Elizabeth Prettejohn is also involved in the Defining Beauty exhibition on show at the British Museum at the time of this writing. I attended a symposium hosted by the British Museum in May of this year – 2015 – at which Prettejohn and others panelled a discussion on the topic of what defines beauty, which was entitled On Beauty.[11]
In certain art circles, beauty is rigidly relegated to the realm of purest subjectivity.[12] No possibility of any objective qualities is afforded it. But this is a recent phenomenon, as is demonstrated by the many opposing viewpoints expressed by historical figures who were not afraid to speak their minds on the matter of beauty's purpose – or supposed lack of purpose – in art.
Take, for example, the following quote by Prussia's Kaiser Wilhelm II from 1901:
"Art that disregards the laws and limits... is no longer art: it is factory work, trade.... Whoever... departs from the laws of beauty, and from the feeling for aesthetic harmony that each man senses within his breast... is sinning against the original wellsprings of art."[13]
Contrast this with what abstract expressionist artist Barnett Newman stated in 1948:
"The invention of beauty by the Greeks, ...their postulate of beauty as an ideal, has been the bugbear of European art and European aesthetic philosophies".[14]
In other words, according to Newman, beauty as an invention can be dismissed as an abstract artifice. Newman and his ilk were reacting to what they perceived to be pious veneration of artificial constructs of beauty by artists and philosophers in centuries preceding theirs. But they were also being funded by what could be perceived as nefarious agenda-laden forces who had designs on beauty and were also working against figurativeness in art.
From The Independent, in an article entitled Modern Art Was a CIA 'Weapon', dated Sunday 22 October 1995, written by Frances Stonor Saunders, we read:
"For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art – including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko – as a weapon in the Cold War. In the manner of a Renaissance prince – except that it acted secretly – the CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years."[15]
Why would the government encourage and even orchestrate the production of modern art? The Independent article goes on to state that "this new artistic movement could be held up as proof of the creativity, the intellectual freedom, and the cultural power of the US. Russian art, strapped into the communist ideological straitjacket, could not compete."
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