What is beauty
You walk into an art gallery and are struck speechless as you pass an artwork on display. You can’t articulate what it is you feel in you but i this piece simply draws you in, it’s mesmerising.
You’re leaving the gallery and a friend has just sent you a song they like. You take a listen. A shiver courses down your spine and and you feel like ever cell, every limb is alive in the flow of the melody.
You get off the bus almost home, you notice an autumn leaf lying humbly on the pavement: it’s delicate veins branching ever smaller as if into infinity, the pure brilliance of its warm colours blending and swirling amongst eachother. Then you look up and see a stunning human being: they smile at you as they pass, their eyes almost piercing through you, their face carved finely as if by a master sculptor, taking your breathe away.
If you hadn’t guess by now this post is about beauty. What is it? And if not what then why is there beauty? What is the difference between something that is beautiful only to a few and something that is beautiful to the vast majority?
You’re leaving the gallery and a friend has just sent you a song they like. You take a listen. A shiver courses down your spine and and you feel like ever cell, every limb is alive in the flow of the melody.
You get off the bus almost home, you notice an autumn leaf lying humbly on the pavement: it’s delicate veins branching ever smaller as if into infinity, the pure brilliance of its warm colours blending and swirling amongst eachother. Then you look up and see a stunning human being: they smile at you as they pass, their eyes almost piercing through you, their face carved finely as if by a master sculptor, taking your breathe away.
If you hadn’t guess by now this post is about beauty. What is it? And if not what then why is there beauty? What is the difference between something that is beautiful only to a few and something that is beautiful to the vast majority?
Comments (93)
No it isn't. We tend to think that anything and everything we are 'attracted' to is beauty. So a generic term is beauty, I give you that.
Quoting Benj96
Often we are conditioned to prefer one thing over another by people around us. We don't, of course, notice it, since it's in our inner being now that we are conscious adults. Beauty is the term we give for just about anything that we are attracted to. Because of this conditioning, no effort on our part to examine why we are drawn to something. We just say cause it's beautiful.
We should always try to cultivate that eccentricity in us by analyzing deeply why we are attracted to a particular music artist, to a painting, to the color of autumn leaves, etc. And yes, I do. I tell myself the way he, and not the other, sings and plays the guitar is beautiful and mesmerizing because such and such. I disdain superficial attraction. I also give up on a lot of things I call attractive, after much thought.
Our senses can be in a fooled mode our entire life, not knowing what we truly value. A saying goes 'open' your eyes when you're already wide awake and conscious. This is cause you could actually see things you haven't seen or noticed before.
I have to say I have never had that experience. I have been struck by extraordinary visual works but never like that. The closest I've come to this is listening to some classical music. Beautiful people... not something that I have ever paid much attention to. I'll be interested to hear what others think.
Whatever gives a happy feeling inside you. That's beauty for me.
André Gide noted that in contrast with Rodin, whose work “quivers, is restless and expressive; cries out with moving pathos, ... Maillol’s Seated Woman [below in bronze] is simply beautiful. She has no meaning. It is a silent work. Maillol does not proceed from an idea that he then tries to explain in marble. I believe we must go back in history -- we must go way back in history -- to find such complete neglect of everything that is foreign to this simple celebration of beauty.”
I agree with Gide. That's beholding.
One man gazes with wonder and delight upon the pottery figures offered as prizes of marksmanship at the village fair and is bored in the National Gallery. Another is thrilled by a Titian and revolted by the pottery prizes.
Are the delight of one man in the pottery figure and the other man in the Titian both instances of appreciation of the beautiful? Or is one genuine appreciation and the other spurious? And if so, why?
What if you are in a bad mood when you see a masterpiece such that it elicits no special feelings in you - is it not beautiful at that time? No, you would not say that: you would say that you failed to appreciate its beauty at the time due to the bad mood.
And consider the unappreciated artist, of which the most famous example is Van Gogh. Virtually no one thought Van Gogh's paintings were brilliant masterpieces when he produced them. Did that mean his paintings were rubbish back then, but gradually became brilliant? In that case he was not an underappreciated genius - for at the time he received the appreciation he deserved, namely none as his paintings were awful in most people's eyes. (But they weren't actually awful, were they?)
And what of the artists themselves: do they think that beauty is in the eye of the beholder? No, Van Gogh and the few other artists who recognized that his paintings were great, were perceiving something that others were not. That is certainly how they themselves understood matters. They did not think that Van Gogh paintings were poor to most, but good for them - they thought they were good and that most people were just too dumb to notice.
