The Abuse of Beauty

Author(s): Arthur C. Danto

Source: Daedalus, Vol. 131, No. 4, On Beauty (Fall, 2002), pp. 35-56
Published by: The MIT Press on behalf of American Academy of Arts & Sciences
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Arthur C. Danto

The abuse of beauty

It is self-evident
ing

art

that

is self-evident

nothing

concern
not

any more,

its

inner life, not its relation to the world,

not even its right to exist.
- Theodor
Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 1969

For example,
shortly after the terrorist
attack on theWorld Trade Center in
New

greatest
guage
was
most.

1
of the contemporary
peri
od in the history of art that no con
straints

the way works

of visual
govern
art should look. An artwork can look like
and be made of anything
anything,
is possible.
anything

Arthur C. Danto, art criticfor "TheNation"

magazine and Emeritus Johnsonian Professor of
Philosophy at Columbia University, has been a
Fellow of theAmerican Academy since 1980. He
is the author of numerous books, including "Niet
zsche as Philosopher" (1965), "The Transfigura
of

the Commonplace"

(19Si),

and

"Encoun

ters and Reflections :Art in theHistorical Pre

sent," a collection of art criticism thatwon the
National Book Critics Circle Prize for Criticism in
1990. "The abuse of beauty" isbased on the
Cams Lectures presented to theAmerican Philo
sophical Association inDecember of 2001. Danto
is currentlypreparing a revised and greatly ex
panded version of these lectures thatwill be pub
lished as a book by Open Court Press in 2003.

the composer

Karl
it "the

proclaimed
"
of art ever. Since his lan

work
conveyed

extreme

instantly disgraced
That such a claim

at all underscores

It is the mark

tion

in 2001,
Stockhausen

York

heinz

he

admiration,
in the minds

of

could be made

the total openness

of
of
how
art,
concept

the contemporary
ever monstrous
the consequences
art
in
that way.
conceiving

of

The philosophical
history of art culmi
in the recognition
that there is no

nates

merit
in asking any longer whether
this
or that can be art, for the answer will al
ways be yes, noting that limits external
to the definition
of art moral consider
ations above all always remain. The de
finition of art must accordingly
be con
as far
sistent with an absolute pluralism
as works of art are concerned.
am
I
al
most

certain

that Adorno's

cultural

de

spair derived from this perception,

though not even that paradigmatically
thinker, whose
pessimistic
thought was
darkened by the Holocaust,
would have
been able to imagine a statement
like
Stockhausen's,
it.
occasioned

let alone

the horror

that

'
sAesthetic
of Adorno
A he publication
in
1969 coincided with the end of
Theory
a decade of
intense inquiry,
remarkably

dalus

Fall

2002

Arthur c.
Danto
beauty

as
philoso
in
of
independence
phers, though largely
an
one another.
with
Indeed,
essay
which
the decade properly began
Clement Greenberg's
i960 "Modernist
remarked
upon a parallel be
Painting"
tween modernist
art and a certain form
conducted

by artists

as well

of philosophical

practice. Comparing
art with a form of self
contemporary
criticism
in the Critique of
exemplified

Pure Reason, Greenberg

called Kant the
in the arts,
first modernist.
Self-criticism
as understood
consisted
by Greenberg,
in purifying
the relevant medium
of the
was
art form. Thus three-dimensionality
to painting, which was essen
extrinsic
view.
tially flat, in Greenberg's
he believed

should

painting
Accordingly,
of any kind, and
be purged of illusionism
over
depth given
by right to sculpture.
was one of art de
Greenberg's
agenda
from
and there can
within,
fining itself
no
be
that this quasi-Kantian
question
endeavor was pursued, often with a cer
tain puritanical
fervor, by a number of
art in its concep
artists bent on making
This was par
condition.
tually purified
case with the so-called min
the
ticularly
But in truth, philosophy
and
a
art
shared
great many atti
avant-garde
imalists.

in the 1960s.
aim of pop, for example, was to
ironize the distinction
between
high and
art - between
the heroized
vernacular
tudes

One

of the previous
of
generation
painting
the
Abstract
and
artists,
Expressionists,
comic
of
the
the popular
strip
imagery
advertisements
the
and commercial
a controversial
of
exhi
and
Low'
'High
Art in
bition at the Museum
of Modern
1992. But comparably,

itwas

an effort of

to overcome

the

philosophy
call 'high'
of what we might
- the
visions
cosmo-tragical
philosophy
or of the towering
of the Existentialists
titans of metaphysics
who loomed be
its language
hind them
by criticizing
analytical

pretensions

36 D

dalus Fall 2002

against either the standards of ordinary

we
discourse
where we know whereof
- or
a scientific discourse
of
gov
speak
erned by strict considerations
of verifi
It is difficult
ability and confirmability.
to resist the impulse to see a cultural
equivalence

the canonization

between

cultivated

ordinary
language
ford School of Linguistic
gy and the studied
objects inWarhol's

of

by the Ox

phenomenolo
aesthetic
of everyday
Factory or Claes

1962 Store on East Second

Oldenberg's
Street inManhattan,
where one could
of
gym shoes, auto
buy painted effigies
mobile
and
women's
tires,
underpants.

AAow much of any of this fellwithin

the horizons

of official

is his
aesthetics
some
but
torically problematic,
philoso
phers certainly grasped that the defini
tion of art was at issue as never before.
In 1965, the British philosopher
Richard
an
Wollheim
essay
published
important
on "Minimal Art."
Though Wollheim
was
credited with coining
subsequently
the term

he admits to
'minimalism,'
known
of
the works
that
having
nothing
con
so
His
became
finally
designated.
cern

in his

essay,

there are minimal

being designated
were monochrome

rather,

was

criteria

whether

for something

art. His paradigms

painting, which was
as amere
philosophi

generally
regarded
cal joke until perhaps
1915, and the
that
Marcel
put
ready-mades
Duchamp
forward as art at about that same time.
In addressing
this concern, Wollheim
followed
the official philosophical
mod
to which having a concept
el according
requires criteria for picking out its in
stances.

a
com
Wittgensteinian
can
that instances
be culled

Itwas

monplace
out successfully

without
benefit of defi
as in the case of games. In fact
nitions,
there can be no criteria for distinguish
a
comb
ing
ready-made metal grooming
an indiscernible
met
from
by Duchamp

comb that was not a ready

al grooming
nor
a
white paint
monochrome
made,
over
a
which white
ing from
panel all
- so
the ques
slathered
had
been
paint
tion of definition

became

urgent

after

all.
Indeed, with the advent of conceptual
art at the end of the 1960s, the material
- nor
no
did
object was
longer required
it necessarily
have to be made by the art
the
ist. "I've stopped making
objects,"
artist Douglas Huebner
said in a 1969 in
terview. "And I'm not trying to take any

art of the 1960s, but from the adof art of that decade
philosophy

vanced
vanced
as well.

Nor could it be part of the defi

can be an art
of art if anything
since it is certainly not true that

nition
work,

is beautiful.
anything
Not long after the John Simon Gug
was
Foundation
genheim Memorial
saw as
in
established
1925, the founders
its immediate
beneficiaries
women
to pushing
devoted

"Men and

forward the
of knowledge
and to the cre
ation of beauty." Art in that era was tac

boundaries

am I try
thing away from the world. Nor
not try
to
restructure
I'm
the world.
ing
really. I'm
ing to tell the world anything,

in terms of creating beauty,

itly defined
and that creation was in turn put on
equal footing with efforts at expanding

not trying to tell the world

that it could
be better by being this or that. I'm just,
the world by doing
you know, touching
these things, and leaving it pretty much
"
the way it is. Leaving the world as we
found it, we had been told by Wittgen

of knowledge.
to the cre
reference
later,
Forty years
ation of beauty was omitted
from the
enabling
language for the National
for the Arts, presumably
Endowment
because beauty had largely disappeared

stein,

it iswith

is the way

philosophy,

too.

this history of con

concomitant
and
the
ceptual
- is not
I
began by remarking
pluralism
that art is indefinable,
but that the con
What

follows
erasure

from

the boundaries

agenda in 1965. But

a role in the
still
beauty
played
thinking
of the era's politicians,
many of whom
art as depraved and
dismissed modern
destructive.
Congressman
George A.
from

the artistic

Dondero

wrote

of Michigan

that "Mod

ditions

ern art is communistic

will

torted and ugly, because

it does not glo
our beautiful
country, our cheerful
rify
and smiling people, and our material
progress. Art which does not beautify
our country in
plain simple terms that
can
understand
breeds dissat
everyone

to be art
for something
necessary
have to be fairly abstract to fit all

that
cases, and in particular
imaginable
remains
art'
of
'our
of
little
very
concept
can
that the framer of a real definition
on. In The Transfiguration of the Com
rely
con
monplace (1981) I came up with two
as
an
art
is
"x
work if
ditions, condensed
a
it embodies
merit
The
chief
meaning."
in
its
of this definition
weakness.
lay
as
from my proto-definition,
Missing
of
from all the philosophical
definitions
art put forth during the 1960s that I can
to beauty,
recall, was any reference
which would
have
been
among
surely
to have been ad
the first conditions
vanced by a conceptual
analyst at the
turn of the twentieth
century. Beauty
not only from the ad

had disappeared

The abuse
?f beauty

isfaction.

it is dis

to our
opposed
and those who create and

It is therefore

government
promote

because

it are

our

enemies."

