Beautiful

How do artists tell if what they do is beautiful? In turn, how do viewers of art tell if the art they’re looking at is any good?

According to George Dickie who wrote “Aesthetics: An Introduction”, Plato defined beauty as the object of love.

Thus, if one finds an object “lovable”; then indeed, it must be beautiful. For the Modernists, the answer is even more simple. Immanuel Kant believed we all have a “faculty of taste” which gives us the “beauty feeling” whenever we confront the aesthetic object.

In contemporary language we might say that all these are completely intuitive. And so, therefore that simple.

And yet, we would be right to suspect these questions are nothing else if not complicated. And the complexity of it comes when we ask the simplest questions: If a thing is beautiful to us, does it follow that it must be beautiful for others? If it thus follows, then why is it that humans seldom ever agree if a thing is beautiful or not?

The complexity deepens even more when we relate the beautiful to what is morally right, as some of the Modernists averred. What is morally right must in turn be beautiful and vice-versa. After all, where we can make the aesthetic judgement regarding something as representational or symbolic as art we should be able to make that same judgement where direct reality is concerned.

We are, of course, dealing with the issue of the universal. The Modernists resolved this issue starting with the claim that aesthetics involves, first of all, the aesthetic judgement. The person confronting the thing of beauty makes an immediate judgement which is not rational or born of reason. The idea is “raised in us”.

The idea being whether the thing is beautiful or not. This idea requires no “mediation”, no prior schooling or training. The “beauty feeling” kicks in automatically.

For this judgement to be universal, the viewer must simply make sure he or she is viewing the object with absolute “disinterest”. In Cebuano, “isip walay labut”. And then, Immanuel Kant claims, others “ought” to see the same beauty. If they do not, it is not because there is something wrong with the object or the aesthetic judgement. There is something wrong with the others.

A strong bias towards the concept of “the individual” would explain the Modernists’ predilections. We are not inclined this way in contemporary times where an argument over the beauty of something may be easily and pragmatically resolved using statistics, consumer satisfaction surveys, and the unarguable measure of market sales.

And still, these measures do not always agree with artists who take their practice beyond the general domain of pandering to the desires of the public; Or those who would rather “play” with how the phenomenon of beauty is generally perceived by a fickle public.

For the longest time, humans have dealt with the issue of beauty as if it was the crux of the whole issue of art. There is a point to this claim. And yet, practice shows us how some of the most exciting art in history have simply been “not beautiful”, or not immediately beautiful, or whose beauty lay somewhat hidden under a mask of “the ugly”, even the monstrous.

Consider for instance the iconic “Crucifixion of Christ”. A dead or dying man hangs bleeding, nailed to a cross. It must have to be divine mystery that we would find this picture “beautiful”. And yet, many of us do. Is beauty universal as the ancient classicists and the modernists saw it?

The contemporary answer leans towards the negative. No, it is not. Contemporary humans demonstrate a variegated judgement where the judgement of beauty is concerned. And in all cases this “judgement of beauty” surrenders allegiance to specific collectives, the social structure, like tribe, community, city, nation, race, culture; whether real or virtual, as in, existing only in the net.

Beauty is, of course, more complicated than we immediately think. And its measure is changing over time even as we speak. It is a running and continuing argument which humans must pursue because it is elemental to human survival. Indeed, just as elemental as science and religion. Except that it is just simply more fun; and yes, beautiful.