Championing Beauty as The Purpose of Art
Up until the early 20th century, beauty was assumed by most people to be the purpose of art. It was a given. Following is a quote from Arthur Danto's The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art:
"A century ago, beauty was almost unanimously considered the supreme purpose of art and even synonymous with artistic excellence. Yet today beauty has come to be viewed as an aesthetic crime. Artists are now chastised by critics if their works seem to aim at beauty.
In the past few years, however, some artists, critics, and curators have begun to give beauty another look. The resulting discussion is often confused, with arts pundits sometimes seeing beauty as a betrayal of the artist’s authentic role, other times working hard to find beauty in the apparently grotesque or disgusting."[1]
When beauty is brought up as a subject in the context of higher education, it is striking just how far those supposedly benefitting from higher education will go to excommunicate beauty from its natural place in art. They deny with zealous piety the importance of beauty, and almost invariably seek to crucify any unfortunate soul who dares to espouse it as a purpose for art.
Adolf Loos famously declared "Ornament is crime"[2], Walter Serner "Art is dead"[3], Paul Delaroche "Painting is dead"[4], Nietzsche "God is dead"[5], Fukuyama "History has ended"[6]. Nihilism spread across the spectrum of art, science, culture and politics throughout the 20th century – but to what end?
The worst nihilistic proscription comes from Georges Bataille: "Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it."[7] What was the purpose of removing Beauty from its natural place as the purpose of art?
If I were to put forth the argument that this obliteration of beauty, art, purpose – and life itself – was indeed deliberate and even orchestrated, I would be severely derided by those who fail to question paradigms because they cannot see the forest for the trees. So instead I will cite various examples of artists, scientists, critics and commentators, who wrote or lectured during the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, and who acknowledged in some way that the annihilation of beauty was a principle theme of Modernism.
This thesis will be concerned primarily with the Modernist murder of beauty which occurred after World War One – as during the long nineteenth century movements such as Impressionism, Aestheticism and Art Nouveau were most definitely pro-beauty to one degree or another[8][9], though they can be seen as proto-modernist.
The Harvard educated head of History of Art at the University of York – Elizabeth Prettejohn – has written extensively on 19th century artists including John Singer Sargent and Frederic, Lord Leighton, as well as on 19th century art movements such as Aestheticism and the Pre-Raphaelites. She has also written a book dedicated to the history and theory of beauty in art entitled Beauty and Art 1750–2000. In it, she states "a number of artists, critics, and curators have begun to call for a new attention to beauty as a significant issue in both contemporary life and contemporary art".[10]
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