It is particularly true in the late twentieth century, but always has been to a greater or lesser degree, that beauty is what serious people want to get beyond as quickly as possible when discussing works of art. Thus in Schiller beauty is inferior to the sublime because the latter leads to a condition of thought which is “independant of all sensuous affects,”1 which is to say, of all that is fundamental to the beautiful.
Likewise it seems worth remembering that art history was founded, by Winckelmann, on the opposition between the high and the beautiful, and that it is this which has now been replaced by the sanctimoniously reassuring opposition of the high and the low—wherein the low is good and the high bad, the meek symbolically inheriting the earth through a conversion of art into a redemptive practice which owes a great deal to Adorno, who oddly enough detested popular culture.
In the old art history, the one where we had works of art—as opposed to images involuntarily demonstrating how wicked the west has always been, how unpleasant its upper classes, and how corrupt its artists—the beautiful was what the high became when it went into decline. In the revisionist and de-aestheticised version of the past currently popular with academics and art dealers, the inherent fraudulence of the high is exposed and redeemed by the symbolic and retrospective triumph over it of the low, which is to say that its decline is realized not only by default but by a keen critical will which demystifies it. Where, however, in the old art history a modicum of the beautiful, however distracting, was nonetheless necessary inasmuch as it was what got you to look at the sublime subject in the first place—it was when the work was “only” beautiful that you had to worry—in the Victorian atmosphere which has prevailed in art criticism since the middle of the nineteen seventies beauty is completely out of the picture. There is no need for it once there is no need for art—as opposed to generally cultural—objects. In that contemporary critical discourse in the visual arts is clearly more interested in the generally cultural it doesn’t actually require art very much of the time, and can therefore do without beauty more or less altogether—or, which is the same thing, administratively speaking, can imagine itself able to do so.
In this regard it is important to note that the current administration of contemporary and past art, which is united largely by a theoretical reconciliation between Foucault and the Frankfurt Institute, the latter having first been reconciled with Duchamp, had the way cleared for it by two generations of American artists whose influence and attitudes to art it has sought to replace with its own, but who shared with it and one another an eagerness to get beauty out of the way. Both Barnett Newman and Don Judd, for example, identified all that they did not want art to do with a European—i.e., decadent—preoccupation with the beautiful, in both cases inventing a completely fanciful history of European painting in order to illustrate the sublime highness of their respective, and different, ambitions. It is an irony that, having helped to invent a new and improved Duchamp in order to displace Greenberg’s Kantian view of painting and art in general—therefore a view founded on the differential of the beautiful and the sublime—Judd and the literalism with which he replaced Greenbergian “opticality” should have been displaced by Duchampianism, but that is another story. Suffice it to say here that the contemporary art world, having de-aestheticised art and replaced it with a species of cultural anthropology—over which the ghost of Kant continues to hover because people, art historians and dealers especially, have to be able to say why one object should be valued more highly than another—represents at the least an intensified version of the traditional situation. Today more than ever beauty is always the “merely” beautiful while the sublime is never “merely” sublime, nor history “merely” historical, nor, to move towards anthropology and away from a compromised teleology, identity “merely” identity or oppression “merely” oppression.
In my opinion this is a sign of beauty’s great strength. Its constant diminishment demonstrates that it places a limit on critique, and I think therefore that it is best to think of beauty as frivolous. Derrida, following Condillac, has discussed the frivolous as the one concept which the dictionary cannot manage, since a serious definition of frivolity is an oxymoron, which means that it is literally the only idea which the fundamental institution of serious discourse—the dictionary being seriousness as such—can’t contain. To theorize beauty as frivolous, then, is to describe it as that which one can’t get past quickly except by forgetting that it’s the one element in one’s thinking that eludes the regime of definition under which every other concept that one knows and uses is happy to labour. Such willful absent-mindedness could in itself call into question one’s own seriousness, but it usually does not.
Moreover, beauty would have to be frivolous in order that it could be secular. I don’t see how it could be frivolous until it had been rescued from the clutches of religion, now known as ideology (which is the religious masquerading as the secular), at least in its organized form, and for that reason I propose that one think about beauty not only as frivolity but as glamorousness rather than goodness. “Glamour” is an ideolectical corruption of the word “grammar,” which seemed to have magical power to the Scots when writing was first introduced to them. Magic also places a limit on the discursive. It was of course prohibited by the established church—which wanted to be not only writing’s source but also to restrict it.
