Beauty

[e_dog]

The single most important feature of modern aesthetics has been the severing of the classic connection between art and beauty. The function of art, in was thought by many, was to transmit or convey the idea and sensation of the beautiful to the perceiver via the handiwork of the artist. With modern art (and indeed preceding it) comes the realization that art can convey things other than the beautiful, indeed that it can convey the horrible, such as war (e.g. Picasso's Guernica) without any pretense that there is beauty in suffering.
A century earlier, modern philosophy was grappling with the issue of conceptualizing the aesthetic realm of experience and the post-Kantian idealist Schopenhauer conceived of the aesthetic in a way which totally dispense with beauty (or so it seems). Kant had distinguished between the beautiful and the sublime but his conception of the latter (like most else) was obscure and riddled with aporia. Schopenhauer, took up much of Kant's problems but pushed tem in a new direction. For Schopenhauer, the sublime is an aesthetic experience characterized by a state of terror, the sprt of terror before the awesome power of nature that a person might experience when faced with a violent dark storm approaching. Thus, the aesthetic is primally witnesses in nature as well as human cultural creations of art. For Schopenhauer, the aesthetic is not some sort of detached academic contemplation but a state of existential mysticism. The sort of art that most closely attains this paradigm would seem to be music of a powerful dark, symphonic sort, for example, as Nietzsche would later identify in connection with the Dionysean principle of art (think Wagner and Beethoven, for instance) or, on the other hand, disaster films like where floods and earthquakes shallow civilizations (when not done in typically stupid Hollywood fashion).

[e_dog]

(continued)

In less dramatic, more socially-concerned fashion, the postmodern feminist critique of the beauty fixation takes a different approach. There percptions and claims about beauty are taken to be themselves products of a given social and cultural configuration which is not necessary but criticizable. Changing fashions and acceptable body images demonstrate the relative character of assessments of beauty, while the marketing and fashion industries demonstrate that publics can be manipulated to have certain perceptions of what is or isn't beautiful as a product of social conditioning and mediatized sterotypes ingrained in our thought structures. Beauty is seen as part of an ideology of objectivfying women as sex objects, or as dolls, or as prize wives or whatever. To feminists, the idea of beauty is caught up in patriarchy. To Marxists, on the other hand, beauty is seen as ideological in parallel though somewhat distinct senses. It is a concpeitons and lure induced by capitalist profiteering. Attention merely to the beautiful aspects of life, moreover, is seen as a frivilous pursuit that distracts from the attention to the reality of suffering and necessity of struggle to change conditions of life. In this, a culture of seriousness emerges, which however is smashed by the postmodern ironic ethic of play. This moment in the cultural theory wars enables the images and stereotypes of beauty to be used as a way of mocking and thus transcending (in thought) the system. (Consider the films of John Waters, or the photographic and textual art of Barbara Kruger.)