Uncontrollable Beauty: Toward a New Aesthetics
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What ever happened to beauty? Since the late 1960s she seems to have been in exile. Postmodern artists traded her in for flirtations with truth, strength, and purity of form. It was then that women started stripping off their heavy makeup and Barbie doll clothing in an effort to gain equal footing with men. And men, anxious too to break some of society's molds, shed their business suits and leisurewear--then the paragons of male beauty. But as art critic Dave Hickey unwittingly predicted during the '80s, that quality--which Plato believed to be eternal and absolute--is the "issue of the '90s."
After three decades of playing wallflower because she was thought by many artists to be frivolous, easy, tired, and even shallow, beauty is dancing again. Uncontrollable Beauty is filled with exciting essays by artists, critics, curators, and philosophers whose definitions of this elusive quality are often at odds with the Platonic ideal. When beauty besets critic Peter Schjeldahl, his mind is "hyperalert," his body eases, and he is often aware of his "shoulders coming down as unconscious muscular tension lets go." Renowned sculptor Louise Bourgeois also experiences beauty as opposed to encountering it: "Beauty is a series of experiences. It is not a noun ... beauty in and of itself does not exist." Artist and coeditor Bill Beckley blames beauty's banishment on Wittgenstein--who, in a 1938 lecture at Cambridge, said that beauty is most often meant as an interjection "similar to Wow! or rubbing one's stomach"--and his undue influence on conceptual artists of the '60s and '70s. Each essay collected here is rigorous in its definition of this elusive yet powerful force in art and aesthetics. Taken together, the writings are an invigorating read for artists and viewers alike.
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Bill Beckley and David Shapiro have compiled a massive tome of essays, arguments, conversations, letters, and poetry to attempt to define aesthetics in all its varieties: painting, sculpture, concept of art, literature, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and poetry, among other disciplines. Among the tacticians of beauty called upon are Louise Bourgeois, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Peter Schjeldahl, Agnes Martin, William Rubin, Thomas McEwilley, and Robert C. Morgan.Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe notes that in the art world, "the idea of the beautiful is always threatening to make an appearance or comeback but it tends always to be deferred."Peter Schjeldahl weighs in: ""Beauty is Truth. Truth Beauty?" That's easy. Truth is a dead stop in thought before a proposition that seems to obviate further questioning, and the satisfaction it brings is beautiful."Santayana is quoted: "To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it."Agnes Martin: "When I think of Art, I think of Beauty, Beauty is the mystery of Life. It is not in the eye, it is in the mind. In our minds there is awareness of perfection."(Yet others have argued "beauty is in the eye of the beholder.").Louise Bourgeois: "Beauty? It seems to me that beauty is an example of what the philosophers call reification, to regard an abstraction as a thing. Beauty is a series of experiences. It is not a noun. People have experiences. If they feel an intense aesthetic pleasure, they take that experience and project it into the object. They experience the idea of beauty, but beauty in and of itself does not exist. Experiences are sorts of pleasure, that invoke verbs. In fact, beauty is only a mystified expression of our own emotion." These are just a few of the many conceptions that permeate this volume, which taken in its totality represents the wellspring of art itself, in its many forms and dichotomies. Jacqueline Lichtenstein talks of "Platonic cosmetics." Hubert Damisch ruminates on Freud and his rare and singular interpretation of Kant. Even the evidence and myth of Pygmalion, and, some feel, his modern antithesis, Robert Mapplethorpe, are observed.What is essential is the understanding of the nature of truth and beauty, from Aeschylus to Shakespeare to Francis Bacon's interpretations of the playwright. One volume can only penetrate the midst of internal and external debate that we see all around us. But its importance in the technological age is to remember that despite its necessity, the computer as a form can never replace the dynamics and feeling of professional artists, sculptors, painters, playwrights, poets, and novelists with an aesthetic form and grace.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Uncontrollable Beauty: Toward a New Aesthetics
Uncontrollable Beauty: Toward a New Aesthetics,Bill Beckley,David Shapiro,Allworth Press,1581151969,Aesthetics,Art,Art & Art Instruction,Criticism,General
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