The eternal problem of beauty's return - Book Review

Saul Ostrow

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.

For Hegel, there are three hierarchically ordered categories of beauty. These include: natural beauty, artistic beauty (behind which lie intentions), and the beauty one finds in decoration and adornment (which is meant to enhance). If we use Danto's text to navigate the rest of the book, by the time we get to reading "Beauty (re) Discovers the Male Body" by Susan Bordo, or "Whose Beauty? Woman, Art, and Intersubjectivity in Luce Irigary's Writings" by Hillary Robinson, it becomes obvious that the actual subject of Beauty Matters is the conditions and objectives of beauty's representation. This in turn explains why despite their differing subjects Kathleen Higgins's "Beauty and Its Kitsch Competitor" and Noel Carroll's "Ethnicity, Race, and Monstrosity: The Rhetoric of Horror and Humor" both address the suspect power and economy of beauty as the measure of all things "other."

While Beauty Matters develops its one-sided argument against beauty. Elaine Scarry's small and elegant volume On Beauty and Being Just sets out to redeem beauty's reputation. Her subject is aesthetic beauty, forever tied to perception and judgment. Scarry believes that beauty intrudes upon and alters our consciousness. Within this context, the failure to recognize beauty or to attribute it to an unworthy object is the result of our generosity or lack of it. For Scarry, both scenarios constitute personal loss. In her book consisting of two chapters, "On Beauty and Being Wrong" and "On Beauty and Being Fair," she explores beauty as the ideal that underwrites the realms of (high) culture, judgment, sensitivity, and pleasure. Her model of beauty resides in a Platonic ideal and is the source of all things good and humane.

Premised on the view that beauty is generative, Scarry proposes that it stimulates rite senses, provoking a desire to sustain not only the sensation, but also its source. For the author, our negative associations with beauty are merely examples of "imperfect versions of an otherwise beneficent momentum toward replication" or simply "imperfect instances of an otherwise positive outcome" (6). Obviously, this vision of beauty contrasts sharply with the views of the writers in Beauty Matters, whom she would include among those who "disparage beauty lot the sake not of one of its attributes, but simply for a misguided version of its otherwise beneficent attributes...." (10).

As for beauty being a cultural construct, Scarry observes, "Beauty always rakes place in the particular, and if there is no particular, the chances of seeing it go down...." (18). In other words, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and its environment and culture inform that eye. The author confirms this by giving us an account of her own error of judgment, which was her failure to recognize the beauty of the palm tree. After a lengthy examination of this joyful motif as depicted by Matisse, to and behold, she was convinced not only of its iconic significance, but also of the beauty of the palm. Consequently, beauty is an act not only of perception and judgment but also of reflection. In this, Scarry acknowledges the subjectivity associated with the appreciation of beauty.

In part two, "On Beauty and Being Fair," Starry replies to the detractors of beauty by proposing that such views are ultimately misguided. Using classical literature as her only witness, she again trumpets the beneficence of beauty. The outcome of Scarry's case can be summed up quite easily: after careful and sometimes fanciful analysis, she concludes that all arguments arising against beauty are wildly contradictory and that outside the belief system of their beholders they have no validity. Yet she seemingly strengthens the arguments of beauty's detractors, for if aesthetic experience and beauty are the measure of all that is good, the power to define, objectify, and represent these is obviously a territory worth struggling over.

It is within this struggle to be the arbiters of beauty that we may locate the performative sensuousness and eroticism ascribed to beauty in Joanna Frueh's book, Monster/Beauty: Building the Body of Love. She neither disparages beauty nor celebrates its virtues; instead, she represents beauty as something earthy and embodied. Beauty, for Frueh, is the aesthetic/erotic field that people create for themselves and inhabit rather than merely an abstract or ideal cultural construct. As such, Frueh is neither beauty's champion nor its detractor; neither its slave, nor its victim. This kind of argument is not to be found in Brand's Beauty Matters or Scarry's On Beauty and Being Just, as hath texts in their own ways view beauty as something more abstract and iconic.

