The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art (Paul Carus Lectures)

Rating:
Summary: A thoughtful study of the role of beauty in art
Review: Expertly written by Arthur C. Danto (art critic of "The Nation" magazine and Emeritus Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy at Column University), The Abuse Of Beauty: Aesthetics And The Concept Of Art is an intriguing and thoughtful study of the role of beauty in art. A century ago, art strived for beauty above all; yet in the modern day, an overly beautiful work of art may even be downgraded by critics for that very reason. Individual chapters cogently address the issues of internal and external beauty in art; the intersection of beauty and politics; the beautiful and the sublime within the concept and execution of art, and a great deal more in this intellectually stimulating and enthusiastically recommended discourse as to how art is viewed within the contexts of the past, the present, and the future.

Rating:
Summary: Clearly out of everyday art practices among the "people"
Review: This book is a collection of articles and essays, most of which must have been published in The Nation, for which Danto is an art critic. They cannot and will not reveal any structured and clearly defined approach of art. They are an impressionistic progress through Danto's own writings. But Danto ignores anything that does not go his way. He ignores Bosch who is the negation of his « beauty » definition of Renaissance art. He ignores all those who deal with « ugly » subjects, even Goya and his drawings about the horror of war and many other subjects. He ignores television and video art, directly on these media (there is one instance in this book of the use of video art in a museum presentation : that is not television and video art, that is the use of video and television technology within the museum). He even relegates video and television art in the « demotic » field, that is to say art for the people, and this approach, borrowed from Hegel, is absolutely condescendent towards the people : people can only suck on the television pacifier because they are not able to understand and enter the sphere of real art. Danto is an aristocrat, like all art critics. He thus ignores the audience of art, the people who are bombarded with artistic forms everyday in the supermarkets, in films, on TV, and in all kinds of mediatic channels. Danto is a typical university professor turned into an art critic and who advocates and illustrates the dominant vision that art is IN the artist, IN the official art circulating system, IN the critic's analysis of it. I dream of a real republic of arts, arts FOR the people, WITH the people and BY the people. Not a submission of artists to the « uneducated » people but a constant permanent intercourse (and this implies exchange, and personal ' even sexually and emotionally motivated ' connection) between the artists and the wide audience that is bombarded with artistic productions. When I read Danto I think of what Spiro Agnew said about « ephete intellectuals ». Agnew was not a very kosher and clean character but he definitely had one point here : what is important in art is the effect it has on the widest audience possible through the various media that use artistic concepts and constructs to be effective. What I am interested in is not the self-satisfied belly-button titillation of artists or art critics but the real effect art forms have on people in general through channels that Danto does not even know, because he is totally locked up in his artistic ghetto. It's a shame because some of his ideas are interesting, orginal and even explosive. But he does not even know about it.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU