Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Albero, Beauty Knows No Pain

”today’s proponents of beauty remove these positions from their historical dynamic only to hypostatize the beautiful as the sole, undisputed and universal bearer of a better society.” (66)


Attempts to validate the beautiful experience are driven by:

1.Nastaligic impulses:

“…recent attempts to revalidate the experience of the beautiful are, first, driven by nostalgic impulses; they promote ahistoric views of the past in the hope of returning us to a state unclouded by the insight and advances made in a wide range of theoretical and discursive practices…”(67)

2. Anti political:

“…today’s writing on beauty is deeply anti political. It is mostly unwilling to contemplate the legitimacy of artistic practices that take a stand and bring together aesthetic, the cognitive and the critical, preferring instead to value artworks that operate independently of any practical interest.” (67)

3. Anti-modernist view points hypocritical:

“Interestingly enough, in privileging the transcendent experience of beauty over the reality of the worlds disenchantment, the position of many of today’s champions of beauty comes to look remarkably like the one they censure…the modernist sublime”(67)


Desire for beauty is symptomatic of deeper structural issues:

1. Restrain/rejection of political dimension of postmodernism

2. Loss of sensual and transcendent dimensions of the artwork in the wake of the critical art practices of the 1960s and 70s

3. Use of technology to create a perfect image/object and to reproduce, as in a copy

a. loss of chance, error, and the uncontrollable

b. raises questions of copy and original.

4. “… the difference between art and culture has also become highly nebulous.” (69)

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