Pulchrism: Championing Beauty as the Purpose of Art/Chapter 2
Aestheticism
Fortunately, we have solid historical records of the mid-19th century art movement which overtly championed the creation of beauty as the noblest human endeavour, and as the highest human ideal: the Aesthetic Movement.
In his Phaidon-published book Art Nouveau, scholar Stephen Escritt writes:
"The Aesthetic Movement, which reacted both against industrialisation's ugliness and Arts and Crafts' social moralizing, made an equally important English contribution to Art Nouveau. Attracting support among a fashionable stream of English upper and middle-class society between the 1870s and 1890s, it promoted the supremacy of beauty and the notion of 'art for art's sake', a philosophy that often spilled over into the kind of hedonism characterized in the lives of the playwright Oscar Wilde and the artist Aubrey Beardsley. It was in fact a Frenchman, the poet Theophile Gautier, who coined the phrase 'l'art pour l'art' when discussing Symbolist poetry, but it was in England that this religion of beauty was most widely applied to the visual arts."
He goes on further:
"In 1873 Walter Pater, an Oxford don and mentor of Aesthetes such as Oscar Wilde, famously invoked the aesthetic spirit in his Studies of the History of the Renaissance. Pater wrote of 'the desire for beauty, the love of art for art's sake'."[18]
So what happened to English, American, and European art between 1873 and 2015? Beauty was murdered. Striving for beauty in art was replaced by striving to excise beauty from art. Most artists and critics still refuse to see what is staring at them in the face: that they have been hoodwinked. When beauty was removed from its place as the primary purpose of art, art lost its purpose. Pure concept was foisted upon art as an impossible substitute, which was bound to spiral down into the chaos and nothingness we have as "art" today.
Jesse Waugh
Monarch Danaus plexippus
2014
Oil on canvas
Art became nothing. The conceptual low-point or high-point – depending upon how you look at it – the bottoming out of conceptualism – was perhaps best represented by Simon Pope's 2006 Gallery Space Recall – which consisted of nothing. The gallery was left completely empty. While this may seem clever and amusing, it was the natural end to the endlessly ironic conceptual extrapolation toward which entire generations of "artists" strove. It was also an unoriginal, uninspired and obvious idea, which must have been done many times before. "There was nothing to see, but seeing nothing made you a philistine," wrote critic David Llewellyn about Gallery Space Recall.[19] Gallery Space Recall serves as an example to illustrate that while Modern Art may not be dead per se, the Modern era with its conceptualist aftermath is most certainly over. I personally entertain hopes that a New Beauty Era is emerging.
This is not to say that abstraction – as was witnessed in the empty gallery space at Pope's "exhibition" – in itself cannot be beautiful – as much Japanese Zen art and design would prove otherwise – and I have stated this outright in my Pulchrist Manifesto (see the addendum or jessewaugh.com/manifesto). But there is a major difference between the motivation behind Japanese Zen art and the nihilistic art produced predominantly in Western countries in the 20th and 21st centuries: The difference is that Japanese abstraction has traditionally aimed at balance and creation, while modern Western art – at least that chosen for exhibition at major museums and galleries – has had existentialist annihilation (of matter, of substance) as its primary objective.
Moreover, Zen art from both Japan and China is concerned principally with the sublime transcendent – this it admittedly has in common with certain works of contemporary art – but Zen art is rarely deliberately demonstrative of the ugly, decayed or destroyed.[20] The very core function of Shintoism, as well as that of its spiritual antecedent Taoism, is worship of the awe-inspiring Kami spirit force of nature which is in varying manifestations terrifying and overwhelming – much like the Kantian notion the sublime. But this veneration of the awesome does not usually focus on the worship of trash, as does its superficially resemblant Western cousin – contemporary, conceptual art. There is respect for beauty inherent in the Kami and Chi (life-force) worship normal to Oriental religions. Without respect for beautiful order, there can be no sublimity and no transcendence.
Tantrism, as opposed to Zen, does indeed, in certain instances, put forth death, decay, destruction, and degradation as objects of worship. The "nothing exists that is not divine" (nasivam vidyate kvacit) mantra at the core of tantrism abolishes the division between the sacred and profane.[21] This opens up possibilities for good and evil, but fully allows for attempting transcendence through depravity. Many Hindus would argue that Kali or Durga worship brings them closer to god. Let’s accept this for the sake of argument and ponder what the varying forms of Hindu immolation – which tend to result from the veneration of death and destruction embodied in deities such as Durga – might achieve: Do they achieve sublimation? Is total destruction sublime? By definition it cannot be, as it actually destroys its participant. The sublime can be terrifying, but once it crosses the line into actual destruction it kills its audience.
This is the awful (though not awesome) conundrum we find ourselves in at the end of the Modern era: we find ourselves worshiping death, rather than the dynamo constructed by the thrilling natural opposition of beautiful life contrasted with terrifying death – chiaroscuro only exists where there is also light present. If we revere the corpses and faecal matter given sacred space in our museums and galleries, we ignore the existence of half the universe. A cursory comparison of the art of Alexander McQueen with the ironic mock-art of Damien Hirst illustrates this dichotomy clearly: where McQueen succeeded at creating a balanced, amazing Savage Beauty which included both life and death in its colourful and rich motifs, Hirst has failed because his oeuvre consists almost solely of one giant memento mori.
In other words, like a Puritan who has tried his hardest to rid the world of evil, Hirst has focused on trying to rid the world of life, although his use of butterflies might be considered a sort of penance to make up for all his sad morbidity, if there is indeed any sincerity in any of his art. Beauty and ugliness must be maintained as separate phenomena, and cannot be transposed by art relativists and subjectivists, if dynamism – not one-sided puritanism – is to prevail and make art beautiful.
Here is the crux of the problem of relativism: If everything is art, then nothing is art. If nothing is art, then everything is art. If everything is beautiful, then nothing is beautiful. If nothing is beautiful, then everything is beautiful.
We are handicapped in an age of political-correctness which has brainwashed us into accepting that discrimination has no merit. But it has to have merit if life is to have value. Otherwise we live in pure relativity, with no meaning.
Furthermore: If everything is relative, then nothing is relative. If everything is subjective, then nothing is subjective. For subjectivity to exist, there must be objectivity. And straight to the point: If relativity is to exist, then there must be an absolute. Any other line of thinking is logical fallacy.
Therefore it stands to reason that a given individual can rationally assign an absolute position to Beauty as the purpose of art. Just as he can rationally assign relativity to beauty if he so chooses. Both are logical stances which may superficially resemble opinions, but in fact can be entirely rational deductions. It is therefore within reason for me to assert the absolute position of Beauty as the purpose of art. Any argument against such a stance would be irrational.
Humanity has had centuries to come to a holistic understanding of the dynamics involved in the interplay between light and dark – they do not exist without each other, and if they can exist independently – to what avail? Nihilists worship nothingness in the same way that idolaters worship somethingness – both are only half of the whole. It is in the interplay between opposites that we find the truth – and the truth, as put forth by John Keats in his Ode on a Grecian Urn is that "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."[22]
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Jesse Waugh
Center (Bonsai)
2014
Oil on canvas