Now try and address something I argued.
And it means that beauty is subjective - that is, that it is made of certain feelings a person (God) has towards something - but not individually or collectively subjective.
So, beauty is like moral goodness in this respect.
But you're not addressing anything I have argued. I have made a destructive case: I have argued that beauty is 'not' individually or collectively subjective. Do you agree with the arguments I made in support of that claim?
Note, someone could agree with my destructive case, yet disagree with my positive claim about what beauty itself consists of. (A Platonist, for instance, would agree with my negative case, but would argue that beauty is a form that the objects we call beautiful are somehow reminding us of).
The feelings by means of which we are aware of the beauty of things, are not themselves constitutive of the beauty of those things.
And beauty is not constituted by the beautiful things themselves - they 'have' beauty, but do not constitute it (which is why 'what is beauty?' is not answered by simply listing all the things that are beautiful).
Though our sensations of beauty are not themselves constitutive of the beauty they give us an awareness of, they could only give us an awareness of beauty if they in some way resembled it. Or so I would argue. And as a sensation resembles another sensation - that is, sensations are like sensations and nothing else - then the beauty of a thing must reside in it standing in a sensational relation to something else. And as minds and only minds can bear sensations, the beauty of a thing must consist in it standing in a sensational relation to a mind.
And as aesthetic reasons conflict with other reasons, that mind must be the mind who is the source of all reasons. And as that mind will be God, beauty consists of a thing standing in a sensational relation to God.
I suspect that we are not in agreement as I would be astonished if that was your view too.
Not having a go at you, Oliver, but I don't like the Seated Woman statue at all. I find it ugly. Rodin I prefer but not the way Gide does.
Were Van Gogh's paintings shit when he painted them and good now? Or were they good - indeed, quite brilliant - the whole time?
One answer to this is that they are neither good nor bad. They are whatever the art market a critical consensus decides which varies over time.
The art market doesn't really hold coherent ideas (In the 1980's I worked for a dealer who traded with Christies and Sotheby's). Things come in and out of fashion without good reason. And ironically those who purchase the works (Warhol or Van Gogh doesn't matter) often have no aesthetic interest in them. They are investment pieces which also drives the market up.
Yes, I am sure that's correct about some collectors. There are, I am sure, all manner of financial schemes behind a lot of what goes on in the art market, just as in the stock and currency markets. Indeed, a Van Gogh may no doubt be viewed by some as just a conveniently big banknote.
But my point is that whether a Van Gogh is beautiful or not is not in the gift of the art market or any particular one of us. There's the value that we place on a Van Gogh, and then there's the aesthetic value that it actually possesses. And what determines the latter is not the former.
My former professor in art failed to perceive the beauty of the Mona Lisa painting when she saw it in person. She wasn't impressed.
Yes, there is clearly something wrong with her.
The work is entitled Méditérannée. She's at the beach. Her body slightly sunken in the sand, she's protecting her eyes from the sun... And yet she looks eternal, almost prehistoric.
You cannot judge a sculpture based on a photo. Best to touch it. This said, I never really liked Rodin, too artificial, too forceful for my taste.
Quoting Bartricks
Clearly, there is something wrong with you. When I see Mona, the only thing I want is to run away as fast as possible and release a dump. She is ugly as hell. Imagine I would find her in my bed, giving me that same grin when she makes me... Brrrrrrr!
Beauty lies in my dog jumping out of a moonlit blanket of mist. Dew glistening thousand colored in the morning autumn sun, trying to touch it and realizing it glistens from fungi on a pile of dogshit.
Interesting! In what sense, may I ask, is something wrong with the Mona Lisa?
I was thinking exactly the same! :lol:
Soulmate!
And that -- I suggest -- is precisely what people call beauty.
OK
I don't mean the physical difference. I know how dear Mona looks like without ever having seen the painting myself. I can't imagine bursting into tears when seeing it for real. Maybe tears of boredom, as sprang up when seeing the de nachtwacht and de staalmeesters, for example. Though some of his paintings impressed me, like the view on the Amstel. But they did so when looking in a book.
It isn't. An ugly scene can do just the same. Even more maybe.
Can you give an example?
Sitting in a chair, beneath a soft-toned lamp, makes me appreciate van Gogh more than looking at his paintings in the museum.