The newspaper magnate William

Ran
Hearst
artis
form
of
dolph
"equated any
tic radicalism

with communism,
and
in a
that the work produced
manner was a
non-traditional
disguised
"
means
of communist
This
propaganda.
one
as
we
is but
shall see, of the
instance,
assumed

of beauty.
politicization
In the early 1990s, the art critic Dave
D

dalus

Fall

2002

37

Arthur C.
0?nt0
beauty

was

asked what he thought the

issue of the decade would be.

Hickey
central

guage

from my reverie, I said 'Beau

and
then, more firmly, ''The issue of
ty,'
"
This was
the nineties will be beauty.
a
"total uncom
greeted, he recalls, with
...
I had wandered
silence.
prehending
into this dead zone, this silent abyss."
"Snatched

?-jet me

to put this silence

begin

into a

certain

the
perspective
by considering
of
Robert
photography
Mapplethorpe,
in 1989 when
who had become
notorious
The Perfect Moment was
his exhibition
of
cancelled by the Corcoran Museum
Art

in an ill-advised

preemptive
that funding

move

for the
the danger
Endowment
for the Arts might
saw
be voted down if our legislators
The fear
what the fund was supporting.
against
National

on the
charged sexual content
was
of his signature
images
though it
that his work
central to his achievement
as well. It
was
beautiful
self-consciously
was this, rather than its content,
that
was

based

the photographic

alienated
against
When

avant-garde

him.

Iwas writing my book on Map

I asked an artist who was at
plethorpe,
the time experimenting
with pinhole
cameras what he thought of him. He dis
missed
have

lost touch with

dium. The

as a

of modernism,
tended to make

imperatives

defined

as

by Greenberg,
the paradigm
the simple grainy snapshot
of photographic
purity. And the charge
was that his work
against Mapplethorpe
was too beautiful
to qualify for critical
endorsement.
"One writer

Gerhard
claimed

itwould
and violence,
but one isn't allowed

38 D

A he twentieth century did not begin

such disdain for the concept of
a
in
beauty. In letter to Thomas Monro
1927, George Santayana wrote of his gen
eration that "We were not very much

with

later than Ruskin,

Matthew
Arnold.

and
Pater, Swinburne,
was
Our atmosphere
that of poets and persons
touched with
or
sad
enthusiasm
religious
religious
ness. Beauty (which mustn't
be men
tioned now) was then a living presence,
or an
aching absence, day and night." It
was
its beauty that justified the
precisely
art was held in San
esteem in which
time.

tayana's

some
gible

Here,

for

are

example,

that are almost

thoughts
today, from

unintelli

the early writing

of
G.
E.
Moore:
contemporary

Santayana's
"I cannot see but what

that which

is

meant

is simply and solely

by beautiful
is an end in itself. The object
that which
the
of art would
then be that to which
are means,
of
Morals
and
the
objects
are means. The
only thing to which
they
reason
for
virtues
would be
only
having
"
to produce works of art.
In his early text Art, Morals, and Reli

a
ismerely
wrote,
"Religion
of art," which he explicated
this way: "Every valuable purpose which
serves is also served
by Art; and
religion
serves more
Art perhaps
ifwe are to say
that its range of good objects and emo
tions iswider." There can be no doubt
that Moore
believed
that art can take re
ligion's

over because
purposes
it essentially
possesses.

of the

beauty

have been okay,

to paint anything

like to offer a historical

es
It
is
that the immense
speculation.
to be held
teem in which
art continues
of this exalted
today is an inheritance

fashion

of the time," if I
Ian

Kant's mournful

dalus

"brings beauty
cast and forsaken."

Richter
recalls,
sex
that if I painted

beautiful."
"The changed
may appropriate

the fate of Metaphysics,

a
out
only scorn ; matron

gion, Moore
subdivision

pompier-an
as to
elegance
the limits of his me

Mapplethorpe
so concerned with

artist

regarding

Fall

2002

JLNow Iwould

view

of beauty.

It iswidely

and some

error.
a
conceptual
place in virtue of
to perceive
Once we are in a position
that mistake, we should be able to re

said that art has replaced

cynically
in
consciousness.
contemporary
religion
times

My speculation
attitudes have

is that these Edwardian

of
the abjuration
even further to
I
itself.
will
go
beauty
suggest that if there is a place for beauty
in art today, it is connected with these
survived

which

survivals,

are

deeply

embedded

in

consciousness.

human

Beauty's place is not in the definition

or - to use the somewhat
idi
discredited
om - the essence of art, from which
the
it. That
has rightly removed
avant-garde
was
not
the
removal, however,
merely
as
ar
I
shall
result of a conceptual
but,
a
it is
And
gue,
political determination.
that lin
the residue of aesthetic politics
we
on
in atti
in
the
find
gers
negativity
tudes toward beauty in art today. The
idea of beauty, the poet Bill Berkson
wrote me recently, is a "mangled
sodden
thing."
But the fact of beauty

is quite

another

matter.

In a passage near the beginning

of
Proust's Within a Budding Grove, Marcel
(the Narrator),
traveling by train to Bal
a
sees
the
bec,
peasant girl approaching
station
coffee
desire
ever

in the early morning,

offering
"I felt on seeing her that
and milk.
to live which
is reborn in us when

we

become

conscious

anew

"
beauty and of happiness.
I believe Proust's psychology

of

deem

beauty

for artistic

use once

again.
But conceptual
with
itself,
analysis by
out the reinforcement
of a kind of Fou
cauldian

is insufficiently
archeology,
to help us in this task. Had

it
powerful
for
artistic
for
the
been
not,
example,
in the twentieth
century,
avant-garde
almost certainly would
philosophers
to teach that the connection
continue
between

art and beauty

is conceptually

tight.
the latter sections of Principia Ethica,
in 1903, Moore wrote,
first published
we
most
the
far
valuable
"By
things
know or can imagine, are certain states
of consciousness,
which may roughly be
as the pleasures
described
of human

An

intercourse
of beauti
and the enjoyment
the
ful objects." Moore
point
thought
"so obvious
that it runs the risk of seem
a
ing to be platitude." No one, Moore
ever doubted
"has
that personal
claims,
of what
is
affection
and the appreciation
are
in Art or Nature,
in
beautiful
good
themselves."
"does it
Nor, he continues,
one
that
think
will
appear probable
any
that anything
else has nearly so great a
are included
value as the things which
under

these

two heads."

profound
in connecting
of
the consciousness
we
with
beauty
happiness
providing
a
are not conflicted
because of negativity

seem al
Moore's
confident
appeals
most
but I'll sup
shockingly
parochial,
in his
pose they were commonplace
world. What would not have been com

that had yet to inflect the idea of beauty

in the generation
of Proust, Moore,
and

iswhat he next goes

however,
monplace,
on to claim, namely
that "this is the ulti
mate and fundamental
truth of Moral

Santayana.

like to press this further. Itwas

to
that was assigned
weight
us understand
that
beauty
helps
why the
first generation
of the twentieth-century
found it so urgent to dis
avant-garde
Iwould

the moral

place in
lodge beauty from its mistaken
of art. It occupied
that
the philosophy

The abuse
?* eauty

and that these two values

Philosophy,"
"form the rational ultimate
end of hu
man action and the sole criterion of
come to
social progress."
People might
accept these as truths, but they appear,
Moore
said, to be "truths which have
been

overlooked."

generally
D

dalus

Fall

2002

39

Arthur C.
^anto
beauty

must have been correct

these were generally over
were
as
they
perceived
the force of revelation
the
by

I think Moore
thsit if truths,
looked, since

having
entire philos
circle, whose
Bloomsbury
were derived from
art
and
of
of
life
ophy
Moore's
"A great new freedom
teaching.
to
seemed about to come," according
on the
Vanessa
Bell. Love and friendship,
one hand, and what Moore
speaks of "as
the proper appreciation
of a beautiful
were to suffice, without
the need
object"
in
main
for religion,
the
moral
satisfying
needs

of modern

Hegel,
no crucial

distinction

between

art and

nature

in regard to the appreciation

of
beauty, and itmust be borne in mind
that that indifference was but rarely con
nor in
tested in philosophical
aesthetics
com
artistic practice
itself when Moore
I
posed Principia Ethica. If anything,
Moore
the
think,
supposed
appreciation
of natural beauty superior to the appre
ciation of artistic beauty, largely because
con
"We do think that the emotional
of a natural scene, supposing
templation
its qualities
is in some
equally beautiful,
a
state
better
of
than
that of a
way
things
we
would
think
that
;
painted
landscape
the world
could

would

substitute

ifwe
be improved
for the best works of
art real objects

representative
beautiful."

in which

to experience
beauty in those
In
years.
Henry James's The Golden Bowl
(1905), his character Adam Verver, a
man of immense wealth
living abroad,
a
the idea of building
has conceived
City, where

of museums"

for American

he amassed

40 D

ly from
objects,

the contemplation
of beautiful
as the
which Moore
endorsed

highest

moral

good.

dalus

Fall

his fortune.

