The World of Art Has Abandoned Beauty and Aesthetics

 Once upon a time, beauty was a noble virtue and a philosophic ideal as opposed to a trip-wire of political correctness. Aesthetic considerations, often refined, formal and generally acknowledged if always subject to challenge, then determined what was beautiful, what was not. And the art world was the main venue where debates over relative beauty took place.

Not so much, if at all, anymore.

"Art today is less about the formal or aesthetic properties of an object than a way of talking about the intricately entangled, increasingly unstable world in which we live."  So said Ben Eastham, a London-based art critic in an essay entitled "The Case for Embracing Uncertainty in Art."

And, indeed, that quote is the only place in the entire, lengthy essay where the word "aesthetic" or "aesthetics" occurs. How about "beauty?"  That word doesn't occur at all.

Perhaps it all started in 1917 when Marcel Duchamp contributed a porcelain urinal signed "R. Mutt" and entitled "Fountain" to a New York art exhibition. Whatever the genesis, matters have come a long way since then, to the point where aesthetic considerations are about the last thing an art museum is likely to consider when mounting an exhibition of contemporary works. What the works, or what the artist (since the works themselves are often incomprehensible), says about society (rarely if ever anything positive), and whether the artist can be viewed as a disadvantaged minority of one sort or another, seem to be what matters most.

In other words, the world of art is today just another extension of the world of politics and social criticism. Why does it survive as such? Well, there is still a certain mystique about the whole business and a fascination over the celebrity it can bring. In addition, there is apparently still sufficient cache in acquiring works of a known-name artist as a trophy of one's wealth and power, and perhaps even as a store of value -- if a lot more questionable than, say, owning a Monet painting.

Some will, of course, be quick to point out that social commentary or overt criticism has long figured in at least some prominent works of art (Picasso's "Guernica" for example), but almost always in the past presented in a context of aesthetic principles. That, according to Eastham, has pretty much disappeared.  If that leaves viewers puzzled as to what they are seeing, or why they are seeing it, so be it, he maintains.

"Where movements have historically been defined by shared forms and subjects linked to their sponsors (church, state, merchants), the art of today can only loosely be identified by some common characteristics: it foregrounds ideas over forms and materials; borrows liberally and not always responsibly from disciplines as varied as philosophy, ecology and sociology; is preoccupied by forming connections between disparate ideas and cultures; is sceptical of received wisdoms; takes place in a globalized world; is, to quote Marshall McLuhan, “whatever you can get away with” or, to paraphrase Robert Rauschenberg, “whatever I say it is.”

So where does that leave aesthetics and beauty? Out in the cold, or as we continually see, in the enveloping arms of commerce where the nobility of beauty is devalued on a daily basis.