BEAUTY IS OBJECTIVE; IDEOLOGY IS UGLY:

The Totalitarian Artist: Politics vs Beauty: After Duchamp, the art world came to view the pursuit of beauty as naïve and gravitated toward political art in their search for meaning. But this is a Faustian bargain: you can have meaning, but you do not get to make it for yourself (Megan Gafford, 20 Sep 2024, Quillette)

This deference to identity politics is an example of Hoffer’s observation that the true believer “subordinates creative work to the advancement of the movement”:

The true-believing artist does not create to express himself, or to save his soul, or to discover the true and the beautiful. His task, as he sees it, is to warn, to advise, to urge, to glorify and to denounce.

The idea that politics must have a mandate over art seems self-evident to many contemporary art students—including many young hopefuls destined to shrivel into Hoffer’s “incurably frustrated.” When they begin to learn art history, students are typically given Janson’s History of Art. About fifteen years ago, I was assigned the seventh edition, which culminates in a chapter on postmodernism that largely focuses on politics. My classmates and I dutifully tried to pick up where history left off by making political art of our own. I had long since come to my senses by the time I returned to the classroom as a university lecturer—but I was still asked to teach students how to make “socially-engaged art.”

Students often perceive the history of art as a progression towards the evolution of ever more political art.

AS Tom Wolfe put It: “All these years, in short, I had assumed that in art, if nowhere else, seeing is believing. Well – how very shortsighted! Now, at last, on April 28, 1974, I could see. I had gotten it backward all along. Not seeing is believing', you ninny, but believing is seeing’, for Modern Art has become completely literary: the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text.”

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MORE:
PODCAST: Podcast #254: In Defence of Beauty: Iona Italia talks to artist Megan Gafford about how we have come to value statement-making over beauty and craftsmanship in art and architecture. (Quillette, 9 Oct 2024)

BEAUTY IS OBJECTIVE:

Misunderstanding Plato (Paul Krause, July 5, 2024, Minerva Wisdom)

Plato’s cosmos is rationally ordered and hierarchal. It is a reflection of the perfection of the Forms, but not the whole cosmos is a perfect, or ideal, reflection. For instance, we all know the form of beauty looms large in Plato’s philosophy. The cosmos, taken as a whole, is a perfect reflection of the form of beauty. Constitutive parts, the sun, the moon, the stars, the earth, the rivers and trees and hills, etc., are not a perfect reflection of the form of beauty and never will be. Instead, every part of the cosmos has some beauty to it in differing degrees. This is only made possible, and makes sense, when you subscribe to a hierarchy of value and beauty as Plato did (which many moderns no longer do which makes it easier for moderns to misunderstand Plato). That is, in a hierarchy some things are naturally greater than others. Those things that are greater are closer in reflection to the ideal. For Plato, wholeness is the perfect reflection of the ideal. Smaller parts, breaking down to individual pieces, while having some embodiment of the ideal within them, are lesser than the whole.

Thus, the earth, and all that is within the earth, possess nature, a reflection of the ideal, but in comparison to the whole of the cosmos, the earth is lesser. Hence, the earth (alone) is not the fullest reflection of the form of beauty. Instead, the earth, when brought together with the sun, moon, stars, and other planets – that is, when the earth is properly situated in the whole of cosmos – becomes far more important and precious when you understand what function, or role, the earth plays in the perfect beauty and reflection of totality. This coming to know the truth magnifies the beauty of the earth and all within it.

ALL IT DID WAS BECOME DISORDERLY:

On Beauty and Imitation (Daniel McInerny, June 3rd, 2024, Imaginative Conservative)

Art as address to sacred order saw itself, to borrow a term from J.R.R. Tolkien, as sub-creation. It was human making done from materials provided by sacred order, for the sake of contemplating and celebrating that order, under the aspect of its beauty.

Such work was driven by an understanding of art as mimēsis. This Greek word is often translated as “imitation” or “re-presentation.” Art as mimesis re-presents, makes present again, the sensible and intelligible forms of things in media other than their own, for the sensible and intelligible delight of an audience.

When we take in Hans Holbein the Younger’s portrait of Sir Thomas More, Thomas More is truly present in the portrait. Not, of course, in all his living three-dimensionality. But the sensible look of his features, and of his bearing, are right there, amazingly, on Holbein’s two-dimensional canvas, as are, even more amazingly, certain signs of the character of the man who would not sacrifice God’s law to the whims of a human prince.

But then one day, something happened to culture and to art.

Culture no longer saw itself as the address to sacred order. Indeed, culture began to style itself as emancipation from that order.

BEAUTY IS OBJECTIVE:

Beauteous Truth: On Literature, Culture, & Faith (Jared Zimmerer interviews Joseph Pearce, 5/07/24, Imaginative Conservative)

Jared Zimmerer: Throughout your collection of essays, Beauteous Truth (St. Augustine’s Press), there is a continuous message that culture and having a steeped understanding of authentic cultural approbations are of utmost importance and that Catholicism has helped shape a culture that can last. What advice would you give for others to be able to recognize those parts of culture that are worthwhile?

Joseph Pearce: True culture is a reflection of the transcendental trinity of the good, the true, and the beautiful. The authentic sign of goodness is love and its manifestation in virtue; the authenticity of the true is to be seen in its conformity to reason, properly understood as an engagement with the objective reality beyond the confines of egocentric subjectivism; the authentic sign of the beautiful is a reverence for the beauty of Creation and creativity, properly perceived in the outpouring of gratitude which is the fruit of humility.