2002

A he problem was that modernist

paint
ing, in the period James's novel was first
was
to veer, some
published,
beginning
what starkly, away from the mimetic
In 1910 and 1912, modernist
and critic Roger Fry organized

model.

painter
two notorious

exhibi
postimpressionist
tions at the Graf ton Gallery
in London.
As it happens,
the Bloomsbury
circle,
and Moore
himself, praised the objective
works on
beauty of the unprecedented
But a great
display in these exhibitions.
art
critics
many professional
disagreed.
so deviated
The artistic representations
from the motifs
that
they transcribed
saw
no
viewers
of
many
way
dealing
wrote Fry,
with them. "One gentleman,"
so
to
it to account for his own in
"is
put
these pictures
that
ability to understand
to the conclusion
that it is a
colossal hoax on the part of the organiz
ers of the exhibition
in par
and myself

he is driven

equally

Moore
believed
that so far as the picto
a beautiful
rial arts are concerned,
paint
a beautiful
a
is
of
ing
painting
subject.
And this I think gave a certain impor
tance to the museum
of fine arts as a site

"museum

zenry of American
City could be put in
the presence
of "treasures
sifted to posi
tive sanctity,"
itwould benefit
immense

human

beings.
the exception
of Hume and
the classical aestheticians
drew

With

aim in this is to "release the people of his

native state from the bondage
of ugli
"
- or no
ness.
There would be no way
- to
or Pitts
transform Detroit
easy way
or
into
the
the
Catskills
Grand
burgh
Canyon. But artistic beauty was porta
citi
ble, so if the aesthetically
deprived

His

ticular."

to explain the incapacity

Attempting
to appreciate
of such gentlemen
objec
tive beauty, Fry blamed
and
ignorance
unfamiliarity:
Almost without
sume

that

exception,
aim

the

none

sentation,

yet

show

reason

any

art

of
of
for

them

such

they tacitly as

is imitative
has
a curious

repre

tried

to

propo

sition. A great deal has been said about

these artists searching for the ugly instead

of consoling us with beauty. They forget
that every new work of creative design is
ugly until it becomes beautiful ; that we
usually apply the word beautiful to those
works of art inwhich familiarity has en
abled us to grasp the unity easily, and that
we find ugly those works inwhich we still
perceive beauty only by an effort.
of these artworks as ugly
The perception
onto them
was, in effect, the projection
that a course in
confusion
of amental
education will remove. Postim
aesthetic
on to say,
painters, Fry goes
pressionist
of
affirm "the paramount
importance
places the imi
design, which necessarily
tative side of art in a secondary place."
This is the basis of Fry's formalism.
even
But Fry himself made amistake
more
critics
who
than
those
profound
itwas

to
the aim of painting
supposed
was
imitate nature. His mistake
suppos
was the aim of
to
be
beau
it
ing
painting
tiful.
I give Fry great credit
that something
needed
in order that those who

to

was beautiful,
if only
question
really
viewers knew how to look at it.
a common
Since Fry, it has become
is
place that the history of modernism
This
of
the history
story is
acceptance.
over
over
and lectur
and
told
by docents
ers in art appreciation.
In this view, the
a
happy ending.
history of art always has
in 1865, became
vilified
Manet's
Olympia,
treasure two generations
later:
in The Guermantes Way, Proust writes of
the way "the unbridgeable
gulf between
amasterpiece
what they considered
by
must for
Ingres and what they supposed
ever remain a 'horror' (Manet's Olympia,
for example)
vases seemed

shrank until
like twins."

the two can

this happen

? Fry believed

that it happens
through critical explanato un
tion. People have to be brought
the work, and the way in which
derstand
it is actually beautiful. That, more
than
is
the actual explanations
his
Fry gave,

The abuse
?* eauty

For itmakes
clear
great achievement.
that artistic beauty often requires expla
some
nation if it is to be appreciated,
Hume
understood
that
completely.
thing
"In many orders of beauty, particularly
in
those of the finer arts," Hume writes
the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of
to employ much
"it is requisite
to
in
order
the proper sen
feel
reasoning
timent ;and a false relish may frequently

Morals,

be corrected

and reflec
by argument
is eager to point out that
"moral beauty partakes much of this lat

tion." Hume
ter

species."

I accept Fry's
qualification,
as well as the spirit of Hume's
point,
Iwant
What
marvelous
observation.

With

to

is that the history of ap

in the ap
preciation
always culminates
as
see it, is
I
o?
preciation
beauty. That,
the assumption
of Edwardian
aesthetics,

perceive

aworld

does

deny, however,

for recognizing
to be explained
scoffed might

the beauty of postimpressionist

painting, but I draw special attention
in
the a priori view that the painting

How

which

the kind of art selected

for the

Gallery
ought to
called into question. The Edwar
dians, for example, were entirely right to
art. They
begin to appreciate African
were even right in thinking that, on for
it could be seen as beauti
mal grounds,
Grafton

exhibitions

have

ful. The Victorians

had thought that

inmaking
art,
'primitive peoples' were,
trying to make beautiful
objects, only
hence
they did not know exactly how
their 'primitivity.' The Edwardians

thought themselves
formalism
enabled

advanced because
to see what Fry
as beautiful.
sculpture"
them

called "Negro
in thinking that
But they were wrong
to
had
learned
through formalism
they
see the beauty that was the point of
African

art.

dalus

Fall

2002

41

Arthur C.
o
^an
beauty

That was

never

its point, nor was

of most of the world's

the point
It is very rarely the point
art.
great

beauty

of art

today.

lived through the Sensation ex

Having
in
at the Brooklyn Museum
hibition
what
of
its crude exploitation
1999, with
can
shock or offend, I
sympathize
might
to a
with Fry. The critics, pretty much
the art, and were
condemned
person,
certain they were being put upon. But
some of us were ready to see it as a First
rather than aesthetic mat
Amendment
ter, and in this we were perhaps more
someone would have been
right than
who hoped that through argument
they
see the beauty itwas in some
would
measure
the object of the art to injure.
not
to say that beauty does not
This is
have a role to play in the art of our own
to find out what that
day. But in order
role might be, we shall have to free our
axiom that all
selves from the Edwardian
if only
art is categorically
beautiful,
good
We
how.
to
we have learned
recognize
will have to find ways of justifying art
other than those with which my narra
tive of the decline of beauty began. It is
histo
an achievement
of the conceptual
we
that
in
art
twentieth
the
of
century
ry
idea of artis
have amuch more complex
than the early modern
tic appreciation
- or modernism
in general, down to
ists
of Clement
in the writing
its formulation
as late as the 1960s.
Greenberg

2
the opening of Une Saison en Enfer
account of his
an allegorical
allegedly
with the poet
tumultuous
relationship
: "One eve
Rimbaud writes
Verlaine
on
knees
sat
I
;and I
my
Beauty
ning,
"
her.
I
abused
found her bitter, and
The 'bitterness of beauty' became
epi
art of the fol
demic in the avant-garde
was a rare thought
lowing century, but it

Near

42 D

dalus

Fall

2002

this
in 1873, when Rimbaud
published
In
Fantin-Latour's
group portrait
poem.
of the previous year, Un Coin de Table,
is shown seated with Verlaine
Rimbaud
in a
and a number of other bohemians
The
Les
Villains
Bonhommes
called
group
and Rim
of whom Verlaine
Bad Eggs
baud were, one might
say, the 'baddest.'
the only por
Rimbaud
The portrait of
is of a singular
trait of him we possess
almost angelic looking
ly beautiful,
state. He was
in a pensive
shown
youth,
a rakehell, and the dispari
and
eighteen,
his character and his appear
ty between
as
in Dorian Grey, is a familiar fail
ance,
ure of fit that has come to give beauty a
bad name. His badness

extends

even

to

he cata
of his poem :

which

his aesthetic

preferences,
logs in the Delires section
"Idiotic pictures,
shop signs, stage sets,
bill
for
backcloths
street-entertainers,
boards, vernacular
images, old fashioned
church Latin, badly spelt por
romance novels for elderly
nography,
ladies, fairy tales, little books for chil
dren, old operas, silly refrains, na?ve
stories,

would not
rhythms." What Rimbaud
was
that his inventory was
have known
to become

the

substance

of

an

alterna

a century later.
tive aesthetic
no wish
to lose myself
I
have
Though
it can,
Rimbaud's
in interpreting
poem,
as a tribute to the
be
read
must,
perhaps
notwith
power of beauty, the disparities
abused
Beauty in the
standing. Having
sen
as
is
the
it
if
third line,
poet were
- a season in hell - in
tenced to madness
titles the section of
penalty. He explicitly
the poem in which he declares his anti
as Ravings. That
aesthetic preferences
section ends with what feels like Rim
baud coming to his senses, though it can
be read as heavy irony: "All that's be
hind me now. Today I know how to bow
down before beauty."
intuited a thought I
It is as if Rimbaud
can hardly suppose he could have read in

that "the
Critique of Judgment
is the symbol of the morally
beautiful
good." Kant's thought is not entirely

Kant's

to say
easy to follow, but he clearly wants
more
is
that finding
beautiful
something
in experi
than simply taking pleasure
encing it. The beautiful
"gives pleasure
with a claim for the agreement
of every
one else." For this reason, "the mind
is
of a certain

made

conscious

ment

and elevation

above

ennoble
the mere

sen

through
sibility of pleasure received
sense, and the worth of others is esti
in accordance with a like maxim
mated
of their judgment." And Kant goes on to
in
claim that "the subjective principle
as
is represented
judging the beautiful
for
man."
The
valid
universal, i.e.,
every
abuse of beauty in this view is the sym
of an offense against
bolic enactment
and hence, in effect, against hu
"I
had armed myself
manity.
against jus
Rimbaud
tice,"
says just after confessing
his crime.

