The Abuse of Beauty
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"Kalliphobia belongs to the defining syndrome of what I have designated the Intractable Avant-Garde in my book, The Abuse of Beauty."--"Kalliphobia in Contemporary Art" (2004) by Arthur Danto One day I sat Beauty on my knees, --A Season in Hell (1873) by Rimbaud "The artist is before all things an artist; what animates him is the sentiment of the beautiful; what he wishes to make pass into the soul of the spectator is the same sentiment that fills his own. He confided himself to the virtue of beauty; he fortifies it with all the power, all the charm of the ideal; it must then do its own work; the artist has done his when he has procured for some noble souls the exquisite sentiment of beauty.This pure and disinterested sentiment is a noble ally of the moral and religious sentiments; it awakens, preserves, and develops them. So art, which is founded on this sentiment, which is inspired by it, which expands it, is in its turn an independent power. It is naturally associated with all that ennobles the soul, with morals and religion; but it springs only from itself."--The True, the Beautiful, and the Good by Victor Cousin |
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The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art (2003) is a book by Arthur C. Danto.
Blurb:
Danto simply and entertainingly traces the evolution of the concept of beauty over the past century and explores how it was removed from the definition of art. Beauty has come to be regarded as a serious aesthetic crime, whereas a hundred years ago it was almost unanimously considered the supreme purpose of art. Beauty is not, and should not be, the be-all and end-all of art, but it has an important place, and is not something to be avoided.
Danto draws eruditely upon the thoughts of artists and critics such as Rimbaud, Fry, Matisse, the Dadaists, Duchamp, and Greenberg, as well as on that of philosophers like Hume, Kant, and Hegel. Danto agrees with the dethroning of beauty as the essence of art, and maintains with telling examples that most art is not, in fact, beautiful. He argues, however, for the partial rehabilitation of beauty and the removal of any critical taboo against beauty. Beauty is one among the many modes through which thoughts are presented to human sensibility in art: disgust, horror, sublimity, and sexuality being among other such modes.
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