Quoting Olivier5
I get more vitality from looking at ugly scenes like some dadaists show us. Or de Koninck. These big magic blacks give me bright shining light. Serenety even. The are not beauty, in my eyes. Beauty is superfluous.
Unless you can see the beauty of ugliness. There is a passage about that in Heinlein's Stranger in Strange Land, where an alien comes to earth and tries to understand human civilisations. One of the things puzzling him is human art, and how it can depict ugly scenes. The examples are drawn from sculpture, including Rodin:
[I]A great artist—a master—and that is what Auguste Rodin was—can look at an old woman, portray her exactly as she is . . . and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be . . . and more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo, or even you, see that this lovely young girl is still alive, not old and ugly at all, but simply prisoned inside her ruined body. He can make you feel the quiet, endless tragedy that there was never a girl born who ever grew older than eighteen in her heart . . . no matter what the merciless hours have done to her.[/i]
(Celle qui fut) la Belle Heaumière, by Rodin.
It's a thin line between beauty and ugliness. Maybe there is not even a line at all. It's all in the eyes and ears or nose of the beholder though. You can construct abstract schemes for explaining it, like I read in a thread here about art, but this merely relocates both beauty and ugliness. Besides the formally pleasing aspects of an artwork, there are of course many other ones.
You mean Mona? No, I haven't actually seen her. And luckily. Spared me money for the entrance ticket.
Velasquez's portrait of pope innocent X is another in the same league.
If you see them and are unmoved, then you're just dead inside.
I have them. If I see the painting (be it for real or not, I'm not a fetishist) I get the feeling of giving her a wake-up slam in the face, to make her stop giving me that double smile. Leonardo must have had a hard time with that lady, self-assured serenity. So it does provoke a feeling in me.
As an aside, I think the "big picture" "truth" of life is also a harmony of opposites. I.E Yin Yang
This may be the source of John Keats saying “Beauty is truth–truth beauty
And R Buckminster Fuller: "When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
How does this explain the beauty of my dog jumping up out of a dark ultramarine moonlit blanket of low mist?
I have exactly the opposite attitude.
And I bet its a complimentary opposite, if we examined both attitudes in the proper context.
To me you are asking "where is the symmetry". I assume you are relating the experience to something in your memory, perhaps subconscious memory, which is creating a symmetry.
Edit: To me the imagine evokes a balance between gravitas and levity.
Edit: However, I do agree that the perception of symmetry, or the feeling/state it evokes aesthetically as the experience of beauty in a person, is subjective. So my definition was too simplistic.
It's not a complementary opposite. It's no complement at all. It's the lacking of symmetry or its complement. If we examine symmetry and it's complement in the proper context than we end up in math, which can have beauty (symmetry is fashion in physics). But the most beautiful math is in which both are not present. Now you can call this a complement again, but then you are stuck in the symmetry-asymmetry dichotomy.
I'm not sure what you are saying. The most beautiful math is when there is neither symmetry no asymmetry?
Precisely!
Sounds interesting!
I can't imagine how math, or anything, can lack both symmetry and asymmetry. If something lacks symmetry doesn't that mean is asymmetrical?
And isn't math all about the symmetry of numbers, loosely speaking?
the quality of being made up of exactly similar parts facing each other or around an axis.
synonyms: regularity, evenness, uniformity, equilibrium, consistency, congruity, conformity, agreement, correspondence, orderliness, equality
The law of non-contradiction, in the positive, could be the law of agreement. In other words, the law of symmetry.
Yet she loved Piet Mondrian's Apple Tree in Bloom or Flowering Apple Tree. (I do too)
Good caption. Thanks.
Yeah, I was reading others' posts in response to your post to me "there is clearly something wrong with her". I got your reference point without missing a beat. But then I read the others' responses -- humor jumped on them, I guess.
It's natural to confuse this propaganda purpose with the aesthetic purpose of the recommended art. Especially when so much art happens to refer to (e.g. depict) people of high status.
I prefer the red tree, but though clearly not entirely insensitive to the aesthetic aspect to reality, she's not tracking it particularly well if she's unmoved by the mona lisa but is in love with a Mondrian. That painting is good, no question - but it's not in the same league as the mona lisa.
:) funny. To me "in love" isn't the same as "she/he loves". One can love someone or something, but not in love with it. Just my thoughts.
You are only in love briefly, but you love forever. Hmm, don't know.
