The eternal problem of beauty's return - Book Review

Peg Zeglin Brand, ed. Beauty Matters. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000. 368 pp., 60 b/w ills. $19.95 paper.

Elaine Scurry. On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. 144 pp., 7 line ills. $27.95, $9.95 paper.

Johanna Frueh. Monster/Beauty: Building the Body of Love. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. 353 pp., 19 b/w ills. $55, $22.50 paper.

Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe. Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime. New York: Allworth Press, 2000. 156 pp., 4 color ills., 20 b/w. $18.95 paper.

Beauty, which had once been considered the supreme good, has come to be identified as a source of oppression and discrimination. Since the late 1800s, avant-garde intellectual and artistic circles had repeatedly disparaged beauty as an objective. By the early 1950s it seemed to have finally exited the scene. First, it had been traded in for the sublime, and then in the 1960s, as artists turned to aestheticizing industrial and abject materials, standardized forms, common objects, and processes, the sublime was desublimated. The irony is that just at that moment the subject of beauty was being reinvented as a political and cultural issue. In the early 1960s Stokely Carmichael, chairman of the Student Non violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), declared, "Black is Beautiful." This slogan of self-affirmation was meant to counter among peoples of color the self-hatred that resulted from beauty's WASP norm. Likewise, the women's movement, by condemning the exploitation of both beauty and sex, sought to contest the influence of the media and the fashion industry on women's self-conceptions. Many feminists held that beauty was not only a source of envy and antagonism among women, but also reduced them to mere objects in the eyes of men. This account of denigration and control has haunted our conception of beauty ever since.

Then, in the 1980s, Dave Hickey announced to die art world that beauty as a concept associated with the pleasuring of the senses had returned. (1) Hickey sought with this announcement to counter the politicization and trivialization of beauty and reestablish it as a philosophical concern based on aesthetic judgment and taste. In turn, the stated purpose for compiling Beauty Matters, an anthology edited by Peg Zeglin Brand, is to rectify the fact that the influential sources of beauty's revival have not addressed "the history of beauty in aesthetics seriously but rather have found it easier to haughtily dismiss its legacy and to urge others toward similar disdain" (3). The texts that make up Beauty Matters, assembled under headings such as "Beyond Kant," "Body Beautiful," and "Body as Art," are meant to inform the new advocates of beauty that they are dealing with an ideological time bomb (3). To wit, anchor after author condemns beauty for bolstering racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination and oppression, if my tone is somewhat disparaging of this effort, it is not because a social and political critique of Beauty bothers me. In principle I tend to agree with the politics of this hook. What does bother me is that today the views presented in Beauty Matters have their roots not only in a reified vision of political struggle but also in a residual positivism that ideologically haunts the area of cultural studies.

The complaint of many of the authors included in Beauty Matters seems to be the troublesome fact that pleasure (sensation) and morality (judgment) often come into conflict and that "beauty" is one of those guilty pleasures. For Marcia Eaton in her essay, "Kantian and Contextual Beauty," the problem begins with her vision of the predominance of the Kantian notion of an indifferent beauty--one free of presupposition--that she sees as ultimately, destined to come into conflict with moral judgment. However, Eaton arrives at this conclusion by mixing the apples of ethics and morality with the oranges of natural and artistic beauty. The problem is that Kant actually does differentiate between normative (or conventional) and ideal beauty and duly notes that in each case we are involved in two different types of judgment.

Within the Kantian schema, while a plant, for instance, may be aesthetically pleasing, it is, let us say, ecologically destructive--it could never be ideally beautiful because ideal beauty for Kant is uniquely a product of moral values. Again, Eaton does not attempt to address tins question but proceeds to assert that in her experience few people seem to agree with Kant that beauty is both universal and necessary. Mitigating Eaton's confusion at this point--and possibly our own--is Arthur Danto's essay "Beauty and Beautification," in which the author points out that Kant understood that there is no singular model of beauty. Kant put forth that different races will have incongruent conceptions of beauty, Danto then goes on to contrast Kant's model of beauty with Hegel's view that beauty is a concept rather than an affect and, as such, forms an assemblage whose varying parts function in different ways, often in accordance with opposing standards. Beauty therefore is modified by the category of object to which it is attributed.