Beauty In Art

Centuries ago, the philosopher Immanuel Kant could discuss it as an aspect of the moral sense of what it was to be human — part of how human beings aspired to higher ideals and dignity. Today, these lofty sentiments seem alien and unreal. Did people really think like that? After all the horrors of the last century, and the continued horrors of this one, who could still believe in the value and goodness of the beautiful? What no longer functions in the idea of beauty is the sense that it represents something of the value and importance of being human. We can call artworks, objects or other people beautiful, but this is disconnected from any greater purpose or aspiration.

But art has become largely indifferent to the idea of the Good, in the big, old-fashioned, capital G sense of the word. Contemporary art tends to reflect the cultural mood of its time, and today any talk of beauty is sceptical or ironic. Art no longer presents a positive take on what humanity might be capable of. Nothing good about human beings, then. The idea of beauty was always about how much human beings valued their own humanity — about how beauty stood in for the optimism that everything could, eventually, be beautiful, or Good. But since we see the human world as an ugly place, beauty no longer matters in art.

So let me follow his lead by creating an initial distinction: In art, the beautiful faces of muses and fillies have already garnered centuries of attention. The media have since adopted this fixation and continually subject women to judgment based on their physical appearance, creating normative and restrictive notions of beauty. Beauty, as I understand it, is far more than a pretty face.

And yet, it is often the beauty we perceive in works of art from the past or from another culture that makes them so compelling. When we find something beautiful we become aware of our mutual humanity. Take, for example, the extraordinary painting Yam awely by Emily Kam Kngwarry in our national collection. Like so many Indigenous Australians, Kngwarry has evoked her deep spiritual and cultural connection to the lands that we share through some of the most intensely beautiful objects made by human hands.

Emily Kam Kngwarray, Anmatyerr people. We can uncover her choices—the mix of predetermination and instinct of a maker in the flow of creation. It is not our cultural differences that strike me when I look at this painting. I know that a complex set of ideas, stories, and experiences have informed its maker. But what captures me is beyond reason.

It cannot be put into words. My felt response to this work does not answer questions of particular cultures or histories. It is more universal than that. I am aware of a beautiful object offered up by its maker, who surely felt the beauty of her creation just as I do.

Navigation menu

Let me be clear. I am not saying that works of art ought to be beautiful.

What I want to defend is our felt experience of beauty as way of knowing and navigating the world around us. The aesthete — a much maligned figure of lateth and earlyth century provides a fascinating insight on this topic. Aesthetes have had a bad rap.

To call someone an aesthete is almost an insult. It suggests that they are frivolous, vain, privileged, and affected. But I would like to reposition aesthetes as radical, transgressive figures, who challenged the very foundations of the conservative culture in which they lived, though an all-consuming love of beautiful things. For Wilde and his followers, the work of art — whether it be a poem, a book, a play, a piece of music, a painting, a dinner plate, or a carpet — should only be judged on the grounds of beauty.

They considered it an utterly vulgar idea that art should serve any other purpose.

Next Question of the Month

Men like Wilde were an open threat to acceptable gender norms—the pursuit of beauty, both in the adoration of beautiful things, and in the pursuit of personal appearances, was deemed unmanly. It had long been held that men and women approached the world differently. Men were rational and intellectual; women emotional and irrational. These unfortunate stereotypes are very familiar to us, and they play both ways. When a woman is confident and intellectual she is sometimes deemed unfeminine.

When she is emotional and empathic, she is at risk of being called hysterical. Likewise, a man who works in the beauty industry — a make-up artist, fashion designer, hairdresser, or interior designer — might be mocked for being effete and superficial. We only need to look to the tasteless comments made about Prime Minister Julia Gillard and her partner Tim Mathieson to see evidence of that today. By the s, many caricatures were published of a flamboyant Wilde as a cultivated aesthete. How far is the aesthete from the ape, it asked. The aesthete was a dangerous combination of male privilege, class privilege, and female sensibility.

The Bright Young Things, as they were called, were the last bloom of a dying plant — the last generation of British aristocrats to lead a life of unfettered leisure before so many were cut down in their prime by the war that permanently altered the economic structure of Britain. Stephen Tennant was the brightest of the Bright Young Things.

He was the youngest son of a Scottish peer, a delicate and sickly child whose recurrent bouts of lung disease lent him a thin, delicate, consumptive and romantic appearance. Through the character of Charles, Waugh grapples with the dilemma of beauty vs erudition. Aesthetes like Wilde and Tennant, cushioned by their privilege, transgressed the accepted norms of their gender to pursue a life not governed by reason but by feeling. This is a radical challenge to our logocentric society; a challenge to a world that often privileges a rational masculine perspective that fails to account for our deeply felt experience of the world around us.

How, then, should the art critic proceed today when beauty counts for so little in the judgement of works of art?