BEAUTY IS OBJECTIVE:

We Built Ugly Churches and Still Do Not Attract Young People: How Is This Possible?
(ITXU DÍAZ, February 16, 2024, American Spectator)

[B]eyond grace, if anything moves the affections of man, if anything can lead our feelings toward God, it is the aesthetics. There is an official liturgy, to avoid abuses and doctrinal errors, to guarantee respect for the Holy Sacrament, but also so that we learn to approach God, not only with the soul, but also with the senses. Beauty is paramount. St. John Paul II wrote about it in his 1999 Letter to Artists:

In perceiving that all he had created was good, God saw that it was beautiful as well. The link between good and beautiful stirs fruitful reflection. In a certain sense, beauty is the visible form of the good, just as the good is the metaphysical condition of beauty.

If the aesthetic and the emotional were not important, they would not have been a priority target of the enemies of God in postmodern times.

FUNCTIONALITY IS THE REAL pROGRESS:

Seeing Thomas Hart Benton’s Panorama of American Life from Another Angle: The series of murals collectively known as “America Today” depict vignettes of a growing, changing nation in vibrant color. (J. McMahon • 01/15/24, NY Observer)

I asked my old friend and teacher from the Art Students League, Costa Vavagiakis, master of painting technique himself, to comment on Breton, whom he greatly admires. “Thomas Hart Benton was an intensely erudite progressive who saw the beauty in the need and function of all things… He comes from the lineage of Michelangelo, Cambiaso, Tintoretto and El Greco.”

Each of Breton’s ten panels has a theme. In City Activities With Subway, burlesque dancers on stage balance boxers in the ring along the top while strap hangers commute in anonymity, ignoring one another, while across the canvas lovers make out on a park bench. Down the center, the mass of humanity works and prays and trogs through life, all depicted in the same muscular, flowing style.

Across the room, the Deep South panel shows a world a thousand miles away from big city life. where black men fill bags with cotton and transport the white fluff to a waiting river boat with horse and carriage while white men use machines to do the same job on the opposing side. From both sides the cotton is loaded onto an old paddle steamer boat of the kind that was already part of the past when Benton painted the panel, having witnessed and sketched just such a scene on the Missouri River when he was traveling. Capturing in one panel past, present and future.

Throughout the work, which celebrates the dynamism of the Jazz Age, there are reminiscences of times past, and also of hard times to come. We see biplanes in the sky and giant steam shovels gouging out mountains but we also see ranch hands corralling stock and dead tired laborers bent over pickaxes. Money flows freely as couples dance in elegant nightclubs and sit in cinemas, but the spewing ticker tape machine boxes the looming economic crisis to come.

In a piece about “America Today” for Smithsonian magazine, Paul Theroux wrote: “None of it was fanciful or exaggerated; it is a true portrait of the Jazz Age, which was also the era of intense industrialization in the United States when cotton was king and oil was beginning to gush; of clearing land for the planting of wheat and cotton, the making of steel and mining of coal, when New York skyscrapers were rising and the city was bursting with life.”

EVERY MAN DIES ALONE:

Why Caspar David Friedrich’s Painting Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818) a Romantic Masterpiece, Evoking the Power of the Sublime (Open Culture, January 8th, 2024)

When Caspar David Friedrich completed Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer, or Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, in 1818, it “was not well received.” So says gallerist-Youtuber James Payne in his new Great Art Explained video above, which focuses on Friedrich’s most famous painting. In the artist’s lifetime, the Wanderer in fact “marked the gradual decline of Friedrich’s fortunes.” He withdrew from society, and in 1835, “he suffered a stroke that left the left side of his body effectively paralyzed, effectively ending his career.” How, over the centuries since, did this once-ill-fated painting become so iconic that many of us now see it referenced every few weeks?

Friedrich had known popular and critical scorn before. His first major commission, painted in 1808, was “an altarpiece which shows a cross in profile at the top of a mountain, alone and surrounded by pine trees. Hard for us to understand now, but it caused a huge scandal.” This owed in part to the lack of traditional perspective in its composition, which presaged the feeling of boundlessness — overlaid with “rolling mists and fogs” — that would characterize his later work. But more to the point, “landscape had never been considered a suitable genre for overtly religious themes. And of course, normally the crucifixion is shown as a human narrative populated by human figures, not Christ dying alone.”

BECAUSE IT IS OBJECTIVE:

The decline of beauty: Why has the concept been rejected by the art world? (Pierre d’Alancaisez, 12/18/23, The Critic)

Ask the contestants of Family Fortunes about the purpose of art, and the concept of beauty is sure to top the list. A kindergartner, likewise, would display an instinctive understanding of the word. In exhibition writing and art criticism today, however, it is as though beauty never existed. Tate wouldn’t dare describe a painting as beautiful, and any artist trying to market their work in such terms would be cast out as an amateur. To speak about beauty today is to be reactionary, without the redemption once offered by thinkers like Roger Scruton. In contemporary art discourse, the concept of beauty is essentialist and deterministic and thus of no use.

In our time of general abolition, there may be convincing arguments for the museum’s war on old ideas. But, as the critic Dave Hickey noted already in the 1990s, beauty has been out of favour in the art school for so long that hardly anyone remembers why. Yet, even now, the assault on the beautiful continues. In The Cult of Beauty at London’s Wellcome Collection, beauty has a problem: we have been “obsessed” with it for over three centuries. From Nefertiti to TikTok, the exhibition questions “the influence of morality, status, health, age, race, and gender” on the notion of beauty before dismantling it to make way for a “more inclusive” version.

It is the morality they rebel against.