- It's just your opinion that Americans look sloppy.
- Caring about aesthetics isn't important to people who are independent thinkers.
- Ugly clothes aren't new--c.f. the leisure suit.
To an extent, I grant all of these are true. Therefore, let me take a different tack in explaining my larger point. Here's the question now: How do we define what is beautiful and what is ugly? Perhaps this is the angle I should have begun with all along. Let's examine it.
I could come at this from two different directions: what makes something beautiful, or what makes something ugly. My husband advises it would be easiest to start at beauty, and so I shall. Let me go directly to the beauty that is attracting me these days: India's traditional aesthetic. Since I'm wildly smitten with their textiles, I'll begin there. But I'll begin there after I've established some important points.First, let me establish that my reader and I agree that the word beautiful means something more than "I, personally, perhaps even idiosyncratically, like it." Everyone has specific taste, I'm not denying that, but there are qualities and principles that render some things beautiful. Even if you wouldn't wear it or display it, we are faced with things in the world that we must concede are beautiful. If I'm Rousseau or Emerson, I call to my reader's mind a sunset. Anyone want to argue that a colorful sunset is not beautiful? Didn't think so. Wait, hold on--there's always a guy in the back who wants to make an argument that his cousin has a retinal disorder that makes colorful sunsets agonizing to look at. Fine. It's possible to find a sunset painful--but that is not an argument against the beauty of sunsets; it's just a believe-it-or-not fact about that guy's cousin. In the end, no one is going to take a serious stand against the statement, "Sunsets are beautiful."
I had to bring up Rousseau and Emerson because the Romantics rear their carefully tousled heads when beauty is the topic. Romanticism unnerves me because it is relativistic and elitist, a great intellectual trap. It is no mistake that it arises with capitalism-they need each other. This will be the subject of other posts, I'm sure. Let me just make the note here announcing that I want to consider beauty without the sticky residue of Romanticism and it may not be possible to do so. I'm hoping I need only make use of their beauty-in-nature argument to put to rest the notion that beauty is too subjective to ever be discussed outside of simple statements of personal preference.
So then, is it possible to extend this assertion that beautiful things exist to the realm of material culture? Can we discuss the beauty of man-made objects? Surely we can all agree that this is beautiful:
That's a page from the Book of Hours. Anyone want to throw down that this is not beautiful? I'm not asking if it is your favorite image in the world. I'm not asking if you would hang it on a wall in your home. It may not be your taste exactly--but it is beautiful. (In choosing such an artifact, rather than a painting by Davinci or a sculpture by Michelangelo, I'm disclosing my alliance with the Arts and Crafts movement. I'm going to be employing their arguments, so c.f. William Morris on all that follows.) So, what makes it beautiful? Let me hazard an answer--and I'm interested in any other answers I'm missing, so let me know. The two most obvious reasons it strikes us as beautiful are the graceful lines and harmonious colors. I'd also say that it has a unique quality that renders it beautiful in the way a painting or sculpture is not: it is a text that has meaning in addition to its lovely images. It is an intensely human thing--a beautifully human thing--to create text and render it aesthetically pleasing. It's not the floral images that are the beautiful part. It is all beautiful. The print is no less pleasing than the leaves and flowers. So, why is the script also beautiful? It's not meticulously perfect. A computer could generate a more flawless text. Interestingly, I hear my students' voices in my head now. My generation might have asserted that this beautiful thing could be improved upon with some digital retouching. However, I think young people today would generally argue against that. There is a new appreciation for the telltale signs of a human hand at work. This gives me hope. Can I get a general agreement that this page from the Book of Hours is beautiful because of its hand-made quality? Would anyone want to go on record as the person who does not find the hand-crafted quality of this appealing? Anyone?
