Week 2 Beauty

 


For this assignment we read and annotated "Every man knows where and how beauty gives him pleasure": Beauty Discourse and the Logic of Aesthetics by Amelia Jones response to Dave Hickey's book, The Invisible Dragon: Four Essay's on Beauty.  

Dave Hickey argues for the unruly vitality of the human imagination against forces of economic, political, and academic control. It’s a book that wants art to be made in a state of absolute individual freedom, where forms and ideas contend for survival in an imaginative free market governed by nothing but desire: the desire to make art and the desire to see or own it. He believes that ideas expire but beauty stays the same throughout time. 

Dave Hickey believed himself to be the arbiter of beauty because he thought that his opinions were superior, or had a great influence or authority over what others might believe beauty is. What Hickey does is different than what art historians do because Hickey wrote about how art work looked, not what the artwork meant. He believes that the way that art work is viewed by historians and art critics is corrupt, and that his way of seeing something through a naked eye and being moved by it makes it more beautiful than seeing something in context of being considered valuable. He believes he is arts savior from ideology. It is naive for him to ignore the context of an artwork and declare his way of seeing the art work the “right way” and to ignore the message and history behind the art work. It is almost like seeing the world through a child’s eyes and not knowing or understanding exactly what you are looking at it. Seeing a bumblebee for the first time might seem uninteresting but knowing their importance on the planet makes you see them through educated and understanding eyes, seeing the importance and therefore making it interesting. (Maybe even beautiful).

When Dave sees an art work he doesn’t wonder why it was created, or the message behind it (if I understand correctly) he only sees it as pleasurable for him to look at or not pleasurable for him to look at. Dave Hickeys view of beauty is not Ethnocentric because they evaluate the work based on contemporary politics and culture; practice, education, race, time period, etc. 

There is no way to make a definition of universal beauty that isn't ethnocentric, elitist, racist, sexist etc. Beauty is (in my opinion) objective and subjective. Beauty, in art work specifically, is different depending on who is looking at it. Art work should provoke thought and feelings and perhaps even memories which means that no two people experience the same viewing. I don’t believe that there is a definition of universal beauty.

“Beauty is one of those great mysteries of nature, whose influence we all see and feel; but a 
general, distinct idea of its essential must be classed among the truths yet undiscovered. If this 
idea were geometrically clear, men would not differ in their opinions upon the beautiful, and it 
would be easy to prove what true beauty is.” 
Johann Winckelmann.

Cite:

Amelia Jones, “Every Man Knows Where and How Beauty Gives Him Pleasure: Beauty Discourse and the Logic of Aesthetics," in Emory Elliott, Louis Freitas Caton & Jeffrey Rhyne (eds.), Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age (Oxford University Press, 2002)



Comments

  1. Alexis RandolphDecember 5, 2022 at 7:19 PM

    Leilani, I really enjoyed reading through your blog but I especially like how you worded your last paragraph. I feel you worded that very simply, eloquently and right to the point. I very much like the concept that there can be no definition of beauty that isn't shadowed by that person's experiences and views.

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