On Beauty and Ugliness

My last blog prompted me to look into the issue of aesthetics in art. Aesthetics is a vital component in art and I feel there is more to it than what Arnold Hauser wrote. The visual experience of looking at art should be enriching and if it achieves that through beauty or ugliness seems secondary. To have beauty as the main goal seems as limiting as not to have beauty as a goal.

Up until the early 1900’s art in the west was aimed at beauty according to Wikipedia , and since then there has been a steady revolt against beauty as the cornerstone of aesthetics in art. I am not sure how successful that revolt has been, as a lot of the art work I see in galleries around Charlottesville is trying hard to be beautiful and likable.

Visual art has to be based on some sort of aesthetics. The aesthetics in my art is governed by feeling and intuition. It has to feel right in relationship to the material and form I am working with. Clement Greenberg’s expressed it well in the 1960’s saying that “each artistic medium should seek that which makes it unique among the possible mediums and then purifies itself of anything other than expression of its own uniqueness as a form”. I guess beauty like everything else is relative and in the eye of the beholder.