Monthly Archives: April 2009

For or Against: Britain’s beauty

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Britain recently hosted a debate that has gotten a lot of airtime across the pond, debating the statement ‘Britain has become indifferent to beauty.’ With the exception of multiple references to the (British) National Trust and some purely English rhetoric, it’s a debate that would feel equally at home on these shores. If Americans were to have a national debate on the topic of beauty, that is…

The Guardian lays out the respective positions with 4 short essays from some avid, diametrically opposed bastions of culture. That’s my kind of journalism: argumentative, honestly biased, and a tad mocking. Stephen Bailey goes right for the jugular in the opening article with an ad hominen attack, “Bereft of optimism or enthusiasm, bloated with sly and knowing cynicism, [my opponents] see no value in contemporary life. Nothing to them is so howlingly funny as poor people going shopping in Tesco.” And it gets better from there.

Check it out, and find out the similarities between Botticelli’s Venus and a Kate Moss ad. Oh, and the coldly intellectual beauty of Roger Scruton makes an appearance as well.

Cowboys, Migrants, and Signs at MoMA’s Into the Sunset exhibition

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Chevron, Stephen Shore

Into the Sunset: Photography’s Image of the American West, on at MoMA through June 8, has been called an ‘unprecedented look at more than a century of changing myths and cultural attitudes about the American West, with over 120 photographs, from 1850 to the present, by photographers including Robert Frank, Dorothea Lange, Cindy Sherman, and Stephen Shore.’ At least, this is how MoMA describes it. The statement is more or less true, but it disguises the insidious fact that the exhibition is (as you might have wondered from the photographers listed) rather an odd agglomeration of images.

Untitled Film Still #43, Cindy Sherman

The curators wished to use the simultaneous exploration of the West and the development of photography to make a point. I find that it offers little illumination other than photographs have been taken of the West. The exhibition is organized thematically. After attending a lecture at MoMA yesterday, I can now inform you that that the exhibition is meant to take you through different facets of the mythic West such as landscape (unspoiled potential), people (seeking destiny, identified by trade such as cowboy or Indian, individuals), transportation (railroad, Manifest Destiny, highways signage). If anything, the exhibition suggests the plethora of ‘West’s we Americans cherish: rugged plains being settled and immigrants, cowboys and Indians, Yosemite natural park and Hollywood. There was an undertone of falsity and disillusionment with these ideals, especially in the latter part of the exhibition.

The exhibition might not suggest a unified concept of photography in the West and it might not impress upon you the development of photography itself, but it does prove to be an evocative experience. From Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath in Dorthea Lange’s photos to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road Again in the highway and signage images of the 1950s and 60s, I was reminded of the lone individual going mobile to follow his manifest destiny under the enormous setting sun. However, like that last sentence, the exhibition never gelled into more than a pastiche of cliches.


That Intellectual Kind of Beauty

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Beauty is instantly recognizable. What is a little more difficult is to pin down exactly what beauty is. Even is you missed the debate regarding Theodore Dalrymple’s Beauty and the Best, you still have a chance to get into the latest aesthetic theories by checking out the prolific writer and philosopher Roger Scruton in a book entitled, properly, Beauty.

Beauty as Scruton means it is of a specifically mental rather than visceral nature. Along with Sebastian Smee of The Guardian, I rather think Scruton does an injustice when he relegates beauty to an act of rational contemplation. Like every other book on beauty, it deals with whether we can make value judgements about art, i.e. can something be better or more beautiful, than another. He also considers whether art can be moral, rather an old-fashioned question but then so is the question of beauty.
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What kills me about books like this is they tackle a huge and general subject, and then meander bombastically about for 100 pages. Dalrymple’s article made his argument precisely, even without him repositing Kant.
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The best primer for any discussion of beauty, as far as I’m concerned, remains Umberto Eco’s On Beauty, which, with it’s thickly illustrated pages, is a thing of beauty itself. Scruton either ripped off Eco’s jacket cover, or Renaissance woman remain the ideal of beauty…