“Where there is no beauty, there is no art,” misses a whole field of expression that isn’t about beauty. The statement narrows the artistic space as to leave out a great deal of what matters in conceptual art and abstract expressionism. To focus on the question “Is it beautiful?” ignores a whole series of additional questions that Abramović highlgihts: Is it distrubing, does it make a prediction about the future, does it pose questions? Focusing so closely on beauty leaves no room for all these other dimensions of art.
“[B]eautiful or not beautiful is not important,” admittedly just a snippet from the larger Abramović quote, but I still think she puts it too strongly here. Beautiful or not beautiful can be important. Yes, there is the potential for becoming so consumed by beauty to the point where one is blind to all else – so a focus on the painting fitting the carpet in the living room devoid of any thought about meanings troubles me. But beauty is not a dimension without a substance of its own as well. Craftsmanship, skill, and technical mastery all deserve thought too. While it is a mistake to focus on them unmoved by all else, it is also a mistake to set them outside consideration altogether.
Altogether I favor a “both/and” proposition here rather than the “either/or” proposition offered by polar aesthetics that either center the artistic universe on beauty or dismiss beauty as undeserving of attention. I’ll conclude by saying up until two years ago I had a sense a great deal of contemporary art was artists, curators, critics, and collectors talking amongst themselves in a language that leaves everyone else, including me, out. The jargon of the art world can be intimidating, it can be a barrier, it can be just too much work when you’re in the mood to relax and maybe look at something pretty. And I’d say being told so-and-so is a Very Important Artist, or Art History Has Decided X, is a lot less convincing than going to the Whitney, or MoMA, or the Tate Modern and particular works evoking (or provoking) feelings and emotions themselves.
For me the gap was bridged on a visit to the Tate Modern, Room 7 to be specific. I have to credit the curators because it was the combination of these three artworks that made me see each of the three artists in a different light. The artists, Monet, Rothko, and Pollock. I was aware of them before, but they did not mean the same thing to me before Room 7. The works are Monet’s Water Lillies (after 1916), Rothko’s Untitled (1952), and Pollock’s Summertime: Number 9A (1948). To say the photos don’t do the works justice is an understatement.
It is one thing to be told about Monet’s link to abstract expressionism and another to see it for yourself. Being there, it was like discovering Rothko. As for Pollock, I’d repeatedly just skipped him at the Met Museum in New York. Of course I’d been told by Very Serious People what to think about him, but I didn’t really think it for myself. After Room 7 I understood more of the whys and wherefores of a kind of rupture with realism that I didn’t really appreciate before. A rupture and yet a bridge explaining how an aesthetic can comfortably contain both John Singer Sargent and Jackson Pollock. A link I feel I’d be poorer without – especially because, for me, it was through that linkage that the conceptual works follow. In a comment at the LoOG I wrote, “I suppose this is how religious people feel when they tell atheists they’re missing something by not having faith.” and having written several hundred more words on the topic I still have that feeling.
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