morality

It is not clear, even if itwould have

for him to have imagined
been possible
it, that the abuse of beauty would be re
as
a
ipso facto moral evil,
garded by Kant
since beauty only symbolizes morality,
and between moral and aesthetic
judg
ments
there is only the kind of analogy,
to use his example,
that may hold be
tween a commonwealth
and a living
are moral
So
aesthetic
imperatives
body.
rec
Kant
imperatives
only symbolically.
not
that
will
everyone
agree,
ognizes
case by case, on questions
of beauty, but
the analogy requires the belief that they
the force of the
ought to, whatever
was
an
ten
ought. There
Enlightenment
that the same moral
dency to believe
exam
the
principles
golden rule for
- were to
in
be
found
every society,
ple
so
must have seemed co
universality
extensive with humanity. Would
there
have been a parallel view in regard to
beauty?

handled

iXant
interestingly
aesthetic differences
He

moral

and

in systematically
about the

The abuse
?* eau y

learned

parallel ways.
South Seas from reading Captain Cook's
and clearly he was struck by the
voyages,
of the societies Cook de
otherness
scribes.
whether

The question
those other

comes

up for him
lives are ones we

be able to live. In the

morally
schedule of cases in which he attempts
to illustrate the working
of the categori
a talented
cal imperative,
he considers
in comfortable
circumstances
individual

would

to
in pleasure
"prefers indulgence
himself
with
and
troubling
broadening
improving his fortunate natural gifts." It

who

be entirely consistent
laws of nature that everyone

would

with

the

should

live

like "the inhabitants

of the South Seas,"
one formulation
of the categorical
by
it
would
be
that
imperative,
permissible
aman "should let his talents rust and re
so

to dedicate

his life only to idleness,

But we
and
indulgence,
propagation."
"cannot possibly will that this should
a universal
become
law of nature," for
solve

"as a rational

one
wills
necessarily
being,
faculties should be devel
as
are
oped inasmuch
they
given to one
for all sorts of possible purposes."
that all one's

is that the South Sea

The implication
islanders are not quite rational, but even
so
with the
ought to live in conformity
Protestant
ethic, and that iswhat we
must
teach them as moral missionaries.
Kant was in no sense amoral relativist.
What

in
regard as differences
as but differences
regarded
on the model
of the dif

relativists

culture Kant

in development,
ferences between

children

and adults.

Sea aes
similarly
as he understands
them. Pre
on an
sumably based
anthropological
he must have seen, Kant was
illustration
aware that there are parts of the world
in
which men are covered with a kind of
contests

Kant

South

thetics,

spiral tattoo

: "We could

dalus

Fall

adorn

2002

figure

43

Arthur C
ato
on

'

beauty

all kinds of spirals and light but reg

uj
jjnes as j.]^ ]sjew Zealanders
do with
if only itwere not the
their tattooing,
a
In
figure of human being," he writes.

with

this same

section of the Third Critique, he

to a building,
"We
could add much
says,
which would
please "the eye
immediately
if only itwere not to be a church.
These are imperatives
of taste, and it is
that
considers
the tattoo as
Kant
striking
a form of ornamentation,
like
on
a
rather
than
church,
statuary

merely

gilded
a set of marks

to
that may have nothing
do with beautification,
but serve rather
to connect
the tattooed person with
some larger scheme of the world. The
to admiration
tattoo may conduce
of its
reasons so
but not for aesthetic
it is in a person the
much as for whatever
tattoo signified
prowess,
say,
military
or cosmic rank.
with
the
brass
Similarly
bearer

neck coils affected by the Paduang

women
of Burma. And something
of the
same sort may be true of ornament
in
Kant
evi
church
the German baroque
to taste - as if the
finds
offensive
dently
icono
of northern European
passions
clasm were merely
of aes
expressions
So it iswith reference
thetic revulsion.
cognitive
ments
that both
Iwould
so-called

to

than aesthetic
judg
ought to be assessed.

rather

to say that all cases of

can be deflected
beautification
hesitate

in this way, but the possibility

suggests
that a universal beauty may be entirely
our
consistent with cultural differences,
in
certain
mistake
consisting
regarding
things

as aesthetic

when

they have

and more

quite different
tion. The aesthetic

cognitive
of the
diversity

some
func

art is consistent with beauty as

such being everywhere
the same, if one
cared to defend that thesis.
in the
If, on the other hand, tattooing

world's

Seas really is beautiful

"in the eye
of the South Sea Islander," Kant must
feel himself
entitled to the view that they
South

44 D

dalus Fall 2002

are wrong.

They just don't know what

which
he would have defined
is,
beauty
in terms of what we may as well term the
Protestant
aesthetic.
Even Hegel,

the first major philoso

to
have gone out of his way
pher actually
to look at paintings
and listen to music
art
and, as we shall see, an extraordinary
critic
had a difficult
time with other
in
traditions.
"The Chinese,"
he writes
the Philosophy of History,
"have as a gen
a remarkable
eral characteristic,
skill in
not
is
exercised
imitation, which
merely
in daily life but in art. They have not yet
in representing
the beautiful
succeeded
as beautiful
;for in their painting,
per
are
(Ma
spective and shadow
wanting."
to the side, as
shadows
net, who pushed
we find them in
photographs,
inevitably
his figures, which
in
flattened
explains
some measure
the outcry against his
is that the Chi
work.) The implication
nese have either no idea of
or a
beauty
one.
a
But
Chinese
culture
had
wrong
idea of visual truth than
very different
Hegel had, and hence a different view of
the aims of representation.
No one could
count their art as ugly, which
is the oper
ative thought in Fry's dictum
that things
as
are
will be perceived
until
ugly
they
as
was
It
beautiful.
perceived
Hegel who
aesthetic
fixated as
education,
required
he was

on the Renaissance

paradigm

of

mimesis.

as amodernist,
But Fry understood,
that the ligature between
beauty and
mimetic
been irre
had
representation
in his time. He knew
loosened
versibly
that one could not argue his critical au
into agreeing
diences
that C?zanne or
as we
Picasso
shows the world
really see
it. He had instead to argue that this is
not relevant, and that the
emphasis must
- to use
be not on vision but on design
the terms of his famous title. Then we
can see the
beauty of African
nese art,
having surrendered

and Chi
the mis

leading mimetic
to Hegel.

criteria

so

compelling

the beauty-mimesis
Loosening
liga
a
ture made
it possible
for Fry to become
great formalist art critic, but because he
art
to see the ligature between
so
and beauty as a necessary
connection,
art is always beautiful,
that of necessity
it failed to occur to him, as a theorist,
continued

that whole
ed in which

artistic

traditions have exist

never the
was
beauty
point

at all.
Beauty was not the rainbow that
awaited us as the reward of sustained
was never the case that the
looking. It
was that
only proper way to address art
To
of aesthetic
put it an
contemplation.
to Fry, any
other way, it never occurred
more than it had occurred
to Ruskin,

on another
art and morality,
was
"all great art
Ruskin
that
plane
right
In 1903, as we have seen,
ismorality."
con
Moore
seriously argued that the
was
sciousness
of beauty
among the su
between

preme moral goods. We are safe, I think,

at the be
in speaking of an atmosphere
century in
ginning of the twentieth
which Rimbaud's
of
image
abusing
seen as an
beauty could still have been
of
abuse
morality.
I can think of no more vivid a gesture
of abusing beauty by abusing great art
than Duchamp's
1919 work in which he
on a postcard
of
drew a moustache
Lisa, and scribbled amild obscen
that paradigm
of great art.
ity beneath
That work,
like everything
by Du
a field of
is
champ,
fiercely competing
but Iwant to use it as a
interpretations,

Mona

that the beauty that was incontestably

the great cathe
in, for example,
present
drals may have been ameans
rather than

historical

an

nation.

end.

was

not

to stand

in front of
The point
the church and gape at its ornamenta
tion, but to enter the church, the beauty
as it so often is in enter
being the bait,
ing into sexual relationships.
one contemporary
who appears
Fry's
to have understood
was
Marcel
this
it's been be
"Since Courbet,
Duchamp.
to the
is addressed
lieved that painting
retina.

That

retinal

was

shudder!"

ably overlooked
quite historical:
other

everyone's

His

error.

The

remark

argument,
by aesthetic
theory, is
"Before, painting had
it could be philosophi

functions,
cal, religious, moral. Our whole
century
is completely
retinal, except for the
it
Surrealists, who tried to go outside
somewhat."

on the somewhat
1905, ruminating
farcical contest between Whistler
and
Ruskin, Proust wrote
(in a letter to
An

Marie

that while Whistler

Nordlinger)
had been right that there is a distinction

The abuse
?* eau y

attitude

a
signpost of deep change in
that calls for a historical
expla
Iwant to focus on an art-histori

in the course of which,

cal episode
ly to the benefit of the philosophical
derstanding
finitively

great
un

of art, a logical gap was

art and
opened between

beauty.
Itwas

a gap that remained

the denizens
of Bloomsbury,

de

invisible
who re

to

for all their modernist

mained,
ideals,
late Edwardians.
Itwas invisible to them
because

in
they had the idea, expressed
are
art
that
works
of
dictum,
per
Fry's
as
ceived as ugly until they are perceived
Itwas a gap that remained
beautiful.
in
visible

until

of the 1960s
contribution

the great conceptual

efforts
to define art. That gap is the
inmy view of what I shall

term the intractable

avant-garde.
Iwant,
in setting the scene for my his
torical explanation,
briefly to return to
- in
to
Moore's
philosophy
particular
the connection
between
the two su
preme goods he holds up for examina
sees a clear connection
tion. Moore
be
tween

goodness
D

and beauty:

dalus

Fall

2002

"It appears

45

Arthur c.
?
on"
beauty

that the beautiful

should be de
probable
as that of which
con
the
fined
admiring
"
two
is
in
itself.
The
templation
good
values, Moore
claims, are so related to
one another "that whatever
is beautiful
is also good." He goes further: "To say
is to say, not in
that a thing is beautiful
deed that it is itself good, but that it is a
in something which
element
necessary
is :to prove that something
is truly beau
to which
tiful is to prove that awhole,
it
a
as
a
bears
relation
part, is
particular
some near
sees
So
Moore
truly good."
art and beauty, and
between
entailments
between

And
beauty and goodness.
was the
on
indeed
beauty
principle
was
which Bloomsbury
friendship
based: It consisted
almost entirely of
those who

assigned

to beauty

the highest

moral

priority.
saw themselves
as
The Bloomsburys
the true vessels of civilization.
And they
it the mark of a civi
perhaps
supposed
of the
lization that it create individuals
sort they exemplified.
In this, I think,
were not so far from Kant, in
they
light
of his concluding
that beau
proposition
even if con
ty is the symbol of morality,
a kind of
in
his
of
view, by way
nected,
There

analogy.
an entailed

is in aesthetic

disinterestedness

universality,
was sine qua
person who
has amoral

judgment
as well as a

in Kant's philosophy
which
non for moral conduct. The
values
fineness

aesthetic

experience
in that she or he is

ennobled through the disinterestedness.

Remember,
further, that Kant defined
as mankind's
the Enlightenment
coming
- a
of age
cultural stage he would have
the South Sea Islanders have
not and perhaps for a long time will not
have attained.
And now the question was :how is it
that those nations defined by civilized
believed

the
should have made
high-mindedness
most
savage and protracted war that his
tory up to that point had known ?
46 D

dalus Fall 2002

Itwas with

this question
that the con
of
became
cept
beauty
abruptly politi
cized by avant-garde
artists around 1915,

which fellmidway in the period of the

career.

in Duchamp's

ready-mades

a device
A he 'abuse of beauty' became
for dissociating
the artists from the soci
ety they held in contempt.
came an artistic and moral
et everyone
"I believe

Rimbaud
be
hero
the po

to be.

wanted

in the genius of Rimbaud,"

the young Andre Breton wrote Tristan
Tzara, the author of the dada manifesto
re
of 1918. It is dada to which
I primarily
fer in the project of disconnecting
beau
as
an
re
art
from
of
moral
ty
expression
vulsion against a society for whom
beau
value and which
cher
ty was a cherished
ished art itself because
Here is a recollective

of beauty.
account by Max

Ernst:
To

was

us, Dada

tion.

Our

rage

of our

existence.

enced the collapse

of

everything

true,

and

od were
people

subversion.

futile war had robbed us of five

horrible
years

at total

aimed

reac

all a moral

above

We

not meant

experi

to us

represented

beautiful.

had

into ridicule and shame

works

My
to attract,

as
of

but

just,
that

peri

to make

scream.

the war

he had been an ar
was aggressive,
art
and
his
tilleryman
as his
as
of
the
war-makers
perception

Ernst knew

it to be.
hateful required
In some measure
this was true of Ger
man dada in
general. The First Interna
tional Dada exhibition
in Berlin had
was
art
that
dead
"Der
signs declaring
to
Kunst ist Tot"
life
the
adding "Long
Kunst Tatlins."
Its members
maschinen
were not out to
values ;
vilify German
on
were
bent
them
they
destroying
by
an
consciousness
forcing upon German
art it could not swallow.
Its means were
a kind of
aggressive

foolishness.

The original
of exaggerated
war, a way of
tempt for the
fantile

actions

was a kind
spirit of dada
in
shadow
of the
the
play
con
its
demonstrating
by in
clashing patriotisms
:the term itself was infan

tile for 'rocking horse,' and the Zurich

their protests
dadaists registered
against what Hans
through buffoonery
called
"the
for author
Arp
puerile mania
itarianism

could use art itself for

:
of mankind"

which

the stultification

we

the distance,

an

for

searched

we

pasted,

versified, we sang with

recited,

we

art

that

to a new

xVada

art was

posters,

book

only the
under

the disgusting,
which
take to represent
"in accordance with nature" pro

cannot

ephemeral
pam

jackets, calligrams,
- as we
recitations
would

expect
of poets as well
in their very
ephemera,
were what Tzara celebrat

phlets,
from amovement
as artists. These

quality acknowl
in the Critique of Aesthetic
was noticed by Kant as
Judgment. Disgust
amode of
to the kind
resistant
ugliness
of pleasure
that even the most displeas
"the Furies, diseases,
the
ing things
- are
devastations
of war"
capable of
as beautiful
causing when represented
excites dis
by works of art. "That which
edged by Kant

most

order.

vehemently

made

in normal viewers.
duce pleasure
There are, to be sure, those who derive
a
in experiencing
perverted
pleasure
what the normal viewer finds disgust
one
say, 'special
ing: who have,
might
in representing
tastes.' Artists
interested

as beautiful. That is
ceived if perceived
or
not its point
ambition.
The narrative of aesthetic
redemption
assures us that sooner or later we will see

the disgusting would not have this spe

in view. Their aim is pre
cial audience
cause
sensa
to
cisely
through their art
tions that, in Kant's phrase, "we strive
our
against with all
might."
The psychobiology
of disgust
is as yet
not well understood,
but the early writ
ers on it followed Darwin
in thinking of
it as a product of evolution
concerned
"
the
with
rejection of food.
"basically
for the centrality of food "in
Evidence

all art as beautiful,

however ugly it ap
as
at
first.
Try to see this
beautiful !
peared
a sort of imperative
for those
becomes
who look at art that does not appear

cludes the facial expression, which

fo
cuses on oral expulsion
and closing of
con
the nares, and the physiological
comitants
of nausea and gagging." Re

ephemerality,
ed as "means

of combat."

Dada refuses to be found beautiful,

even
today, after the passage of time
and that is its great philosophical
signifi
cance. Dada
avant-garde,

exemplifies
since

its works

the intractable
are

misper

at first at all.
Someone
told me that she found beau

beautiful

ty in the maggots
infesting the severed
head of a cow,
and seemingly putrescent
set in a vitrine by the Young British Art
ist Damien Hirst. It gives me a certain
wicked
tration

The
?*

disgusting,
cally unredeemable

be the production
of pleasure,
perverse of artists would

would, we thought, save mankind from

the furious folly of these times. We
aspired

which

all aesthetic
satisfac
without
" destroying
tion.
Since the purpose of art is taken to

all our soul. We

elementary

that his work be found

was the one aestheti-

intended

"cannot be rep
gust [Ekel],99Kant writes,
in accordance with nature
resented

in

the thunder of guns sounded

While

He

to imagine Hirst's frus

pleasure
if hers were the received view.

cent research

has widened

"disgust elicitors,"
ing the connection
iswith

items

that disgust

the scope of
weaken
survival
and it

somewhat
with

in this augmented
schedule
an artistic op
has become

for those eager to hold beauty

portunity
at bay. Kant would have no recourse but
to regard this as the perversion
of art. It
D

dalus

Fall

2002

47

Arthur c.
^anto
beauty

be of no value to the artists in

if a taste for the disgusting
question
were to be normalized.
to
It is essential
would

their aims

remain
that the disgusting
not
that
audiences
learn to
disgusting,
in it, or find it somehow
take pleasure
beautiful.
I have seen a sculpture from Nurem
era of a
berg from the late Gothic
figure
known as "The Prince of theWorld,"
which
looks comely and strong from the
in a state of wormy
front but is displayed
the
from
behind;
decay
body is shown
in
the way itwould
look decomposing
we
the grave. Such sights explain why
can be no
actually bury the dead. There
is
the
func
of
what
intended
question
tion of showing bodily decay with the
stone carver - it is
skill of a Nuremberg
: it is,
not to give the viewer pleasure
rather, to disgust the viewer, and in so
us
as a vanitas,
reminding
doing, to act
is
flesh
that
the
through presentation
a
its
distraction
and
corrupt,
pleasures
to
from our higher aspirations
namely
and
achieve everlasting
blessedness
avoid

eternal

human

body
good

violate
were

prepared

Christianity

To show the
punishment.
as
to
is certainly
disgusting
artists
taste, but Christian
to pay this price for what
as our
regards
highest moral

