The beauty of a painting is not the same thing as the beauty of the
represented subject. In fact, you can make a beautiful painting of an
ugly subject (e.g., "Saturn," Isenheim Altarpiece, Soutine's "Side of
Beef," etc.). Or a beautifully ugly painting of ugly-beautiful
subjects, as in almost all of Lucien Freud's works.
Many people fall into the habit of speaking of beauty, first, as a
superficial aspect of conforming to a pleasant standard or paradigm of
form.
Art "is" "about" more than exclusively beauty; it's about something
else.
In my view, first and foremost in visual and representative modes,
artworks are fictitious representations that exhibit probable
existences. "Here's an old, grizzled giant eating his child. like the
stories say. Are you repulsed?" "Ever hear the one about Jacob
wrestling with the angel? This is what it might have looked like, with
nuns watching. The squiggly lines kind of give me a weird feeling."
"This overweight middle-aged woman [man] laid naked on my couch and
spread her [his] legs without any concern for modesty. I made her
[his] skin green in places and, basically, over-exaggerated how she
[he] looked."
When you stand in front of the subject (figure on a couch, old man
drinking from a goat's udder, a bridge across the Seine), there is
only one realm of representation, namely, the transferral from your
sensory perception to your interpretive cognition (where your
perception is "re-presented" internally). But in "art," there are at
least two realms: the image painted on the canvas or embodied in stone
or metal--which is separate from both the original subject and you,
the viewer--and your own internal representation, how you process and
interpret the sense perception of seeing the artwork.
That's where the fiction of art is evident and where it is possible to
speak of beauty in the midst of ugliness, or at least non-beauty.
Again, I find it useful to remember the old-school unity of Good, One,
True, and Beautiful, and the fact that in any existent thing, these
qualities are all present, because they are a unity, but the qualities
manifest themselves to our perception and understanding only to
various degrees at different times and under different conditions.
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Michael Brady
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