Kant doesn’t define beauty as frivolous but does identify it with freedom from concepts beyond itself, except in regard to beautiful women. As is well known, Kant doesn’t say anything about beauty as a property of art except that one might describe some art works as beautiful in this or that sense. He finds beauty which is free from government by other ideas, which is to say from having to do a useful job for which it didn’t necessarily ask, in flowers. Flowers belong to a sphere of understanding which does not require them to do anything other than look good. However, Kant insists on a purpose which comes from somewhere else when beauty is the property of a woman. When women are pretty that quality is supposed to be reconciled with, in the sense of being ancillary or dependant upon, the obligations which come from being a person.
That is precisely what happens to beauty in discussions of works of art, or did when the beautiful used to come up in such contexts, as it nowadays does only very rarely. It is, I think, complicated by the sense in which beauty has to be feminine.
It has to be feminine because beauty, in Kant and subsequently, is perfect and therefore seen to be complete. In Kant and since, beauty exists—is known to us as something we can talk about—in a differential with the sublime. In Kant and Schiller and everybody since, beauty is there always to give way to the sublime, which is that in which reason finds itself. The sublime is limitless where the beautiful is finite, and in being able to grasp the sublime’s limitlessness the human subject finds its own autonomy. (Paul Guyer has explained that Kant never said works of art were autonomous, indeed that they could not be given his definition of them as intended objects, while the subject finds its autonomy, or idea of freedom, not before works of art but in contemplating the sublimity of nature.2 Unlike beauty, the sublime is always associated with force—Kant divides it into two sorts, the mathematical and the dynamic which underscores its association with reason as that which organizes the world.
While beauty doesn’t organize things, force means power, and its absence, powerlessness, or at least at first sight. In Kenneth Burke, the sublime is masculine and the beautiful feminine. So it is throughout (most) art history. Feminist aestheticians, perhaps too often tending to reverse the model while otherwise preserving it intact, have accordingly seen the sublime as the place in which to develop counter-masculinist theories of force subverted or turned against itself. I have elsewhere suggested that the sublime would have to be androgynous for several reasons, one of which would be the general realization that the masculine as such had become absurd. As force, or power, the sublime would have to be able to use or be composed of both the feminine and the masculine. Beauty would remain exclusively feminine by definition because in being complete it cannot be androgynous, and it can’t be masculine because it’s not about physical force. I should reject absolutely Burke’s opposition of beauty and the sublime as one between the passive and the active, however, and substitute for it one between the intransitive and the transitive. Beauty is irreducibly feminine if only by default, but as such it represents or embodies not powerlessness but implicit counter-power. Unlike the transitive it requires no object to activate it. Its completeness is a function of an absence of lack, which is the key to its frivolous independance from discourse, which requires a lack that it may supplement with reason, and lacking which has no purchase.
Helen of Troy is the Western image of intransitive attractiveness—the powerlessness, or counter-power, over which both reason and advertizing seek control. She has nothing to do with the war that is fought over her except that she is allegedly—through no clear fault of her own—its cause. This points to another inherent property of the frivolous which is also another necessary implication of beauty’s freedom from concepts, its irresponsibility. Helen’s irresponsibility drove the Greeks mad. They explained it away with the rationale that she was the daughter of a God. Norman Austin has explained that Euripedes’ play about Helen is about her being torn between her divine obligation not to be constrained by the laws of mortals and the requirement, as a woman unfortunate enough to be married to that doltish jock Menelaus, to do just the opposite and behave properly.3 At which, it must be confessed, she doesn’t seem to be very good. As Austin also explains, to spare Helen the woman shame, the Greeks invented a second myth—and it is this second one that Euripedes uses—in which Helen didn’t even go to Troy. Her image or phantom (eidolon) alone caused all the trouble, taking on a magical life of its own—and causing or being a part of a great deal of trouble—over which she had no control. It is as an image of the beautiful as feminine and irreducible to a regime of reasonableness—i.e., not responsible to it, and therefore irresponsible only from the regime’s point of view—that Helen is the fashion model’s model. The model models an image of intransitive attractiveness. Euripedes’ Helen is a Helen driven to distraction by implicitly social obligations directly reminiscent of those loaded on beauty by Kant once it becomes a quality possessed by a woman. She is supposed to care. Similarly, philosophy is always trying to find some way to unite beauty with responsibility, which, as I’ve said, it does by making it be that which gives way to the sublime. It is nowadays prepared to go even further, and to propose the subsumption not only of beauty into the sublime, but both into a larger goodness. J.M. Bernstein, to whose Fate of Art my own sense of the how a techno-sublime has come to penetrate or replace or parallel the one Kant and Schiller found in nature owes a number of debts, nonetheless calls for a work of art which has no need for beauty, and in that seems to me to advance an argument for an art debilitated by piety. Bernstein wants all that came after Adorno to return to him, and in brilliantly reconciling Derrida and others with the Frankfurt Institute, spells out succinctly Adorno’s position as one which is paradigmatic for an idea of art which in my opinion is too comfortable with the reasons it gives for its repression or displacement of the beautiful. Bernstein explains that for Adorno “modernism is best understood as a diachronic movement from beauty and taste to the sublime. ‘Works that transcend their aesthetic shape under the pressure of truth content occupy the place that aesthetics used to reserve for the sublime.’”4
One could not wish for a blunter statement than that of the will to submit pleasure to the demands of duty. It seems to me to recall Winckelmann, and the manly virtues of the eighteenth century to which one may relate his theory of the high as opposed to the feminine,5 in its valorization of an aggressive truth that exerts pressure and seeks to occupy what was previously the reserve of an earlier version of itself.