Yes, I think so. Doesn't saying you're in love with something or someone or some appearance or whatever just mean the same as saying that you love that person, or thing, or appearance, or whatever?
If I say "I love x" then I am describing an attitude I have towards x. If I say "I am in love with x" then I am describing my situation in the attitudinal relation that i have towards x. That seems to be the only difference. Yet if I have a loving attitude towards x, then I am in the situation in the attitudinal relation that I have towards x that "I am in love with x" describes.
Clinton cards have yet to use any of my greeting card messages.
In that thread I presented Kant's description of our judgement of what he terms the Beautiful--that it allows for rational discussion (apart from just personal feelings or value judgments, etc.) through the criteria internal to the art--its form.
One's personal experience or sensation is what Kant calls the Pleasant--an experience that it is nice (say when you look at it), or whatever personal "feelings" you have. Kant also allows that a piece of art can have good/bad "value" for us (popularity; taste). The Beautiful is focused on the form of the art, say, the way a story is told (think Northrup Frye's Modes and Genres); or the possibilities of the camera, the method, processes, framing, etc. in photography.
Part of the rationality is that the critic is making a claim (with evidence and rationale) in what Kant calls a universal voice--on behalf of everyone for others to accept or discuss. Even though the outcome is not predetermined to be an absolute, certain conclusion (or even resolved)--the goal, and the truth of the beauty of the work, is to get you to see for yourself what I see along the terms of the form of the art.
From Kant's 3rd Critique:
“As regards the Pleasant every one is content that his judgement, which he bases upon private feeling, and by which he says of an object that it pleases him, should be limited merely to his own person” Sec. 7.
“[The Beautiful] is not what gratifies in sensation but what pleases by means of its form... [that] is... the only [element] of these representations which admits with certainty of universal communicability” Sec. 10.
“[ B ]ut if he gives out anything as beautiful, he supposes in others the same satisfaction—he judges not merely for himself, but for every one... which can make a rightful claim upon every one’s assent. ...the beautiful undertakes or lays claim to [the universal].” Sec 6.
Okay, thank you. I believe you.
Clinton cards?
Obviously not. I truly are not in love with the conceptual works of Mondriaan or Escher. However I like them or pleasing they are to see. Sometimes I can hate them though, for their being bound to the purely formal, of which Mondriaan (or Rietvelt and van der Lek)) is the ultimate example. Reducing man and wife to two perpendicular lines placed perpendicular to the painting's frame.... what a farce! And the frame has to be hung up with a corner pointing down. How ingenious. Two lines perpendiculary driven in a corner. Was the man painting his marriage?
I regard beauty is good for all but possibly imbalanced.
Beauty is something to do with obsession and infatuation when imbalanced; can be beneficent.
Quoting tim wood
You can also judge a pudding by its look. However, the real proof of the pudding is in the eating.
Quoting tim wood
Yes, you cannot touch those of course, too old and fragile. But to come back to contemporary artists like Rodin or Maillol, you can touch their bronzes without posing any risk to their work.
Maillol's sculptures are what we would call today "sexualized": beauty for him was also carnal. E.g. tits are typically erected. There are a few Maillol bronzes in the Tuileries garden in Paris, and people touch them all the time. Some body parts more than others, though, just like your husky... :-)
As I'm sure has been said many times already on this thread, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Personally, I find the 'Flore' statue very attractive. The point was that these bronzes are there for the touching, that touching a sculpture is not out of place (unless it can damage it of course), but is in fact the best way to enjoy and literally grasp a sculpture.
Question remains: what is perfection? What is perfect? One man's perfection is the other's worst nightmare.
d
Beauty you might say is the relational make up of a particular form, species of object. The degree this relational form is violated is the degree the object approaches non-being, a monserosity of form and/or function is not beautiful and will not long be. It is first a conscious evaluation, in the absence of consciousness of course there is nothing. The healthier the being/object the more beautiful it is.
What Nicholson should have said.
"What counts as beautiful, Pal? That's ALL that counts. "
In other words, do you believe in ‘true judges’ whose sensibilities are perfectly calibrated for the maximization of aesthetic pleasure, such that their hypothetical joint verdict on matters of aesthetic value fixes the aesthetic facts?
No. But I'm willing to be convinced if there were good evidence.
Quoting Natherton
Tease that out. Not sure what it means or how it would work. And it sounds like a fancy language for the old fashioned idea of 'good taste'.
Lucy, a gorgeous gal!