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Visual Art: Human Figure Unit 4 Close Reading
BEAUTY / Vocabulary / Close Reading Questions / NOTES: Application, etc.- What is Beauty?
“Beauty itself is but the sensible image of the infinite” said once the historianGeorge Bancroft. The nature of beauty is one of the most fascinating riddles ofphilosophy. Is beautyuniversal? How do we know it? Nearly every major philosopher has engaged with these questions and their cognates, including the great figures ofancient Greek philosophysuch asPlatoandAristotle.
The Aesthetic Attitude
The appreciation of beauty takes place in anaesthetic attitude. This is the state of contemplating a subject with no other purpose than appreciating it. For most authors, thus, the aesthetic attitude is purposeless: we have no reason to engage in it other than finding aesthetic enjoyment.
Now aesthetic appreciationcanbe carried on by means of the senses: looking at a sculpture, some trees in bloom, or Manhattan’s skyline; listening to Jay-Z’s raps; tasting a mushroomrisotto; feeling some fresh water on a hot day; and so on. However, senses may not be necessary in order to obtain an aesthetic attitude: we can rejoice, for instance, in imagining a beautiful house that never existed; in discovering or grasping the details of a complex theorem in algebra.In principle, thus, the aesthetic attitude can fall under any subject via any possible mode of thought –senses, imagination, intellect, or any combination of them.
Is Beauty Universal?
The question arises of whether beauty is universal. Suppose you agree that Michelangelo’s Davidand a Van Gogh’s self-portrait are beautiful; do such beauties have something in common? Is actually the one and the same quality,beauty, that we come to find in them? And is this beauty the very same that one experiences gazing on the Grand Canyon from its edge or listening to Beethoven’s ninth symphony?
If beauty is a universal, as for examplePlatomaintained, it is reasonable to hold that we do not know it through the senses. Indeed, the subjects in question are quite different and are also known in different ways (gaze, hearing, observation); so, if there is something in common among those subjects, it cannot be what is known through the senses.
But, is there really something common to all experiences of beauty? Compare the beauty of watching a horror movie or visiting a haunted house with the one of picking flowers in a Montana field over the summer or surfing a gigantic wave in Hawaii. It seems that in each of those cases there is no single common element: not even the feelings or the basic ideas involved seem to match. It’s on the basis of those considerations that some prefer to believe that beauty is a label we attach to different sorts of experiences.
Beauty and Pleasure
Does beauty necessarily go along with pleasure? Do humans praise beauty because of its pleasure? Could it be the other way round, instead? Is a life dedicated to the quest for beauty one worth being lived? These are some fundamental questions in philosophy, at the intersection betweenethicsand aesthetics.
If on the one hand beauty seems linked to the aesthetic pleasure, seeking the former as a mean to achieve the latter can lead to one of the worst consequences:egoistic hedonism, the typical symbol of decadence.
But, beauty can also be regarded as a value, one of the dearest to humans. In Roman Polanski’s movieThe Pianist, for instance, the protagonist escapes the desolation of WWII by playing a ballad by Chopin.Art therapyoffers another example of the importance of beauty to our lives. The appreciation of beauty, to sum up, is something that is worthwhile to cultivate, for its consequences and in itself.
- Does beauty still belong in art?
ByCarol Strickland/ December 20, 2007
Is beauty dead? The answer that springs from much of contemporary art is an unapologetic "yes." Grime, grit, death, destruction, flesh, and flaws have replaced pretty models, still-lifes, and pastoral scenes.
In the past 500 years, the opalescent beauty of "La Pietà" has become the urine-soaked effrontery of "Piss Christ." It's no wonder crowds prefer the cheer of Van Gogh's sunflowers to such cheekiness. But history is surely laughing at this irony.
Impressionism, now beloved, was considered an assault on beauty when first exhibited in the 1860s. Critics scoffed that the paintings were sloppy, stupid, and meaningless – the same complaints one often hears about art today. As art critic Clement Greenberg famously said, "All profoundly original art looks ugly at first."
So perhaps it is premature to declare beauty obsolete. Instead, what's needed is a more nuanced appreciation of contemporary art's aesthetic. Today, beauty is no longer about what's pretty, symmetrical, or harmonious. It's about what stirs the viewer to grapple with the world as it really is. Art is not a cosmetic to prettify reality or provide escapist pleasure but a hammer to smash our complacency.
The philosopher George Santayana described beauty as "a living presence or an aching absence." In contemporary art, it's quite often an aching presence. As Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa pointed out, "Contemporary aesthetics has established the beauty of ugliness, reclaiming for art everything in human experience that artistic representation had previously rejected."