Kant does make

plain that the disgusting

is the antonym
of the beautiful.
So the
case not
in
is
any
disgusting
conceptual
ly connected with the sublime. The ant
ob
onym of the sublime, he deliciously
that
serves, is the silly, which
suggests
the effect of dada was less the abuse of

beauty

Kant did of course

have a concept of
I suppose has to tran

the sublime, which

because
scend morality,
allels he insisted

of the close par

between moral
so
without

upon
and aesthetic
judgments,
and in what de
much as asking whether
of
the
gree
beauty itself
production
serves or can serve some higher moral
ends. It is quite as if beauty were its own
the practice of art
end, justifying
alone.
through its existence
Kant never asks what the purpose of
the disgusting might be in awork of art,
or
of beauty might
why the dereliction
In a precritical
be amoral means.
text,
48 D

dalus Fall 2002

of the sublime.

as
the disgusting,
just possibly
logi
can also
connected
with
cally
beauty,
have the connection
with morality
that

Ajut

beauty does.
In the early 1990s, curators
a genre of contemporary
art

recognized

they desig
nated
'abject art.' "The abject," writes
the art historian
"is a
Joseph Koerner,
nor
in
art
neither
the
of
novelty
history
to
in the attempts
write that history."
Koerner
cites, among other sources, a
characteristically
profound
insight of
: "The
of
and
Christian
Hegel
novelty
art consisted
Romantic
of taking the ab
as
its
ject
object. Specifically,
privileged
the tortured and crucified Christ, that
in whom
divine
ugliest of creatures
beauty
basest

became,

through

human

evil,

abjection."
Rudolph Wittkower
begins his great
text on art and architecture
in Italy after
the Council of Trent by recording
the de

to display the
and agonies of the martyred,
order, through this display of affect,
elicit the sympathy
of viewers and
cision

purpose.

than the rejection

of that council

in

wounds

to

threatened
through that to strengthen
'af
faith. "Even Christ must be shown
flicted, bleeding,
spat upon, with his
skin torn, wounded,
deformed,
pale and
if
the
calls
for
it." The
unsightly'
subject
to beautify
in the Renaissance
tendency
the crucified Christ was in effect amove
to classicize

Christianity
by returning
a
body to kind of athletic
the basic message
of
grace, denying
is at
Christian
that
salvation
teaching
the tortured

tained

through

abject

suffering.

Edwardian

The

aestheticism
of the eighteenth
was
a
century
corollary of the rational
ism of natural religion.
Itwas Kant's

two small

steps away from

reason.

pure

of the vast human suffering

that was one salient aspect of the twenti
eth century, it is astonishing
how dispas

ists, and itwould

before
monplace

In view

rational, how distancing,

so much of twentieth-cen
was.
art
How innocent dada
tury
really
was ! In its refusal to
gratify the aesthetic
of those responsible
for
I, dada gave the world bab
in place of beauty, silliness
instead

When
Nelson

bling
If it injured beauty, itwas
of sublimity.
a kind of punitive
clownishness.
through
so
in its inca
What
art,
abject
pathetic
or di
to
to
do
much
deflect
pacity finally

order

the degradations
of the body that
the politics of our times has used as its
has done is to seize upon the em
means,
as away of
blems of degradation
crying
out in the name of humanity.
"For many
in contemporary
culture," Hal Foster
abject

of

necessary

witnessings

against

power.

or
My aim is not to judge the success
failure of artistic abjection,
but rather to
to resist
that it is intended
emphasize
the prediction
that art is ugly until seen
as beautiful.
It is amisperception
of art
con
to see it as always and necessarily
the creation and apprecia
tion of beauty. With
dada, a deep con
took
shift
place. This perhaps
ceptual
cerned with

justifies the claim that I have often made

that in the twentieth
century, the artists
were
forward
the philosophy
of
carrying
art in away that could not have been
achieved by philosophers
themselves,
intuitions were colored by the
whose

in

to talk about

3
On principles
of Renaissance
theory,
were
on the world
windows
paintings

or

subject,
aged body. Thus body is the evidentiary
to truth,
basis of important witnessings

a
of art such as
philosopher
sets aesthetics
Goodman
aside

and
representation
not
is
this
done with the ex
meaning,
we
that
will return to the con
pectation
an enhanced under
of
with
cept
beauty
It
is
done,
rather, with the
standing.
awareness
that beauty belongs neither to
the essence nor the definition
of art.

minish

in the traumatic
in the diseased or dam

seen as com

consciousness.

War

"truth resides

have been

of art, even if the new

posed definition
situation dawned very slowly in artistic

sensibilities

writes,

The abuse

and

the Enlightenment
it has continued
the
gave beauty
primacy
to enjoy. That clarification managed
to
to
out
of
reference
any pro
push
beauty

sionate, how
how abstract

World

inMoore

Bloomsbury.
I regard the discovery
that something
can be
art
without
good
being beautiful
one of the great
clarifications
conceptual
of art,
of twentieth-century
philosophy
was
it
made
though
exclusively
by art

to situate aesthet
stunning achievement
as a form
ics in the critical architectonic
of judgment

views we find
?fheauty

pure,
"

transparent
apparently
openings
one saw the world as if
through which
from outside.
So a picture drew its beau
none of
from
the
world,
ty
ideally having
to what one saw, as
its own to contribute
itwere,
through it. (This of course over
looks

the contribution

of the frame

shaping the way the world presents

to the eye in a painting.)
The stereotypical
painter crooks

in
itself
the

index finger against the thumb, framing

the world until it resolves
into a picture
until it looks the way she wants her
like Lily Briscoe in To
picture to look
the Lighthouse, or, we imagine, any of the
the south
painters
Bloomsbury
scouting
of France
schools

for what
designated

dalus

the traditional

art

motifs.

Fall

2002

49

Arthur c.
?
o?n
beauty

a
but
famously
stay-at-home,
an
era
of aesthetic
tourism.
he lived in
went abroad to see the
The well-to-do
as
:the
Alps, the Bay of Naples,
sights
as
Piazza
of
the
San
course,
Marco,
well,
the Leaning Tower, the
the Pantheon,
Kant was

A pictorial
industry grew up
Acropolis.
memo
to provide
souvenirs
objective
ries
of what one took in. This I take to
of Kant's somewhat
be the background
at ?45 of the Critique
remark,
surprising
is beautiful
"Nature
that
of Judgment,
it looks like art," when one
because
asser

the opposite
expected
Kant seems to be saying
it looks
is beautiful when
that the world
one
it.
the way painters
When
represent
a scene be
thinks an artist represented
cause itwas beautiful
in the first place,

would

have

tion instead.

one understands

rightly the Renaissance

idea that what one sees pictured on a
a
canvas or a
view of
panel is transparent

a scene's

beauty.

have been the

cannot, however,
even
not
for
Kant, who rec
story,

This
whole

that art was

as beautiful

of repre
which
may
"things
senting
The Fu
be in nature ugly or displeasing.
the devastations
of war,
ries, diseases,
etc. may even be regarded as calamitous,
as they
as very beautiful,
be described
are represented
in a picture."
So the picture in Kant's understanding
ognized

must

capable

to the beauty, since

have none. It is here that

contribute

these motifs

observa
Kant makes his parenthetical
tion on disgust as the "one kind of ugli
ness which
cannot be represented
in
accordance

with

ing all aesthetic

nature without
satisfaction,

destroy
and conse

quently artificial beauty.99

I emphasize
'artificial beauty.'
what we would

It is
-

'beautification'
the worse
aesthetic
ap
sophism, making
involves
which
cosmetics,
pear better,
interior decoration,
and the
fashion,
are
we
not
like, where
dealing with natu
ral but with enhanced beauty. In the
50 D

call

dalus Fall 2002

century, in France especially,

eighteenth
a close
was drawn between
parallel
faces, so
painting pictures and painting
Pom
that, in his portrait of Madame
shows the
padour at her Vanity, which
with
her
before a
great lady
rouge-brush
a
is
Boucher
mirror,
virtually
saluting
fellow artist. With
the made-up
face,
Kant's follow-up
would
be ex
thought
act
"we are conscious
of it as art while
yet it looks like nature."
Beautification
has tended
certain

to incur a
: it

condemnation

puritanical
traffics in causing

the kind of false be

the cognitive
basis
for the great cosmetic
fortunes of the
modern world. The French term for 'to
make up' isfarder, or 'to color,' which
in part why there was a tradi
explains
mistrust
of colors - why Descartes
tional
so
as
to say we really did not
went
far
need our eyes to know what the world
was like, since the blind can feel the out
liefs that constitute

lines and know the shapes of things.

Ruskin appears to have had beautifica
- or
in sup
in mind when,
tion
artifice
he
port of the British Pre-Raphaelites,
the entire histo
condemns
pretty much
time
of
from
the
of Raphael
ry
painting
down.

In the first of two letters to The Times

in 1851, Ruskin wrote
that his young pro
teges
desire

to represent,

irrespective

of

any

rules of picture making; and

have
chosen
their unfortunate
they
name because all
not
inaccurate
though

conventional

artists did this before Raphael's time, and

after Raphael's time did not do this, but
sought to paint fair pictures rather than
represent

stern

facts,

of which

the

conse

quence has been that from Raphael's

to this day historical art has been in
acknowledged

time

decadence.

