Chardin and Proust, on the Beauty of the Everday

Still Life with Plums, 1730

Rather I should say: Me, on Chardin and Proust, on the beauty of everyday things like jugs, water, and fruit in an article up on Escape Into Life magazine.  Being able to see the beauty in the commonplace is surely a quality to be valued.  Chardin's still life above looks nothing like my messy kitchen table--but then perhaps it does more than I can appreciate.

I'd love to hear what you think about the article.  This train of thought spun off my enjoyment of De Botain's How Proust Can Change Your Life, an enjoyable book I shared earlier this month here and also worth a look.

Ravels in Review Friday

It's been a long time since I did a Ravels in Review post between my trip to Costa Rica and skipping last week because there was very little that needed to be summed up. It's so nice to be swinging these art ravels in full force, you won't even here me rail on the weather. Especially as it is supposed to be a fantastic 71 degrees in NYC today.

But as to these past ravels, you'll see we have some interesting debates raised as to beauty, what it is and whether society values it, tales of rapscallions both old and new, a review of MoMA's photography exhibition Into the Sunset, and we even poked our nose across the pond to check out happenings at the Louvre and the situation for art recovery in L'Aquila.
Whew--time to take a breath. I also am excited by the idea of a public cafe cum art studio. So read, enjoy, comment: I always like to hear from people.

If you're wondering why I've said so little about Costa Rica, it's not that it was a cultural black hole per se. Watching a soccer match between Costa Rica and Mexico proved to be quite the cultural experience, and Costa Rica possesses great natural beauty. Not to mention surfing, zip lining, sloths (like the cute one above), toucans and tons of monkeys. It makes for a wonderful vacation, just not so artsy.



I surfed! (the smallest waves). Anyhow, happy Friday to you all! Enjoy the warm weekend!

For or Against: Britain's beauty

Britain recently hosted a debate that has gotten a lot of airtime across the pond, debating the statement 'Britain has become indifferent to beauty.' With the exception of multiple references to the (British) National Trust and some purely English rhetoric, it's a debate that would feel equally at home on these shores. If Americans were to have a national debate on the topic of beauty, that is...

The Guardian lays out the respective positions with 4 short essays from some avid, diametrically opposed bastions of culture. That's my kind of journalism: argumentative, honestly biased, and a tad mocking. Stephen Bailey goes right for the jugular in the opening article with an ad hominen attack, "Bereft of optimism or enthusiasm, bloated with sly and knowing cynicism, [my opponents] see no value in contemporary life. Nothing to them is so howlingly funny as poor people going shopping in Tesco." And it gets better from there.

Check it out, and find out the similarities between Botticelli's Venus and a Kate Moss ad. Oh, and the coldly intellectual beauty of Roger Scruton makes an appearance as well.

That Intellectual Kind of Beauty

Beauty is instantly recognizable. What is a little more difficult is to pin down exactly what beauty is. Even is you missed the debate regarding Theodore Dalrymple's Beauty and the Best, you still have a chance to get into the latest aesthetic theories by checking out the prolific writer and philosopher Roger Scruton in a book entitled, properly, Beauty.

Beauty as Scruton means it is of a specifically mental rather than visceral nature. Along with Sebastian Smee of The Guardian, I rather think Scruton does an injustice when he relegates beauty to an act of rational contemplation. Like every other book on beauty, it deals with whether we can make value judgements about art, i.e. can something be better or more beautiful, than another. He also considers whether art can be moral, rather an old-fashioned question but then so is the question of beauty.

sd

What kills me about books like this is they tackle a huge and general subject, and then meander bombastically about for 100 pages. Dalrymple's article made his argument precisely, even without him repositing Kant.

sd

The best primer for any discussion of beauty, as far as I'm concerned, remains Umberto Eco's On Beauty, which, with it's thickly illustrated pages, is a thing of beauty itself. Scruton either ripped off Eco's jacket cover, or Renaissance woman remain the ideal of beauty...

http://aphainventions.com www.condron.us

Ravels in Review Friday (already!)

Has another week really passed? It seems so here in Art Ravel's land, which has been hopefully busy despite a recurrence of hangovers.

Reasons to be hopeful:

1) Spring has returned to Manhattan and gallery hopping can commence again, as I document here. Sure, in between then and now we had some freezing days, but a thaw is coming. *Could also be a reason to be hungover.

2) YouTube's content gets more fun by the minute. See Richard Serra shovel Vaseline under Mathew Barney's direction. Not to be missed.

3) A new play by Moises Kaufman shows us how to make time stand still, in addition to its other good qualities.

4) In another exorbitant claim, a man has discovered the secret of beauty. *Could also be a reason to be hungover.

5)I said goodbye to Culture Pundits, and hello to cool art magazines.

6) Asking questions about Kara Walker, rather than critique, in a further positive, hopeful effort.