This leaves something out. As I think does a writer like Stephen Henry Ross, even though he pursues quite a different path than Bernstein or Adorno, never allowing beauty to be mired in a critique where it has lost from the start. Ross is clear that beauty is not a bad thing, nor expendable: “The gift of beauty is the abundance of things, is given from the good, framed as cherishment.”6 However, in discussing beauty as both a derivitive of and a problem for the good, Ross seems to have no place for an attractiveness which would be indifferent to its origins or obligations, or even one able to stick around: “In art, the gift of beauty is restricted, enters restricted economies of work, framed by history and judgment, framed in place. The gift of the good is sacrificed into work, in art, still bearing the mark of the good, witness to the abundance of the good, remembering wondrous beauties and catastrophic disasters.”7 Once again beauty has become something to be remembered, which is to say, as something which is not happening. Because it’s not allowed. If it were to happen one wouldn’t be able to contemplate the implications of only being able to remember it. This is the sense—which has everything and nothing to do with the form and conclusions of Ross’s argument—in which the postmodern preference for the abject is Victorian. It wants to make mourning a prior condition, and end, of pleasure.
Frivolity cannot be contained or transcended by mourning, and it is for that reason that it can’t be contained by theories of power; it simply has no place in the discussion. The best thing I’ve read on beauty’s provocative relationship to philosophy is by Jacqueline Lichtenstein, who has shown that it is in Plato that one finds what is at its root an exasperation with appearances and an insistence that truth is invisible—in other words that only philosophers can get at it. The history of beauty is a history of reason feeling threatened by it. The beautiful has always been irredeemable. Detached from what it fascinates by what makes it fascinating, it persists in being resistant to (whatever) power that seeks to administer it, in terms which have remained essentially the same if not from the start then from very early on. Schiller may claim that beauty falls short of the achievements of reason, but does not see that as a moral shortcoming. Plato does, disapproving of art because it is clever but not committed to the idea of the good, insisting that the pretty is in fact ugly in a politically correct sort of way which would not seem out of place in any contemporary art magazine: “I say the thing is ugly and shameful… because it shrewdly guesses at what is pleasant while omitting what is best.”8 As Lichtenstein says of this passage and the argument of which it is a part: “An entire tradition—tenacious, iconoclastic, and mutable in its form though monotonous in its bias—takes this definition as the model for its moral and aesthetic puritanism and as the constant implicit reference in its attack, filled with hate, fear, and discomfiture, against the pleasures of appearance and the charms of the tangible realm.”9
The best Burkean analysis of the sublime as a quality set in motion in almost entirely traditional terms in a contemporary work of art is Dave Hickey’s discussion of Robert Mapplethorpe in that it shows the logic of redemption on which that idea depends literally disappearing up a male asshole.10 That is the pure expression of Winckelmann adapted to the late twentieth-century condition of the masculine. I recommend all readers to compare Hickey on Mapplethorpe with Potts on Winckelmann. I, however, want to go elsewhere. Where Hickey takes things to one limit, as will be seen if one compares his deployment of the terms he employs with their traditional usage, I want to begin with another.
In replacing the traditional differential of an aggressively masculine sublime and a passively feminine beauty with one in which the sublime is androgynous and transitive, and beauty intransitive while still irreducibly feminine, I want to argue for beauty as an element in experience which is at once harder to get past or subsume than far too many—both boys and girls—have traditionally wanted and currently want to think, and, in that, not so incidentally to suggest that it would be by paying attention to the question of beauty that one could have visual art that was once again visual. The point has been made that Foucault’s research ends just before visual material enters the archive, and the contemporary fashion for works which are read rather than looked at—many being devoted to the inherent wickedness on which so much Western thought about looking is based—has facilitated the suppression of beauty by a quest for goodness by way of a parallel suppression of the visual by the discursive.