It did not incidentally matter

that the
was
'made up' by
reality
only imagined
the artist in the other sense of the ex

- so
as itwas not falsified
pression
long
in the interests of beautification.
I cannot help but feel that the aura of
some of the
falsification
helps to explain
aroused
when
suspicions
beauty plays a
art. Consider
role in contemporary
again
He tried to
the case of Mapplethorpe.
of pornographic
achieve the excitement
images in artistic, that is, beautiful pho
that "the geni
tographs. Freud observed
is al
the sight of which
are
ever
ways exciting,
hardly
regarded
as beautiful."
success
Yet at their most
ful, we can barely stand to look at some
of Mapplethorpe's
from which,
pictures
because of the beauty with which he in
tals themselves,

them, we

tear our eyes

the
will, as in the
away. They paralyze
case cited
aman who
by Socrates of
"feasts his eyes" on the sight of corpses.
To take a less complex
case, Sabastao
fused

cannot

of suffering hu
Salgado's photographs
are beautiful
and
hence, his
manity
critics would
because
suf
falsified
say,
fering of that order, being
not to be seen as beautiful.

grim, ought

is to be art, it should not be beauti

since
the world does not deserve
ful,
Artistic
truth must accordingly
beauty.
be as sad as human
life itself, and art
there

leached of beauty serves in its own way

as amirror of what human
beings have
done. Art, subtracted
of the stigma of
as what the world has
serves
beauty,
are, so to speak,
coming to it. Beautifiers
collaborationists.
art is not beauti
of the world's
IVAost
ful at all, nor was the production
of
of
its
One
of
the
purpose.
beauty part
most marvelous
art
I
of
criticism
pieces
know was written
himself
about
by Fry
in Berlin :
Simone Madonna
Mantegna's
"The wizened
crumpled

The abuse
?* eauty

the

are marked."

As enfleshed,
God
as we all be
begin
helplessly
col
gin
hungry, wet, soiled, confused,
drool
icky, crying, dribbling,
babbling,
All that is
ing, and totally dependent.

flesh'

as

must

picture, and it is
implicit inMantegna's
as
inconsistent
with seeing the painting
beautiful.

The message
transcends beau
It ismorally
rather than

ty and ugliness.
visually true.
Iwant

one further

example, which
a great art critic,
comes from
Hegel,
a
about
masterpiece
writing
by the artist
were to
: "It
the Pre-Raphaelites
despise
re
is a familiar and frequently
repeated
proach against Raphael's
Transfiguration
that it falls apart into two actions entire
with one
ly devoid of any connection
another,"

Hegel writes.

in fact this is true if this picture is

considered externally :above on the hill

And
we

see the transfiguration, below is the

the child possessed of an un
clean spirit. But ifwe look at the spirit of
scene with

Salgado pret
tifies through photographic
artifice what
to
true
in
its
be
shown
colors. If
ought

face, the creased and

flesh of a new born babe...

almost
the penalty,
the humiliation,
attendant
upon
squalor
being'made

all

the

composition,

not

to be missed.

Christ's visible
elevation

his

on

For,

the

the

visible

too

as a

hand,

is precisely
and

earth,

his

de

and this must

parture from his disciples,

be made

one

transfiguration

above

is

connection

supreme

and

separation

departure ;on the other hand, the sublimi

ty of Christ is here especially transfigured
in an actual

simple

case,

namely

in the

fact

that the Disciples could not help the child

without
the help of the Lord. Thus here
the double action ismotivated
throughout
is displayed within
and the connection
in the fact that one disciple
and without
expressly points to Christ who has depart
ed from them and thereby he hints at the
true destiny of the Son of God to be at the
same
be

true

time

on

:
Where

earth,
two

so that
or

three

the
are

gathered

there am I in the midst

inmy name,

will

saying

of

them.

dalus

Fall

2002

51

Arthur c.
^anto
beauty

To say design is as weak as beauty would

to this
ke an inappropriate
response
tremendous
work. The design inheres in
intends to convey,
the meaning
Raphael
to
Yeffet of the event he has undertaken
of the
the meaning
visually, when
- is not
itself- the transfiguration
entirely visual. Ruskin would be right
it lacks visu
about Raphael:
'externally'

depict
event

it conveys

al truth, but internally

kind.
of a profounder

truth

the re
V>Jne sees from this passage
a thinker
difference
between
markable
like Hegel, who was deeply engaged by
great art, and Kant, who was not, and for
art was

of a piece
experiencing
beauty, like
that of flowers or sunsets or lovely wom
en. And this is
in
ismissing
finally what
Moore's
way of thinking about art as
well. He thought of artistic beauty on the
model
of natural beauty, as we can see
from his belief that something
beautiful
in reality
exists much more compellingly
in
than
pictures.
whom

experiencing

ter to our taste and sentiment."

It is in
one
to
sort
that
this
of
regard
beauty
no
taste.
But
is
say there
disputing
might
as
a
man
a
vivid
of letters, had
Hume,
sense of the transformative
power of
critical

reasoning:

In many

orders

of beauty,

particularly

those of the finer arts, it is requisite to

employ much reasoning in order to feel
the proper sentiment; and a false relish
may frequently be corrected by argument
and reflection. There are just grounds to
conclude that moral beauty partakes
of this latter species, and demands
of our intellectual faculties
in order to give it a suitable influence on

much

the assistance
the human

mind.

natural

with

David Hume
takes up the relationship
natural and artistic beauty al
between
most as an aside, in order to point out an
two views of moral
analogy between
"whether
truths, namely
they be derived
Sentimen
from Reason or Sentiment."
to
talists claim that "To virtue it belongs
"
be amiable, and vice odious. The latter
a
term evokes a distant echo to disgust,
on
that verges
revulsion
moral
physical
the former evokes a
recoil. By symmetry,
we
:
are drawn
kind of natural attraction
us in
as
to what we perceive
good for
Hume allows that there is a kind

others.

the latter may be

of beauty of which
true: "Some species of beauty, especially
the natural kinds, on their first appear
our affection
ance command
and appro
bation
;and where
they fail of this effect,
to re
it is impossible
for any reasoning
or
dress their influence,
adapt them bet
52 D

dalus

Fall

2002

kind of reasoning
is, I think, illus
on
or
in Fry on Mantegna,
Hegel
more
I
it
is
And
believe
Raphael.
Hegel,
than any other thinker, who draws the
This

trated

most

sharply. He is the first

to distinguish,
too
perhaps
and
the
between
aesthetics
phi
sharply,
he observes,
losophy of art. Aesthetics,
or
is "the science of sensation
feeling,"
art "when works of art are
and concerns

distinction

in particular

treated with regard to the feelings

they
were
to produce,
as, for in
supposed
admira
stance, the feeling of pleasure,
tion, fear, pity, and so on." This is a great
advance over Kant, who more or less
of ef
the relevant repertoire
an
to pleasure
and pain, making
for
exception
important
sublimity. Hegel
insists artistic beauty is 'higher' than the
a
beauty of nature, and he writes with
thunder that "The beauty of
marvelous
confines
fects

art is beauty born of the spirit and born

"
I am eager to stress is that
again. What
art is, for Hegel, an intellectual product,
and that its beauty too must express the
thought the art embodies.
All this said, Hegel cannot have
thought of art as other than beautiful,
and indeed he saw this as art's limita

tion, thinking as he does of beauty in

or what Hume calls
terms of a sensation,
a'sentiment.'

that "the beauty of art

Hegel writes
to
itself
sense, feeling, intuition,
presents
a different
it
has
;
imagination
sphere
of
than thought, and the apprehension
its activity and its products
organ other than scientific

demands

an

thinking."
That iswhy art has come to an end, to
invoke his celebrated
thesis. We have
risen above the sphere of sense in the
or
respect that philosophy,
Wissenschajft,
is an exercise of pure understanding
and
our
So
"the
conditions
of
pres
analysis.
ent time are not favorable

to art." The

to do with
end of art thus has nothing
the decline of art but rather with the as
cent of reason.
of whether
A here remains the question
there is an important difference
between
natural and artistic beauty, just so far as
the object itself is concerned.
perceiving
that in the appreciation
of
is the
beauty, the object which
of beauty
which has beauty
it properties
is not connected

Let's allow
natural
vehicle

among
with a thought that explains
its exis
a
art the
whereas
with
work
of
tence,
is
beautiful
explained by the thought
to grasp in order to
that it is necessary
the beauty. Is the apprecia
appreciate
tion of beauty different between
the two
cases ?
Iwant to present a pair of examples one of natural, one of artistic
in
beauty
which we can see Hume's way of dealing
at work.
with the distinction
I have se
lected
some

the examples

because

striking psychological
bear on the moral grounds
treating beauty as shallow

they raise
issues that

evoked in
and false to
They bear on

the reality of the world.

what I take the prophet
Isaiah to have
a world
meant
in envisioning
in which
those who suffer are given beauty in

in
place of ashes. I intend the examples,
remove
to
the
from
brief,
help
stigma
beauty, to restore to beauty some of
what gave it the moral weight
it had in
Edwardian

The abuse
?* beauty

aesthetics.