Frueh achieves mastery over beauty by rejecting it as primarily an issue of visual attraction or an appeal to another. In her opinion, such a conception of beauty represents a loss of its corporeality. Given this premise, the exemplary object of Monster/ Beauty is Frueh herself. As such she autobiographically explores beauty as a source of attraction and repulsion, at once abject and exalted. She indexes the role that beauty plays in each of her many roles, from that of the object of some other's gaze to those of lover, stepmother, teacher, et al. The value of Frueh's book resides in her ability to give life to the conflicts that stem from the disharmony and paradoxes that circumscribe the differing concepts and values associated with beauty.

Along similar lines, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe's collection of essays, Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime, rather than dealing with beauty's relation to the construction of subjectivity or ideology, instead proposes that beauty's relevance--because of its association with pleasure--lies in its capacity to be irrelevant and yet indispensable. Gilbert-Rolfe presents something of a genealogy of beauty's morphology--philosophically as well as aesthetically--in his seven essays. For instance, when it comes to the struggle between the cultural and social spheres in regard to beauty, Gilbert-Rolfe believes we need to achieve an understanding of how the beautiful has come to be possessed by fashion, video, etc., regardless of the implications for art. He sees the appropriation of beauty by these other areas of cultural production as a result of art's apparent submission to the dead hand of critique, which increasingly appears to promote the contemporary version of Puritan iconoclasm, that is, concept over experience, mind over body.

There is a personal side to this concern for the relationship of beauty, for Gilbert-Rolfe's theoretical propositions grow out of his role as an abstract painter. The great irony of Gilbert Rolfe's critique is that he views the concept of the sublime as having been used to free art from its quest for beauty and effectively rid art at art itself This is because the sublime, which is unquantifiable, critically comes to displace the notion of beauty, which is irreducible and therefore unresponsive to other forms of discourse. Consequently, what comes to occupy art's place are "cultural objects that are valued for their critical significance," demonstrating how the good looking and the sensuously appealing are "entangled with corrupt thought" (42).

It is in this context that beauty comes to be reconceived as a node in a complex network, connecting our concepts of aesthetic judgment to truth, purity, art, the political, etc., rather than as a thing in itself. Given the irreconcilable nature of the opposing visions of beauty, many writers and artists who now promote an antiaesthetic vision of art and culture are equally as dangerous as those who claim art to represent a fixed truth, for both standardized models lead to the repression of all things unfixable, The proponents of the antiaesthetic model fail to see how their position, rather than avoiding the problem of anesthetizing politics, actually promotes it.

It is most interesting to me that among these books, it is the artists Frueh and Gilbert-Rolfe--though they are of very different intellectual persuasions--who view the pleasure principle as culturally continuing to be a great motivating factor. Both authors argue that beauty need not be denied or demeaned in the name of the political, but may be instead recuperated. While acknowledging the pitfalls and traps associated with beauty, they also demonstrate that there are ways to bypass the ideological and moralistic dilemmas arising from them. If, as Scarry proposes, the embrace of beauty generates reflection rather than serving as an end in itself, it is a double-edged sword, for it also requires that we see the relativity of our critical methods, values. standards, and their respective messages.

Taking a positive rather than a reactive stance seems to me to be the only way that we might come to learn and take responsibility for how our reflections on beauty affect our own existence as well as that of the "other." Rather than argue that our concepts of beauty must be either jettisoned or defended, we need to generate positions, as Frueh and Gilbert-Rolfe have, that are self-consciously personal, perverse, positive, philosophical, and practical, rather than those that replay opposing sides in a long tradition of recrimination.

(1.) Dave Hickey, The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (Los Angeles: Art Issues Press, 1995).

Saul Ostrow is dean of the studio program at the Cleveland Institute of Art, editor for the Critical Voices book series published by Routledge U. K., and art editor for Bomb Magazine.

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