Category Archives: beauty

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.

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…

Ravels in Review Friday (already!)

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Has another week really passed? It seems so here in Art Ravel’s land, which has been hopefully busy despite a recurrence of hangovers.

Reasons to be hopeful:

1) Spring has returned to Manhattan and gallery hopping can commence again, as I document here. Sure, in between then and now we had some freezing days, but a thaw is coming. *Could also be a reason to be hungover.

2) YouTube’s content gets more fun by the minute. See Richard Serra shovel Vaseline under Mathew Barney’s direction. Not to be missed.

3) A new play by Moises Kaufman shows us how to make time stand still, in addition to its other good qualities.

4) In another exorbitant claim, a man has discovered the secret of beauty. *Could also be a reason to be hungover.

5)I said goodbye to Culture Pundits, and hello to cool art magazines.

6) Asking questions about Kara Walker, rather than critique, in a further positive, hopeful effort.

And so what do I think sums up this week, its hopes, its hangovers?

Lobsters, obviously. Why? Ask the Surrealists, or read Signs of Spring.