The first, somewhat

overdetermined
comes from Proust. In a section
example
called "The Intermitancies
of the
in the fourth volume of In Search
Heart,"
has returned
of Lost Time, the Narrator
to the seaside resort of Balbec. On his
first stay, he was accompanied
by his be
who has since died.
loved grandmother,
The

section

of the book

in which

he de

scribes his grandmother's

death is curi
is
ously clinical and detached, which
somewhat
inconsistent
with what we
would
We

expect, given their earlier bond.

feel we have learned something

through this about the character of Mar

cel, who seems amuch colder person
than we would have believed him to be.
This impression
proves to be false ; the
moment
he returns to his room at the
Grand Hotel, he is overwhelmed
sense of loss and bereavement,
scends into an acute depression

with

and de
as his

irrevocable
absence
grandmother's
floods his consciousness
completely.
now sits
Marcel
gazing at his grand
mother's

photograph,
him. He realizes how
had been when

which

tortures

self-centered

he

he had been

the object of
his grandmother's
totally dedicated
to
love
how he had failed, for example,
notice how ill she had been on that first
lasts until
sojourn to Balbec. This mood

he goes for a walk one day in the direc

tion of a high road, along which he and
his grandmother
used to be driven in the
de Villeparisis.
The
carriage of Mme.
was
road
muddy, which made him think
of his grandmother
and how she used to
return covered with mud when
she went
The sun
the weather.
walking whatever
is out, and he sees a "dazzling specta
:
cle" - a stand of apple trees in blossom
D

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Fall

2002

53

Arthur C.
Danto
on J

beauty

The disposition of the apple trees, as far as

could reach, were in full bloom,
tjie
luxuriant, their feet in the
unbelievably
heedless

their ball-dresses,
the most marvelous

mire beneath

of spoiling
pink satin
that was ever seen, which glittered in the
sea
sunlight; the distant horizon of the
a
gave the trees the background of Japan
ese print ; if I raised my head to gaze at the
sky through the flowers, which made its
serene blue appear almost violent, they
seemed to draw apart to reveal the im
mensity of their paradise. Beneath that
azure a faint but cold breeze set the blush
[Itwas]

ing bouquets.
been

an amateur

of

as though

exotic

art

and

it had
colors

that had artificially created this living

beauty. But itmoved one to tears because,
lengths itwent in its effects of
refined artifice, one felt that itwas natural,
that these apple trees were there in the
to whatever

heart

The

of

the

example
someone

is overdetermined

because

like Marcel would have

only
as he did. He is
seen this glorious
sight
like his counterpart,
Swann, in seeing
of
everything
through the metaphors
art. Someone who had never seen Hiro
or in
or an Ascension
of the Virgin,
shige
or
life there were no ballgowns
whose
could
have
satin,
experi
hardly
pink
enced the apple trees quite as he did.
Still, itwas a piece of natural beauty,
which might have taken the breath away
from anyone fortunate
enough to have
seen it.Marcel
tells us that from this
his grief for his grandmother
one
to
diminish
;
metaphorically,
began
say, she had entered paradise. He
might
was
given beauty for ashes. The beauty,
one
truly say, helped heal him.
might
The apple trees at Balbec might be on
short list for Moore's
world of
anyone's

moment,

beauty. A world with such sights in it

is confident
in
would be better, Moore
aworld of ashes. That
than
arguing,
would be as obvious as the fact that his
54 D

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cannot

that
argue anyone into accepting
if they are uncertain
of it for what
could be more certain than that? If they
doubt that, their doubt is irremediable.
This I think is Hume's
point about nat
ural beauty. You can't argue anyone into
was at the core
feeling it. Natural beauty
- even
if there
of Marcel's
experience
was an aura of
drawn
from
metaphors
of art, which
his experience
his descriptions.

enters

into

is of a relatively
example
work,
contemporary
Maya Lin's Viet
nam Veterans Memorial
of 1982, which
as
it iswidely
select because
regarded
great beauty, both by those
possessing
second

My

I
in

the art world

and by quite ordinary per

sons for whom
one of the
it has become
most
ton,

country.

exist, to invoke one of

most famous arguments.
You

two hands
Moore's

admired

widely

sights

inWashing

D.C.

is simplicity
itself. It
two
of
symmetrical
triangular
one
that
bend
from
another
away
wings
at amild angle -125 degrees - from a
shared vertical base to gently enfold
it. It is a very re
those who approach
duced form of the Bernini colonnades
The Memorial

consists

St. Peter's Square in Rome,

enclosing
a similar role.
buts performs
Maya Lin
was an undergraduate
at Yale when
she
presented
instructor

the idea, and was told by her

that the angle between
the
"Had to mean
something."

two wings
two walls

are of polished
black gran
ite, and inscribed with the names of ev
soldier killed in the Viet
ery American
nam War - about 58,000 in all - listed

The

chronologically
by date of death.
The commission
of Lin's scheme

for
the memorial
almost had the quality of a
:
fairy tale it took the twenty-one-year
to complete
the win
old all of six weeks
selected unanimously
from
ning model,
1,421 entries in blind review. This, after
Lin's peers had criticized
the work as

it is, after all, a kind of

poetry'
book
and had expressed
their uncer
tainty of its architectural merit. Mean
while, Lin was young, female, of Asian
and had lost no loved ones in
descent,
:she failed all the tacit tests
the conflict
Visual

the designer

of such amemorial
to meet.

was

supposed
When
the organizer
of the competi
tion, Jan Scruggs, first saw the work he
was
disillusioned.
"A big
profoundly
bat. A
that
could
weird-looking
thing
a third
have been from Mars. Maybe
All
grader had entered the competition.
the fund's work had gone into
a
making
veterans.
bat
for
it
huge
Maybe
symbol
ized a boomerang,"
Scruggs thought.
"It's weird and Iwish I knew what the
hell it is." It is amazing
that itwas not
voted

down. Everyone wondered

how
the general public would
react, but one
person told Scruggs that "You would be
the general
surprised how sophisticated
course
is."
That
of
turned
public really
out to be true.
The beauty of the work is almost in
stantly felt, and then perhaps best ex
in terms of the emotional
re
plained
come
sponse of visitors, many of whom
to see the name of someone
loved
they
and to do a rubbing of it to carry home.
reflected
in the
They see themselves
same wall that carries the name of the
of
dead, as if there were a community
the living and the dead, though death it
self is forever. Possibly
there is an analo
a
to
natural
such as
gy
phenomenon
the surface of a very still body of water
as inMo
in which
the sky is reflected,
net's immense paintings
of water
lilies
that make visible the way clouds and
seem to occupy the same space.
flowers
Whatever

the proper explanation

of the
felt beauty of the wall, it is understood
to the 'thought.'
with reference
It is part
of the meaning
of the work.
In Proust's
orchard,

the thought

is his.

In the Viet

nam Veterans

the thought
Memorial,
to
the
work
and
the
belongs
explains
In
natural
the
beauty.
beauty,
beauty is
external to the thought;
in art the beauty
is internal to the work.
A he idea of
as
integral to
came
ginally
Motherwell's

The

internal

beauty, of beauty
the meaning
of awork, ori
to me in
thinking of Robert
Elegy for the Spanish Repub

lic. People have sometimes

read its black
as
forms
icons for the penis and testicles
of a bull, and, thus, the work as
elegizing
the loss of virility. But I see them as hu
man

and architectural
of devastation

elements
in a
:shawled wom

landscape
en and broken
pillars, against early day
light, as with the Christ figure in Piero's
Resurrection. Motherwell
achieved a rep
resentation

that transcends

the history
it
and
interprets, personal
experience,
as will Lin's work in a relative
memory,
ly short period of time.
was the way the
What
impressed me
very idea of elegy is connected with the
an
idea of beauty - that its
being
elegy
meant
itwas intended to be beautiful,
and that the beauty was intended
to be
a
the
the
music
at
funeral
way
healing,
or - this is not to my
is, or the flowers,
taste - even the beautification
of the de
a
for
the
occasion
of
parted
'viewing.' I
mean
in any case that Motherwell's
Ele
gies do not just happen to be beautiful.
Their being beautiful
is part of their
and
meaning,
integral to their impact.

IVAy heart leaps up-when Ibehold a

in the sky" Wordsworth's

a species of
expresses
beauty
and aesthetic
surprise we have all experi
enced. But my concern
in the preceding
has
to make
been
paragraphs
mainly
the
between
plain
relationship
beauty
and thought, and between
the kinds of
rainbow

sentiment

thoughts
external

that go into the experience

of
as against internal
how
beauty
D

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Fall

2002

abuse

of beauty

55

Arthur C.
anto
beauty

in the first instance the thoughts are per

resi
sonal and in the second objectively
dent in the work.
concern
in this essay as a whole,
My
on the other hand, has been to show the
:
between
connection
beauty and art
art
its
when
beauty is connected with
of
the
is
the
of
part
presence
meaning
work.

The TajMahal is beautiful, but I am

to say that about the
or about The Last
of Cologne,
Cathedral
or the Demoi
Judgment of Michelangelo
and certainly not of the
selles dAvignon
Woman with aHat,
Simone Madonna,
cases of
Transfiguration. The
Raphael's
some
dis
I
considered
have
go
beauty
tance toward supporting Hegel's view
are differently
that art and philosophy
not certain

Iwant

56 D

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and in different ways with

interests of mankind
and
"the deepest
the most comprehensive
truths of the
these interests are con
spirit." Because
nected with the way we are made,
they
us
of
begin the detoxification
might help
art
in
and
contemporary
philoso
beauty
connected

that both have

phy, always recognizing
shown that it is not part of the definition
of art.
is one mode
among many
in
which
thoughts are presented
through
art to human sensibility
disgust, hor
and sexuality are still oth
ror, sublimity,
ers. These modes
explain the relevance
and room for
of art to human existence,
them all must be found in an adequate
definition
of art.
Beauty