Hubert Damisch has pointed out, with regard to the contest for which Helen was the prize, that the Greeks and by implication the rest of us were lucky that Paris didn’t choose either of the other two Goddesses. Given that one represented the law and the other war, flattering either would presumably have considerably improved Troy’s tactical position while depriving Greece of an excuse for a war. Subsequent conflict, when it took place, would occur without beauty as cause or referent. It would just be a matter of power. A Foucauldian world as one might nowadays say. Very much what the art world is or must be insofar as it seeks to do without beauty.
However, as I’ve suggested, it can’t. Because it can’t do without Kant. Kant’s ghost hangs over everything because he redefined beauty as something with which one thinks, thereby making seeing an act of judment—rather than passive reception subsequently interpreted by reason—and in doing so rendered all art Kantian insofar as it involves judgments of taste. Art dealers sell non- or post-Kantian art objects, or alternatives to art objects, by calling on Kantian judgments and persuading customers of their validity (parodying or paralleling at the commercial level Kant’s feeling that once one believed a work of art to be good one had an obligation to convince others of one’s judgement.) Art historians similarly call forth the specter of Kant as Derrida has described the ghost of Marx being summoned in order that it might be both consulted and ritually exorcised. In a formulation such as Bernstein’s, judgment becomes involved in a connoisseurship of the post-aesthetic, of the skill with which one has been passed into the sphere of the true as opposed to that of the thrill. For my part I am baffled as to why Bernstein and others would not see that Adornoism’s own logic could suggest that beauty, in its frivolous indifference to reason, would not have something to offer as a model of subversion more difficult to contain than those which are themselves inversions of the power they are otherwise meant to subvert. Therein lies the relevance of beauty’s irrelevance.
I was part of a panel discussion about beauty recently with Arthur Danto, who at one point found it necessary to helpfully reassure another panelist that he was quite right to insist that I really do think Kant’s differential still works when it comes to making judgments about things in art galleries—and, perhaps even more importantly, when seeing in general—despite its having been formulated in the eighteenth century. Which last point seemed to me no more obviously germane than gravity’s being a seventeenth-century one while continuing to be useful if not indispensible in the present.
However, as I have indicated here, I want it to work in terms which make a frivolous use of Kant or at least adapt him to a necessary frivolity (un)grounded in part in his possible inconsistency when it comes to girls. I cannot see why one would not feel a (Kantian) obligation to theorize that which—skin deep, glamorous, attractive—brings theory to a stop but is the opposite of death, which also stops it. As I have suggested, I want to discuss this beauty in terms of a differential relationship with a sublime found, nowadays, less in a now finite nature than in an infinite technology which has overlaid or surrounded or otherwise appeared, irreversibly, alongside it. But here I have confined myself to a question about beauty.
Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe teaches in the Graduate Program in Fine Art at Art Center College of Design. His Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime will be published later this year by Allworth Press, New York.
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1. Friedrich von Schiller, “On the Sublime,” Naive and Sentimental Poetry and On the Sublime, trans, intro & notes Julias A. Tobias (New York: Fredrich Ungar Publishing Co., 1980) p.198.
2. Paul Guyer, Kant and the Experience of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) p.258 et passim.
3. Norman Austin, Helen of Troy and Her Shameless Phantom (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994) pp.137-203.
4. J.M. Bernstein, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992) p. 235.
5. See Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994) p.227.
6. Stephen David Ross, The Gift of Beauty: The Good as Art (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996) p.288.
7. Ibid.
8. Jacqueline Lichtenstein, “Plato’s Cosmetics,” in Uncontrollable Beauty, eds. Bill Beckley and David Shapiro (New York: Allsworth Press, 1998) p.86. The quote is from Plato’s Gorgias, the italics added by Lichtenstein.
9. Ibid.
10. Dave Hickey, “Nothing Like the Son, on Robert Mapplethorpe’s X Portfolio,” The Invisible Dragon, Four Essays on Beauty (Los Angeles: Art Issues. Press, 1993) pp.55-57.--------------------------------
"Beauty" by Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe. This edition incorporates the author's corrections to the version that appeared in the print edition of X-Tra, Volume II, No. 3.
Contents copyright by X-Tra and the individual contributors. All rights reserved.