This challenge to convention reflects artists' "I cannot tell a lie" honesty. After the savagery of World War I, art turned to the dark side with wrenching paintings of brutality by German Expressionists such as George Grosz, Otto Dix, and Max Beckmann. "We had found in the war," the Dada artist Richard Huelsenbeck said in 1917, "that Goethe and Schiller and beauty added up to killing and bloodshed and murder." After World War II, Theodor Adorno said that "to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric."
No wonder today's art reflects an unsettling sense of disturbance. Check out Anselm Kiefer's charred landscapes. Or Lucian Freud's clotted canvases grotesquely exaggerating each crease and fleshly flaw in his models. It shouts: What a broken, saggy, ruined piece of work is man! If we don't want to be blind to reality, it behooves us to look at contemporary art, think about it, register its message, and understand its origins.
"If you look at the street art of Jean-Michel Basquiat or younger artists like Dash Snow or Barry McGee, their work is about the grit and grime of reality," says Susan Davidson, senior curator at the Guggenheim Museum. "There is beauty in it but it's harsher, rough, and in your face."
Morley Safer, who covers art for CBS's "Sunday Morning," says, "its clear beauty has no place in contemporary art." He suggests substituting "emotional and intellectual impact" as the criterion to judge quality.
To assess quality in today's art, don't rely on superficial beauty. Unlike a vapidBreck-girl image, good art has got to have punch to shake us up, wake us up, and – above all – make us sit up and take notice.
Good art grabs our attention, then deepens our engagement with multiple layers that expand our knowledge of the world and ourselves, and make us see and feel and think in different ways. And all this should come in the form of an object made with consummate skill. "Things that quicken the heart" is how John Baldessari, a master of postmodern art, puts it.
Renaissance idealism – a pinnacle of beauty in visual art – embodied the smiling face of life as we might wish it to be. Caravaggio gave art a Baroque twist when he took his models from the gutter and painted the Virgin Mary with dirty feet. Caravaggio's patron’s howled, just as today, museum-goers often recoil from art reflecting the sordid side of life.
It's lovely to depict humanity's highest aspirations, but it's necessary to acknowledge our feet of clay, too.
Looking at art today has the morbid fascination of rubbernecking at a wreck on the highway. Yet the artist's intent goes beyond voyeurism to sound an early warning. The canary's song is beautiful and lulling. But when its melody stops in the mine, you'd better cease heaving that pickaxe and run for your life.
• Carol Strickland is an art correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor and the author of "The Annotated Mona Lisa: A Crash Course in Art History from Prehistoric to Post-Modern." This is the second of a three-part series.
- A Taste of Beauty Culture
Multibillion-dollar beauty and fashion industries both shape and depend on the cult-like worship of what physical attributes the public sees as beautiful. And most women feel the effects of those decisions.
The photo exhibition "Beauty Culture" at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles, with 175 pictures by iconic photographers, is aimed at starting people thinking and talking about female beauty. It also peeks into the underbelly of the beauty industry, including its relation to celebrity, plastic surgery, the faux-perfection of airbrushing of advertising and even child beauty pageants.
There are a lot of hot-button issues as to how the media and the beauty and fashion worlds depict whole groups of people, why they show them in a particular way or barely notice them at all.
However, there's been a major shift when it comes to diversity in beauty advertising and magazine beauty editorial spreads.
Supermodel Veronica Webb, L'Oreal's corporate diversity director Jean-Claude Le Grand, fashion insider BethannHardison, Marie Claire's beauty editor Erin Flaherty and others share their thoughts on the evolving and increasingly inclusive take on gorgeousness.
America's changing definition of beautiful
Several studies suggest that many equate beauty with symmetry, but even within that equation, "Each time has its own standard (of beauty)," said photographer Melvin Sokolsky during his lecture at the Annenberg.
A photographer, an editor or a casting director may be subject to his or her personal predilections of what beauty is and foist them upon the public, leading entire societal likes and dislikes to shift, too.
And that standard in America is changing rapidly. Today, the number of marriages between people of different ethnicities is surging. Back in 1993, Time magazine's cover story"The New Face of America,"featuring a computer generated face consisting of a mix of several ethnicities, is indeed more in line with what most of us now consider beautiful, according toAllure's 20th Anniversary Beauty Survey. "Sixty-four percent of all our respondents think women of mixed race represent the epitome of beauty," the survey says.
And of those respondents who said they wished to change their skin color, "70% reported that they wanted it to be darker." Full lips and curvy bodies are also coveted.
That's a far cry from 1991 when most Allure respondents chose blonde haired, blue-eyed Christie Brinkley as the ideal beauty. The all-American look today is much more of a hybrid.
One model's story
Model, writer and television personality Veronica Webb (former co-host of "Tim Gunn's Guide to Style" on Bravo) experienced this transition from the front lines of the beauty industry.
Although Beverly Johnson was the first African-American on the cover of Vogue in 1974, Webb was the first African-American to win a major cosmetics campaign when she signed on with Revlon in 1992.