5 comments:
Sorry--can't keep the Romantics out. Shelley would argue (and I agree) that what makes the mountainous sunset beautiful is the eye of the beholder; the sunset is meaningless without someone watching it to pronounce it beautiful. What do I find beautiful about it? (Although I'm not a fan of Pater, here I'll have to get Pateresque.) There are the colors themselves, which are pleasing. There's a kind of built-in nostalgia for the end of day, any day, with the sunset as the last little bit of light before the darkness sets in. There's the mountain (cf. Schiller's On the Sublime) which strikes many people as beautiful with its height, its solidity, simply the way it stands out. (Remember that the earliest gods were often pictured as living on mountain tops.) And for me personally and privately, the mountain framed by the orange light makes me think of Brünnhilde's Rock, with Loge's magic fire surrounding and protecting the sleeping Valkyrie. There you have it--why I think the sunset is beautiful.
Am I missing something? Most of Dr. Enright's post seems to address why the sunset is meaningful or moving, not why it is beautiful.
I don't know that I have a coherent response yet (a thesis-driven response is what I mean there), but here are some things I thought about as I read your topic.
1. I agree: the page is a demonstration of beauty and I'd agree that the hand-made quality contributes to that. But I don't know if that guarantees its beauty. As a hand-crafter (knitting and crocheting), I've made some things that I believe most would agree are beautiful and artful--and, at least to me, they feel more artful because of the work I know went into them. I've also made some that are... less artful and not beautiful by anyone's definition. One (failed) project looked like yarn roadkill. So, I'm leery of agreeing that the image is beautiful because it is handmade, but I do agree that the hand-made aspect contributes to the beauty.
2. To take the discussion of beauty in another direction, I'm thinking about how we judge beauty in people. I saw a conference presentation once comparing two women (models) pictured on the cover of a Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. One was white and one was black (or, more precisely, multiracial, but the way we use racial/ethnic labels in our social hierarchies is a discussion for another time). I'm sure you'd recognize their names if I could remember who they were. They were pictured in an African tribal motif (of western swimsuit, but ignore that disconnect for now; it's not really the point), and the presenter argued that the black/multiracial model was "beautiful" enough to make the cover (she may have been the first African-American or African woman on the cover of SI) because her body, skin tone, hair, etc. conformed to more Anglo-European (white) beauty ideals.
The presentation sparked a debate between myself and a friend; I took the "yes, beauty standards are relative" side and she took the "no, there are absolute, empirical ideals that govern our understanding of beauty" perspective. It's an interesting question and the answer probably lies somewhere between the two sides (as it so often does). But, I'm wondering as we contemplate beauty in sunsets or textiles or pre-printing-press manuscripts: what aesthetic standards influence or govern our definitions of beauty and what are the cultural origins of those aesthetics? Are there cultural origins for all aesthetics? Are some empirical or "natural" (in a nature v. nurture kind of way)?
Natural views and/or events are difficult to compare with handmade/man-made items especially when trying to quantify something illusive as beauty. That said, I believe there are several comparisons. There may be some things that are beauty absolutes, but for completely different reasons. Take the sunset; Dr Enright gave us a good example of the filter we pass beauty through. He perceives the sunset through a literature and historical narrative. I heard a science writer on NPR (cannot for the life of me remember or find her name, though it was sometime the past 8 weeks or so) anyway she mentioned her husband, who was a scientist, viewed a beautiful sunset. His response (according to her many scientists think this was) was amazement at what a type of Fourier transform analysis would look like. She explained to we confused listeners that it was a type of analysis that graphed out the various lights and colors based on what in the atmosphere caused it – I think. The beauty may be the image, the parts, or the causes.
I would guess that our appreciation of beauty in manmade items – be they art or function or event, or a combination of all – is a combination of the filter and the respect for the creation. The page you displayed is not something I would put on a wall, but the combination of age, effort and detail is amazing. Or, thinking about opera. When we go to the opera, I sometimes immerse myself in what occurs in the pit, while Phyllis is fascinated by the costumes and stagecraft.
Who knows, there are probably neurobiologists out there that will tell is beauty is something that fires particular receptors and releases particular endorphins – and they may find the process of reaction to beauty the beauty.
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