And so what do I think sums up this week, its hopes, its hangovers?

Lobsters, obviously. Why? Ask the Surrealists, or read Signs of Spring.

The Secret of Beauty

Math.

That's right, math is the secret of beauty. Or a least of beautiful design as it relates to architecture, furniture and other decorative arts. Horace Brock claims to have discovered that the secret of beautiful design is "themes" (motifs such as a curve or line) and "transformations" (changes in the motif, such as size, rotations). People find only a middling amount of complexity beautiful, so if there are many themes, there should be few transformations, and vice-versa.

Brock claims his theory goes beyond Fibonacci, and other calssic models of beautiful form.

It sounds simplistic, to say the least, and even more like a vague description of how objects physically must appear. Brock, based on this Boston Globe article, seems to have an interesting personality, if only for calling aesthetic philosophers Kant, Schiller, and Hume "fuzzy wuzzy." He gets extra credit for saying about art's effect on him, "it's all a variation on an orgasm, isn't it?"

I'm not arguing that form, whether you classify it as themes or motifs, is unimportant. I would argue that it is not the secret of beauty, only a component. N'cest ce pas?

"Beauty and the Best" and a Boyfriend

“Artists should be separated from people who do creative things” was my boyfriend’s response to my description of Theodore Dalrymple’s article in The New English Review, mentioned previously here.

By that, he meant that saying a chef was an artiste was hyperbolic, only meaning he cooked very well. He also meant that more conceptual and non-traditional works of contemporary art, such as rings of circles in duct tape or performances where a person sits on a box for days or even Pippilotti Rist’s video and sound installation in the atrium at MoMA, are cool, are visual, and are creative but that they are not art.

Dalrymple’s trenchant article has stayed in my mind, but all my conclusions from it seem to be drawing lines in the sand, much as my boyfriend’s statement does. “This is Art; this is not.” As if there were a right and wrong, and a good and bad when it comes to art.

But in fact, isn’t there? Art requires a set of aesthetic values to be judged by, if we are to make judgments at all. Life and art, or at least my life and art, are more than a series of perceptions. They have meaning to me, and they do because I assign to all things value. This is no formal declaration of organizing principles either for myself or of culture in general. But as my life has meaning, and art has meaning to me, and I think some organizing principle guides my perceptions of art.

Dalrymple’s article feels true to my experiences. He considers popular contemporary art to be shallow and created by egoists who are too afraid to create something beautiful, not to mention lacking the technical means and knowledge of an artistic heritage to do so. Think of Jeff Koons, who he mentions, or Damian Hirst or Murakami. To strive for beauty seems too earnest, almost gauche today.

So perhaps my boyfriend and Dalrymple are saying similar things. One feels it is not art, the other that it is bad art. Perhaps I agree. My amusement and interest with much of contemporary art is just that; and those feelings are different than a reaction to something beautiful. People who look can find beauty and an expression of the human condition in a falling leaf or the texture of a wall. A beautiful work of art makes those qualities apparent to those who weren’t looking.

Ugliness, More than Skin Deep

"It is a fact universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a fortune must be in want of a wife." So begins Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, and this tongue-in-cheek maxim could perhaps be qualified by more recent research to state: "a single man in posession of a fortune must be in want of a beautiful wife." As a New York Times article points out today, the more beautiful a woman is, the wealthier her husband tends to be.

Indeed, who wouldn't want a beautiful wife? Beauty is more than just beauty. Because beauty, historically and today, is associated with virtue and intelligence. Thus, beautiful people are even payed more. The NYT article discusses 'ugliness' as a quality coming up more in public discussion, everywhere from the popular TV show "Ugly Betty" to Umberto Eco's art history tome On Ugliness, which I've recommended in another post on ugliness. It ends by discussing a new awareness of ugliness as a quality discriminated against, similar to race or gender. Certainly a fair point.

More interesting though, is how ugliness has been systematically ignored throughout history and why, if at all, we should remove the stigma. Beauty has been discussed ad nauseum, while ugliness, as Eco points out, has simply been considered the opposite. Ugliness, in its grotesque mutations and fascinating sinfulness has all the appeal of Milton's Satan, who remains far more compelling than his God. Beauty, like perfection, is boring. Absolute symmetry only means you need to see half the face before you know everything that you need to know. If one considers ugliness or beauty something more than superficial, then I think one has to acknowledge that it as a very powerful force. Look at the variations of ugliness below:

In defense of this misunderstood phenomena, I've pointed out the ugliness is more interesting and more complex than beauty. In addition, aside from the fact it is uneradicable and necessary to a conception of beauty, ugliness should have a stigma. Beauty and ugliness go behyond the skin deep. They express qualities beyond symmetry and proportion, and to limit them to simplistic ideas of Barbie dolls and Ugly Betty's is to limit our cutural heritage. Why is uglyness such a loaded term? What is it we fear? Death. Sickness. Deviation from the norm. Evil.

