ART AND BEAUTY - TO DISCUSS

'ahhhhh beauty'
its about aesthetics, whats that you ask?...  (click here)

"Aesthetics (also spelled æsthetics or esthetics) is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste. More broadly, scholars in the field define aesthetics as "critical reflection on art, culture and nature."quote from wikipedia


For more on beauty, interesting essay here

WHY ART? or SOLVING THE BIG HEAD PROBLEM

David Lance Goines 

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty;"
that is all Ye
know on earth, and all ye need to know.

- John Keats (1795-1821), Ode on a Grecian Urn (29) 

And the true order of going, or being led by another, to the things of love, is to begin from the beauties of earth and mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty, using these steps only, and from one going on to two, and from two to all fair forms to fair practices, and from fair practices to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is. - Plato (c 428-c 348 BC) Dialogues, Symposium 211 (30) 

MAYBE THIS IS JUST A BAD TRANSLATION. Though the impenetrable load of double talk that Plato has here shoveled out sounds nice (especially if you don't really think about it but just let the words wash over you like warm honey, and don't actually have to go out and do something with them), it isn't good for much. When you try to figure out how you can actually use Plato's ideas to make something beautiful, or evaluate something to discover whether it is beautiful or not, you find that this sort of philosophical lumber lets you down rather badly. 

So to begin with, let's just forget about totalitarian anti-art Plato and his incomprehensible ideal forms and the other-worldly mystic Saint Thomas Aquinas, nasty lunatic John Ruskin and that sausage-gobbling Kraut Hegel and all those old frauds and their transcendent hogwash.

Beauty is real. Beauty is the expression through art of wealth and power. The vehicle by which beauty comes into the world is art; anticipating the ideals of wealth and power, art gives form to the standards by which society judges itself. 

Art creates beauty. Art is the vanguard of taste, trumpeting fashion before it actually exists.

Art, like science, goes where the money is. If you follow the history of art, you also follow the history of political power. Where is the nexus of culture? Why, it is always where the most impressive military and economic society of the day holds sway. Babylonia, Egypt, Athens, Rome, Florence, London, Paris, New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo. These are, or have been, centers of beauty, taste and art. Not coincidentally, these also are or were centers of political and financial power. Artists are paid to tell everybody what beauty is, and to display that beauty for the glorification of their patrons.

Beauty is an index of leisure, which is itself an index of wealth, which is an index of power. Flower arranging, for example, takes a long time to learn and a long time to learn to appreciate. Poor people do not acquire these refined tastes. For the poor, these tastes do not exist. The subtleties of such things are totally lost on the poor. The poor do not much like the art of Rauschenberg, Oldenberg, Klee, Arp or Pollock. If they think of them at all, they think they're silly. Let's face it: only the rich can afford aesthetics. When the poor want to become like the rich they emulate the tastes of the rich.

About the only thing that is constant in beauty is that it is the opposite of ugly. (31) Ugly, too is a constant. It is whatever the rich, healthy, youthful, strong and powerful are not doing. 

Beauty is constantly changing, and culture-bound. What one person at one time finds beautiful, another person from another culture will often finds ludicrous, incomprehensible and ugly. So few of our young women wear brass hoops that stretch the neck, plates in their lips and heavy facial or body tattooing. Hardly any men on the streets of New York sport a penis sheath. We do not dye ourselves blue... for more click on the link above.

BUT MOST IMPORTANTLY WHAT DO YOU THINK?