumanity, isn't there? Can we call that sublimnity? My response last May upon seeing this painting again was how roughly it was painted. Not-Beauty. He painted, especially in the Black Paintings, a shadowed universe with figures coming out into shafts of light, a terrible place where humans turn into monsters. But then Goya always had a rough attitude when his brush touched canvas, even when he was young. It was when he no longer needed the trappings of courtly grace that his rough touch matched the terror in the streets.

UPDATE: Comments from Brent Hallard below the fold...

Brent writes:

Hey Dennis,

you uncoiling again through that gigantic blog of life?
anyway hope your show goes good, real good.
Stopped by your blog this morning, saw the hit and run on beauty and over coffee punched this out as effected effects. So I send this back to you.
You out boating again today? What a life! Reminds me of home. In a sense that's what drove me from it, but reading your posts I do have that memory.
Me, today I'm taking young 4y.o. Josh to the park to catch tombo.

If Beauty is the arrangement (of everything) then beauty is not alone. It permeates everything. Beauty is on the monopoly board, forensics under the figure names. Beauty chases tan bodies, unsigned laments back to the sun, to the author. Beauty cracks the case of the murder next door. Beauty is an origami crane both formed and unformed--a pack of colored paper hanging off the wire in the local super. Beauty is all potential, all isles, all the shopping trolleys and all its pushers.
There is no missing link to Beauty as all links are beauty. We don't go to it we're in it. I guess because we're kind of small and beauty is kind of big from that perspective you could say that beauty is the potential to grasp the vastness of it, the arrangement. Too, the other way as we are kind of big and sort of clumsy and beauty something so fine when we hold our breath we get something of it.

Everything exists for a reason and that reason is beauty: And what reason is beauty other than the potential to find reason, to extend reason, to loose reason.

Horror is not beautiful, though it is an arrangement. When we have a good picture of this arrangement we can see beauty. We can also see that horror is not beautiful.