Venus in Exile  

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"It was in this century, too, that feminists confronted the “beauty myth” and rejected the “temptation to be a beautiful object.” “Beauty creates shame,” says the performance artist Vanessa Beecroft, and Howard Barker’s artist-heroine in Scenes from an Execution declares: “I tell you I would not, I do not trust beauty, it is an invention and a lie, trust my face, I am a woman who has lived a little.”--Venus in Exile (2001) by Wendy Steiner


"In order to provide sustenance for themselves and their families, as they had ceased foraging, [the fathers of civilization] had to tame the earth and sow grain. All this for the salvation of the nascent human race. Meanwhile, scattered through the plains and valleys and preserving the infamous promiscuity of things and of women, there remained a great number of the impious, the unchaste, and the nefarious."--The New Science (1725) by Giambattista Vico


"When Marinetti writes: “ . . . The heat of a piece of wood or iron is in fact more passionate, for us, than the laughter or tears of a woman” — then I know what he means."--D. H. Lawrence


"Major museums are mounting exhibitions of work that only a few decades ago was considered far too pretty or sensuous or complacent to have been taken seriously: the paintings of Gustave Moreau, Alphonse Mucha, Pierre Bonnard, Remedios Varo, Maxfield Parrish, Norman Rockwell; Victorian fairy painting, Pre-Raphaelite portraits, pinup art, couturier design. Such novelists as Penelope Fitzgerald, Andrei Makine, Philip Roth, and Michael Cunningham are pointing us back toward beauty."--Venus in Exile (2001) by Wendy Steiner


"Nancy Etcoff argues in Survival of the Prettiest that a particular ratio between female waist and hip measurements universally evokes a positive male response, which she identifies as aesthetic."--Venus in Exile (2001) by Wendy Steiner

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Venus in Exile : The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-Century Art (2001) is a book on the cult of ugliness by Wendy Steiner.

Blurb 1:

In Venus in Exile renowned cultural critic Wendy Steiner explores the twentieth century's troubled relationship with beauty. Disdained by avant-garde artists, feminists, and activists, beauty and its major symbols of art—the female subject and ornament—became modernist taboos. To this day it is hard to champion beauty in art without sounding aesthetically or politically retrograde. Steiner argues instead that the experience of beauty is a form of communication, a subject-object interchange in which finding someone or something beautiful is at the same time recognizing beauty in oneself. This idea has led artists and writers such as Marlene Dumas, Christopher Bram, and Cindy Sherman to focus on the long-ignored figure of the model, who function in art as both a subject and an object. Steiner concludes Venus in Exile on a decidedly optimistic note, demonstrating that beauty has created a new and intensely pleasurable direction for contemporary artistic practice.

Blurb 2:

Whereas previous eras had celebrated beauty as the central aim of art, the modernist avant-garde were deeply suspicious of beauty and its perennial symbols, woman and ornament, preferring instead the thrill and alienation of the sublime. They rejected harmony, empathy, and femininity in a denial still reverberating through art and social relations today. Exploring this casting of Venus, with all her charms, into exile, Wendy Steiner's brilliant, ambitious, and provocative analysis explores the twentieth century's troubled relationship with beauty.

Tracing this strange and damaging history, starting from Kant's aesthetics and Mary Shelley's horrified response in Frankenstein, Steiner untangles the complex attitudes of modernists toward both beauty and the female subject in art. She argues that the avant-garde set out to replace the impurity of woman and ornament with form -- the new arch-symbol of artistic beauty. However, in the process of controlling desire and pleasure in this way, artists admitted the exotic fetish objects of "primitive" cultures -- someone else's power and allure that surely would not overmaster the sophisticated modernist. A century of pornography, shock, and alienation followed, and this rejection of feminine and bourgeois values -- domesticity, intimacy, charm -- kept the female subject an impossible and remote symbol. Ironically, as Steiner reveals, the feminist hostility to the "beauty myth" had a parallel result, leaving Western society alienated from desire and pleasure on all sides.

In the course of this elegantly constructed and accessibly written argument, Steiner explores the cultural history of the century just ended, from Dada to Futurism, T. S. Eliot's Wasteland and Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon to Pumping Iron II: The Women and Deep Throat, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Outsider Art, Naomi Wolf and Cindy Sherman, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, ranging across art and architecture, poetry and the novel, feminist writing and pornography.

Only in recent years, Steiner demonstrates, has our culture begun to see a way out of this damaging impasse, revising the reputations of neglected artists such as Pierre Bonnard, and celebrating pleasure and charm in the arts of the present. By disentangling beauty from a misogynistic view of femininity -- as passive, narcissistic, sentimental, inefficacious -- Western culture now seems ready to return to the female subject and ornament in art, and to accept male beauty as a possibility to explore and celebrate as well. Steiner finds hints of these developments in the work of figures as varied as the painter Marlene Dumas, the novelist Penelope Fitzgerald, and the choreographer Mark Morris as she leads us to a rediscovery and a reclamation of beauty in the Western world.

From one of our most thoughtful and ambitious cultural critics, this important and thought-provoking work not only provides us with a searching analysis of where we have been in the last century but reveals the promise of where we might be going in the coming one.

Criticism

The book was sloppily written and researched. Twice Bram Dijkstra is referred to as 'Dijksa', and the famous “hatred of bourgeois" axiom is attributed erroneously to George Sand instead of to Gustave Flaubert.

See also




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