Tomorrow expectations of beauty will be reversed. It's Halloween, when people embrace the ugly and scary and creepy. However, it's more fair to say that the scary, creepy, and horrible are in themselves ugly. With costumes of monsters and witches, people embrace their deepest culture fears. (Obviously, this article is not going out to all those skanky barmaids and Playboy bunnies. Yawn.)

Halloween is a celebration of all that ugliness signifies, and even if we as a culture only give it one night before shedding our talismanic ugly skins and returning to our beautified selves, it is an important expression of all the variety and power of ugliness.

Grotesque Old Woman: Why did Leonardo and Matsys depict you?

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) sketched the head of the woman to the left. Flemish painter Quentin Matsys (1466 - 1530) painted the oil portrait below. People have generally assumed that Matsys was copying Leonardo. Obviously, there is a remarkable similarity between the two heads produced in roughly the same time. Both artists had an interest in the ugly as much as the beautiful, and these images have popped up multiple times in my reading on ugliness and on portraiture. I think these two works say a lot about the nature of beauty and function of portraits.



I've read that Leonardo despaired of finding true beauty after struggling with the Vitruvian man, and turned more to grotesques and caricatures. I don't find this very convincing. Ugliness, just like evil to good, is so much more interesting than beauty. Also, throughout his life, Leonardo displayed an acute attention to all aspects of life.

So there are many questions about who this woman is, who drew her first (assuming she is the same woman), and why she was drawn. This oil is one of Matsys's best known pieces today, and, once considered simply a copy of Leonardo, is now thought to depict a real person with Paget's disease, though it is sometimes said to be a portrait of Margaret Countess of Tyrol, also known as "the Ugly" or "Satchel-mouth." Was it a commissioned portrait of an individual, or a grotesque head done for fun? Without answering any of these questions, I think one can delve into the ideas of beauty and portraiture that informs these works.

Beauty in the Renaissance era functioned as an outward sign of one's inner self. Beauty was associated with goodness, and ugliness with vice. Paradoxically then, females--as the original temptresses-- were either beautiful and pure, or ugly and lecherous. What a man is to do in those circumstances, I don't know. More and more in this time, we see men paying homage to ugliness as the safeguard to chastity, or ridiculing old women for their fading charms, or chastising women for using make up to alter their appearance and trick people. In this portrait, the woman is clearly ugly. She does not seem lewd, nor does she seem made up. In Matsys portrait, her old-fashioned bonnet would have made her seem additionally ridiculous. However, Matsys portrait--perhaps just because of the oils--makes her look like a real individual, especially in the eyes, whereas Leonardo's sketch seems like another of his grotesque heads even as the bulbousness of the figure is less pronounced.

Are the images of the grotesque women meant to depict a real person (or people)? I would argue that both fall into the tradition of the caricature, placing them squarely at odds with beauty. Notice, though, how despite her ugliness she is not revolting. Caricatures, by creating a harmony out of the disproportions of ugliness, neutralize the bad associations that ugly females had. Albeit at the same time as it mocks and dehumanizes its subject, caricature elevates ugliness to a kind of beauty. It is a really interesting phenomenon, documented in Umberto Eco's On Ugliness, which I highly recommend.

There are very few women who have spanned the centuries by being Quasimodos. Women are traditionally celebrated for their beauty or virtue. These two, or one, women interest me. If anyone know more about them, please let me know.

Ray Caesar and Ugliness with Beauty

Recently I came across the works of Ray Caesar (feel free to check out his very nice web site from which I pulled these). I think the images are lovely: striking and rich palette and a painterly feel (as it happens, the images are produced digitally). The images are often of beautiful fantasy women, typically in romantic period costume and in luxurious, ornate settings...with deformities. Not deformities that actually happen to people, but like the one to the left: octopus-like tentacles. The combination of the beauty of the style, which suits the preconceptions of beauty we bring to glamorous women in Victorian costume, twists the ugliness of these unexpected, unnatural additions into an uncanny mix. In some of his more explicitly sexual works, there is the added odd charm of liscentious and uncanniness and beauty. The effect: disturbing.


Distrubing in a light way, the kind you never need think about twice. The uncanny, as a mix of ugliness and beauty, is ground mined during Romanticism and liscentious ugliness reared its serpent head in the works of Decadents. The mix of straight-laced Victorianism with alien qualities is nice, the skill of the graphics excellent, and the style beautiful. The dreamy Surrealism of Dali, as well as similar plasticine molding of form is "pretty," as in attractive.

But what interest me is the use of prettyness and ugliness together. Does the style beaut-ify the ugliness depicted? Does Caeser succeed in making beautiful pictures of uncanny, ugly things? I think so. But I think that is the sum total of his charms, and there is much more to be said for ugliness in art. For example, can it be ugly, if it's good art?