"For me personally it was like almost the impossible dream of the fashion industry," says Webb of her Revlon campaign. "The biggest reward, the most money you could make, the highest level of commercial validation. And you know a barrier -- a real barrier, a glass ceiling that existed forever -- got broken.
"And the ideal of beauty, and who represents beauty, and what beautiful is changed so quickly and so radically right after that, that by the time I had my children they can't even recognize the world of fashion and beauty that I came up in."
Webb says that in any business when you qualify and can perform on every level, "but you're rejected out of hand because of your skin color ... not even your skin color, but the perception of your 'race,' there's nothing more frustrating than that," says Webb.
But today there's a whole spectrum of women who've helmed beauty campaigns from blonde to brunette, from fair skinned to deep, including celebrities such as Jennifer Lopez, Beyoncé, Freida Pinto, Eva Mendes, Taylor Swift, Kerry Washington, AishwaryaRai, Drew Barrymore, Gwen Stefani and models such as Liu Wen, LiyaKebede, Christy Turlington and Adriana Lima.
A global perspective = good business
Time has shown the beauty industry that embracing a world of beauty isn't just good karma, it's also good for the bottom line.
"For us, the more you are diverse, the more you are successful," says Le Grand. L'Oreal Group is the world's largest beauty company and includes 23 international brands, including L'Oreal Paris, Lancôme, Maybelline and Garnier.
If you are to be a leader, Le Grand says that you have to understand "there is a link between beauty and diversity." And that includes understanding the vision of beauty in places such as China, India, Africa and Europe as well the United States.
"If it's only one vision of beauty and not a diverse one, you are out. ... We have to reflect everyone from the model to the employee."
Flaherty, Marie Claire's beauty editor who also once worked at Jane, says that she's been lucky to work at magazines that are all about a global perspective, diversity and unusual beauty.
Diversity, of course, can be expresses a myriad of ways, be it featuring women with freckles, who are curvier or who are 45 and older.
An element in the beauty world that changed things, "was the Dove campaign," says Flaherty. "Using many different types of models and reflecting what women really look like."
The campaign's stated goal is to "free ourselves and the next generation from beauty stereotypes" and contribute to building self-esteem for young women and others through marketing campaigns featuring women of different shapes, sizes, ages and hues as well as partnering with groups such as the National Eating Disorders Information Center and the Girl Scouts.
BethannHardison has been a model, modeling agent and recently Vogue Italia editor-at-large.
"I'm an advocate of the fashion model," says Hardison, who laments models losing jobs to actors and singers.But she does see big changes in advertising in that it better reflects American demographics.
Hardison points out that the beauty industry has a large consumer base, speaks to a broader group of people, and so is more democratic and shifts faster than the fashion world.
But as the global economy shifts, so too will fashion with the help of newspaper editors who call out inequities and magazine editors, casting directors, advertising agencies and designers committed to inclusiveness, as well as the public.
"The word beauty is such a controversial word," says Hardison. "I think that the more that there's exposure (of different kinds of looks), and as long as you expose them consistently, you give people a chance to see what could also be beautiful besides what came before."
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- Art Talk Chapter 10: Proportion
Through the ages, artists have looked for a ratio (a mathematical comparison of sizes) that produces an ideal form for figures and structures. The Greek mathematician Euclid found what he considered a perfect ratio. Known as theGolden Mean, this ratio consists ofa line divided into two parts so that the smaller line has the same proportion to the larger line as the larger line has to the whole line. In math, this ratio is written 1:1.6. The Golden Mean was extended to the Golden Rectangle, which had sides that matched this ratio. Many artists have used the Golden Rectangle to organize their paintings. Also, if you divide the average adult male body at the navel, the two body measurements match the Golden Mean. Many artists, therefore, have used the Golden Mean to represent humans. This was common in the Renaissance, when the Golden Mean was called the Divine Proportion. Although there may be no “correct” proportion for works of art, many people have looked to the human body as a source for perfect proportions.
Lesson 2: Scale
Scale refers to thesize of something as measured against a standard reference. In art you can judge whether an object is represented in large or small scale, based on the average size of that object. Artists often usehierarchical proportion, which iswhen figures are arranged in a work of art so that scale indicates importance. You can also consider the scale of an artwork itself, based on what you know of the average size of works of the same type. Some works that seem monumental are actually very small in size. This is why the dimensions are always listed in the credit line of the work. Variations in scale within a work can change the work’s total impact. When drawing human proportions, Western artists usually try to represent them realistically. But sometimes they use the technique foreshortening.Foreshorteningis when artistsshorten an object to make it look as if it extends backward into space. Other artists use symbolic proportions, showing areas of the body they consider more important, such as the head, as larger. By studying the general proportions of the human body and the human face, you will learn to create natural-looking figures. Then you can vary these proportions for expressive effect.