I received an email about beauty this morning and have been thinking about it all day. I thought
that this would be the best place to answer.
Remind me again why the contemporary art world doesn't like
beauty so much?
Is it too hard to define? Too subjective? Not political,
engaged, intelligent, critical?
We've just had too much of it?
Can you name ten contemporary artists whose work is basically
just beautiful?
I don’t think that the contemporary art world hates beauty,
but it certainly has a complex relationship with it. I think that beautiful work is often
saleable, which makes it a commodity, which leads to dismissal by the
academic contemporary art community as a whole, but I also think that’s an
easy and cursory answer.
First, what is beauty? I've read Kant, and all the stuff you're
supposed to read about this. There's actually a great Donald Kuspit piece about
it here. It sometimes gets super-Freudian, but includes the basics and then
some. Additional, more recent, comments from Kuspit on beauty here.
So if all of that (and that is just the tip of the iceberg) is implicated in what beauty is, how do
people who aren’t artists or art historians define beauty?
“I don’t know what it is, but I know what I like’?
When I was a senior in college and trying to wrap my head
around what art is, and how I could contribute something to the world with mine, I
created a questionnaire, and ended up getting a couple hundred people to
respond to it. One of the questions was What
is or do you have a definition of beauty? I’ve included a few of my
favorite responses below.
Anything that is not perfection. – Andrew, 25, Grocery store
clerk
Anything that helps you realize that you are not the center
of the universe. – Adam, 27, Artist
Anything I’m attracted to enough to look at twice. – Tony,
23, Admin Assistant
I don’t have a word one. But I know how it feels. It tugs
lightly inside the ribcage and catches the breath inside for a moment. It fills
and delights. It gives and is given to. – Casey, 21, Dancer
Beauty is described as a universal, but the concept of a
universal agreement on this over time sounds ridiculous to me. People typically
fear the unknown, and change. As our world evolves, so does our definition of
beauty. I’m not sure how, but I think this somehow connects to the difficulty most Americans have with appreciating the value of modern and contemporary art. According to Buzzfeed, it looks like a good chunk stopped appreciating current modes of art in the fifties, and still regard the work of Robert
Motherwell as something a toddler could have done. Robert Motherwell, whose first solo show in New
York was held in 1944.
I think beauty is something that grabs me and pulls me
closer. Something that holds me long enough to consider what is in front of me
for more than a couple of moments, something that keeps giving. I think at this
point the only universal of beauty that isn’t culturally dictated is the beauty
of the natural world. I don’t think that to be beautiful an artist has to
borrow from or emulate the natural world, but there are several contemporary artists I can
think of whose work does that.
Olafur Eliasson
Tomas Saraceno
Ursula Von Rydingsgard
Sally Mann
Vija Celmins
Maybe I’m dodging, because the question was about 10 artists
whose work is strictly beautiful. So here are a few more. When you listen to
them talk they have all sorts of things to say about their concept and far
ranging historical, architectural and scientific references. I think that adds
to the whole of the piece, what the artist was thinking about while they made
it, but basically I think this work is important because it’s just beautiful
and no one wants to admit it because Kant jacked it all up.
Sarah sze
Diana Al-Hadid
Jeff Wall
Peter Doig
Martin Puryear
Julie Mehretu
I saw an upholstered orange chair covered with small pile of
snow that was melting into the seat today. It was beautiful.
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