Notions of beauty

Notions of beauty

What is aesthetically ideal in art? A Picasso, a Mondrian - or a movie star?

Umberto Eco
Saturday October 2, 2004

From The Guardian
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1317040,00.html

Let's imagine an art historian of the future or an explorer arriving from outer space who both ask themselves the same question: what is the idea of beauty that dominated the 20th century? It may be that, on looking at things "from a distance", the interpreters of the future will identify something as truly characteristic of the 20th century and thus give Marinetti the rights of the matter by saying that the 20th-century equivalent of the Nike of Samothrace was indeed a beautiful racing car, perhaps, ignoring Picasso or Mondrian. We cannot look at things from such a distance; all we can do is content ourselves with noting that the first half of the 20th century, up to and including the 1960s at most (after which it would be more difficult), witnessed a dramatic struggle between the beauty of provocation and the beauty of consumption.

The beauty of provocation is the idea of beauty that emerged from the various avant-garde movements and from artistic experimentalism: from futurism to cubism, from expressionism to surrealism, and from Picasso to the great masters of informal art and beyond.

Avant-garde art does not itself pose the problem of beauty. And while it is implicitly accepted that the new images are artistically "beautiful", and must give us the same pleasure that Giotto's frescoes or Raphael's paintings gave to their own contemporaries, it is important to realise that this is so precisely because the avant garde has provocatively flouted all aesthetic canons respected until now. Art is no longer interested in providing an image of natural beauty, nor does it aim to procure the pleasure ensuing from the contemplation of harmonious forms. On the contrary, its aim is to teach us to interpret the world through different eyes, to enjoy a return to archaic or esoteric models, the universe of dreams or the fantasies of the mentally ill, the visions provoked by drugs, the rediscovery of material, the startling representation of everyday objects in improbable contexts (ready-mades, Dada, etc), and subconscious drives.

Only one school of contemporary art has retrieved an idea of geometrical harmony, reminiscent of the aesthetics of proportion, and that is abstract art. By rebelling against both subjection to nature and to everyday life, abstract art has offered us pure forms, from the geometries of Mondrian to the large monochromatic canvases of Klein, Rothko or Manzoni. But who has not had the experience, on visiting an exhibition or a museum over the past decades, of listening to visitors who - faced with an abstract work - say "But what is it meant to be?", or come out with the inevitable "They call this art?" And so even this "neo-pythagorical" return to the aesthetics of proportion works against current sensibilities, against the ideas ordinary people have about beauty.

Finally, there are many schools of contemporary art (happenings, events in which the artist cuts or mutilates his own body, involvement of the public in light shows or acoustic phenomena) in which people apparently stage ceremonies smacking of ritual, not unlike the ancient mystery rites, whose ends are not the contemplation of something beautiful, but quasi-religious experiences, albeit of a carnal and primitive sort, from which the gods are absent. Other occasions of a similar nature include "raves" and events involving huge crowds in discos or rock concerts, where strobe lights and music played at extremely high volume constitute a way of "being together" (often accompanied by the use of chemical stimulants) that may even seem "beautiful" (in the traditional sense of circensian games) to someone contemplating the scene from the outside, but is not experienced in the same way by those actively involved. Participants may talk about a "beautiful experience", but in the same way that we might talk about a beautiful swim, a beautiful motorcycle ride or a satisfactory sexual encounter.

But our visitor from the future could not avoid making another curious discovery. Visitors to an exhibition of avant-garde art who purchase an "incomprehensible" sculpture, or those who take part in a "happening", are dressed and made up in accordance with the canons of fashion. They wear jeans or designer clothes, wear their hair or make-up according to the model of beauty offered by glossy magazines, the cinema or television, in other words by the mass media. These people follow the ideals of beauty as suggested by the world of commercial consumption, the very world that avant-garde artists have been battling against for over 50 years.

How to interpret this contradiction? Without attempting to explain it, we can say that it is the contradiction typical of the 20th century. At this point the visitor from the future would have to ask himself what the mass media's model of beauty really was, and he would discover that the century was traversed by a double caesura.

The first of these takes the form of a contrast between models in the course of the same decade. Just to provide a few examples, in the same years the cinema offered the model of the femme fatale as represented by Greta Garbo and Rita Hayworth, and that of the "girl next door", as played by Claudette Colbert or Doris Day. It also gave us the western hero in the form of the hulking and ultra-virile John Wayne along with the meek and vaguely effeminate Dustin Hoffman. Gary Cooper and Fred Astaire were contemporaries, and the slightly built Fred danced with the stocky Gene Kelly. Fashion offered sumptuous womenswear such as the outfits seen in Roberta, and, at the same, time it gave us the androgynous designs of Coco Chanel. The mass media are totally democratic, offering a model of beauty for those already naturally endowed with aristocratic grace, as well as for the voluptuous working-class girl; the svelte Audrey Hepburn constituted a model for those women who could not compete with the full-bosomed Anita Ekberg; while for those men who do not possess the refined masculine beauty of Richard Gere, there is the sensitive appeal of Al Pacino and the blue-collar charm of Robert De Niro. And finally, for those who cannot afford the beauty of a Maserati, there is the convenient beauty of the Mini.

The second caesura split the century in two. All things considered, the ideals of beauty presented by the media over the first 60 years of the 20th century refer to models originating in the "major arts". The languorous women who appeared in the ads of the 1920s and 1930s are reminiscent of the slender beauty of the art nouveau and art deco movements. Advertising material for a variety of products reveals futurist, cubist and surrealist influences. The "Little Nemo" strips were inspired by art nouveau, the urban scenarios of other worlds that appear in Flash Gordon comics remind us of the utopias of modernist architects like Sant'Elia and even anticipate the shape of modern missiles. Dick Tracy strips express a growing familiarity with avant-garde painting. And, at bottom, it suffices to follow Mickey and Minnie Mouse from the 1930s to the 1950s to see how the drawings conformed to the development of dominant aesthetic sensibilities.

But when pop art took over and began to turn out provocative experimental works based on images from the worlds of commerce, industry and the mass media, and when the Beatles skilfully reworked certain traditional musical forms, the gap between the art of provocation and the art of consumption grew narrower. What's more, while it seems that there is still a gap between "cultivated" and "popular" art, in the climate of the so-called postmodern period, cultivated art offers new experimental work that goes beyond visual art and revivals of visual art at one and the same time, as the tradition is continually reassessed.

For their part, the mass media no longer present any unified model, any single ideal of beauty. They can retrieve - even for an advertising campaign destined to last only a week - all the experimental work of the avant garde, and at the same time offer models from the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, even in the outmoded forms of automobiles from the mid-century. The media continue to serve up warmed-over versions of 19th-century iconography - the Junoesque opulence of Mae West and the anorexic charms of the latest fashion models; the dusky beauty of Naomi Campbell and the Nordic beauty of Claudia Schiffer; the grace of traditional tap dancing in A Chorus Line and the chilling futuristic architectures of Blade Runner; the femme fatale of dozens of television shows or advertising campaigns and squeaky clean girls-next-door such as Julia Roberts or Cameron Diaz; Rambo and RuPaul; George Clooney with his short hair and neocyborgs who paint their faces in metallic shades and transform their hair into forests of coloured spikes, or shave their heads.

Our explorer from the future will no longer be able to identify the aesthetic ideal diffused by the media of the 20th century and beyond. He will have to surrender before the orgy of tolerance, the total syncretism and absolute and unstoppable polytheism of beauty.