I am known to say harsh things in the name of the beautiful. I find it repugnant that so many artists put this concept as the only reason why they do art. They claim that artists have the sensitivity and the ability to make beautiful things. In fact they act like Archimedes. When they make art they through their hands in the air and say it’s beautiful.
There is a standard cultural joke that always works. The joke is portraying the artist manipulating or promoting shit. After all it is easy and sometimes funny to represent artists as promoters of shit as art in pop and media culture. It is believable and convincing that an artist would say and support the claim that shit is art or that shit is beautiful.
I would like to decontextualize the main ideas and notions that are motivating these discussions I start by pointing something that has often happened to me. I always say to the public that some of my subject matter is ugly and thus require a different visual approach from the one that is celebrated today. To this many artist question the ugly part by claiming that to them my work is beautiful and thus in contradiction with my main theses. I find their observation interesting but flawed. To them I offer the following explanations.
To many people involved in ordinary daily activities, there is the realization that sometimes we are looking at something very beautiful. It can happen that at some instance a particular object or person looks very nice, and engaging or sexy or stunning. It can be a passing moment or it could last for a long time. This is a universal experience. It comes and goes; it is obviously a personal and subjective experience everyone can empathize with. It can be argued that its cause is innate and primal.
This reaction does not differentiate between objects. We can say that each and every simple object in the universe is classified in terms of the ugly, the beautiful or the indifferent or simply the ordinary. It’s an easy classification. It uses the idea that we can think of all things as synonymous to names and the evaluation of these objects we think of in terms as an assignment of one of three categories mentioned above in other words a first order classification of objects. What I am saying is that we only are concerned with the name of the object not with its subject matter. For us a subject matter is not a first order concept
An artwork does not exist outside the human condition. There has to be an artist or artists that create the work of art otherwise art is not an activity, which would weaken one of the reasons of creating art. The work of art must have a subject matter. Thus to claim that an artwork is beautiful can be argued as not a simple statement, even though many argue that it simple is first order, in other words simple. Thus claims involve many ideas in relations to other art and other activities. For practical reasons we can claim that an artwork is a second order object. With a second order object we need a second order aesthetic. Second order notions of beauty are in relation to history, to culture, to the community and to the artistic activity, motivation and interpretations.
My art therefore has a second order beauty. Even though it is motivated by an ugly subject matter it is nonetheless very beautiful. This has bothered many. After all interpretations and evaluative processes are often difficult engaging and stressful. It is an essential process in the enunciation of cultural truth. To simplify my explanations I will use an example to explain myself.
Imagine taking pictures of destruction and tragedy and than having your pictures pronounced beautiful what a seemingly contradictory position to find one self in, very unpleasant and difficult to handle. No one will support this as such. This requires delicate handling and sensitive explanations Therefor we will take our thoughts and descriptions and some explanations further. A photograph can be refered to as a document of something that exists outside of the artist. We then push aside all notions of art when we look at the images. These images are not what they depict. They are however a testimony of how they were depicted. Thus for us we look at a photograph as a first order object, it’s just a photograph among many photographs, a simple object. When looking at the photograph as a second order object by interpreting the subject matter, by evaluating the image based on various aesthetic arguments we are outside the simple universe and in a more involved, cultural, religious, political reality. This is than the germ of my discussion. I claim that even though the subject matter is ugly. It is important that the realization of the artwork be beautiful.
This kind of beauty one finds whenever we are solving any problem. We know that not all solutions are elegant and beautiful. What we often celebrate in serious deductive arguments is the discussions that are generated because of these creations in the well-understood activity that is taking place.