Beauty in Hard Times

Beauty is a wonderful thing, a thing of true value. Stocks look valuable at sometimes, and seem worthless in others. Posters of one’s favorite band seem valuable when you are a teen, and just cheesy latter in life. But beauty is of real and enduring value, in swell times and lean times. God forbid I should speak against beauty.

What I do want to say is that Beauty has a whole host of relatives that are worthy too. Beauty is a good thing, but not the only good thing.

The ancients and medievals in the West, valued beautiful art, but had plenty of other goals for art too. Grotesque art (like statues of rotting corpses) which nonetheless managed to convey religious truths like the ephemerality of this life, were considered art and valued. Horror stories, political art, and homely arts, all of these were valued as well even if what they produced wasn’t exactly beauty. But beauty proper had a place too, in the cathedrals, in the songs, in the decoration of clothes. It was part of how the wealthy showed off there wealth, how the young showed of their youth, and how the content showed off their contentment.

But this picture changed in the 1700s and 1800s. Beauty (and its very close relatives the sublime and the delightful) came to seem central to art, and to aesthetics, and aesthetics was cashed out as the science of beauty. A Baroque artist, a Rococo artist, and a Neo-Classical artist would have very different pictures of what beauty is, and what techniques best achieve it, but all three think that all real art is aimed primarily, even exclusively at creating beauty. And the philosophers of this time are very interest in how the philosophy of beauty related to the philosophy of moral value, and of economic value. To David Hume, Edmunde Burke, or Adam Smith, the question which of these paintings is genuinely better is philosophically very parallel to the questions which of the actions is genuinely morally superior, which of these assets is genuinely worth more, and which of these political systems is genuinely better. For the Scottish Enlightenment, the artist exploring beauty is in effect exploring morality, politics, and economics as well, even though that isn’t their real goal.

But by the end of the 1800s and the early 1900s you begin to see a rebellion against beauty by artists, and it continues during the twentieth century so that you see plenty of anti-beauty art in the 1990s and the 2000s. Arthur Rimbaud is the first person I know of to speak against beauty in public, at the beginning of his poem “A Season in Hell”

“Once, if my memory serves me well, my life was a banquet where every heart revealed itself, where every wine flowed.
One evening I took Beauty in my arms - and I thought her bitter - and I insulted her.
I steeled myself against justice.
I fled. O witches, O misery, O hate, my treasure was left in your care! …”

But the basic critique of beauty is found in many different arts and artists during this time, and it takes slightly different forms. Sometimes, the artist is pursuing some other goal besides beauty but thinks that they wind up hitting beauty as well, such as in Picasso’s Cubism; Picasso’s goal isn’t beauty, but he thinks his painting do succeed at being (oddly) beautiful incidentally. Sometimes, they are hoping to help people see beauty within a piece that looks ugly at first, but that they think is not genuinely ugly, as in Stravinsky’s ballet the Rites of Spring. But sometimes, the artist is actually opposed to beauty. The Dadaists thought that beauty was used by the powers that be to tranquilize the populous into accepting stupid policies like WWI. For them, undercutting beauty was part of undercutting the ruling regime. For Lichtenstein, obsession with beauty forced us to focus on the culture of the upper class, whereas art needed to wrestle with the culture of the whole society, thus must also struggle with pop culture. For Yoko Ono, beauty caused us to dwell on pleasant emotions, and situations where things were basically working, whereas art needed to confront life in both its pleasant and unpleasant forms. In a broken world, beauty is a balm, but it is in danger of being a lie or a distraction, and maybe the people need to be riled up rather than soothed. Many artists felt that art ought to confront the audience at least as much as it should cater to the tastes of the audience. So by the 20th century, beauty seemed like the coward's way out of refusing to look at the harsh realities of the world.

So do we need to be riled or soothed? Well, BOTH! Sometimes we need to be riled up and sometimes we need to be soothed, so I’m just not as willing to oppose beauty as a lot of 20th century thinkers were, but I’m also not as staunchly in favor of it as a lot of 18th and 19th century thinkers were. Further, I’m pretty impressed by Frank Sibley’s article “Aesthetic Concepts” from 1963. He argues that aesthetics is the study of human experience especially as it is colored by a particular kind of emotional experience such as when we experience beauty. But he argues that we have dozens and dozens of genuinely aesthetic concepts, like graceful, convoluted, or intriguing. According to Sibley, the vocabulary we use to talk about art falls into 3 basic categories, sensory talk that isn’t aesthetic yet (red, circular, polyphonal), aesthetic concepts (balanced, suggestive, harmonious), and overall judgment terms (good, lackluster, a classic).

So my position is that it makes sense to find ways to bring beauty into our lives, even in hard times, probably especially in hard times, but that beauty has a number of relatives that we should also try to bring into our lives during hard times.

There have been a lot of fights on exactly what beauty is, but a harmonious fit between parts, and a sense of delightfulness divorced from our immediate self-interest are classic elements. Winning a million dollars is delightful (at first), but our interests are directly involved. Watching a beautiful sunset is delightful too, even though it doesn’t really advance our interests in a direct way. Beauty is classically related to sexuality, youth and ephemerality as well. Sunsets are beautiful in large part because they don’t last. Beauty soothes us when things are hard. It makes it look as if things fit together, as if even the hard bits are just small parts of a larger more glorious design. One of my families’ favorite movies is O Brother Where Art Thou? which strives to convey the ways in which song and music weaved through the lives of common folk before the time of television and movies and Ipods. And here the music of beauty, solace and wistfulness dominates, not the music of anger, alienation, and reflection that I grew up with.

So beauty is a kind of delight but it is not the only variety of delight or even the only important one. When my kids get a new toy, they sometimes experience a delight that is not exactly beauty. It is a delight of fun, or hopefulness. Likewise when they learn a new skill that they can use, they experience a kind of delight twinged with pride and self-discovery. Delight is a close ally of curiousity, and so I will often find a book delightful even if it is not exactly beautiful. Beauty, as well as soothing, can give a lightness of spirit that we call delight, but delight is a broader concept than just beauty. And in hard times, delight is important too, not just soothing beauty. We need to keep our curiousity, our capacity for surprise and wonder. It is part of what allows us to retain openness to new and changing situations, it is part of what allows us to continue to adapt, and to enjoy adapting. In hard times, we need also a delight beyond mere beauty.

There is also a deeper kind of wonder, an experience tinged with awe, where we encounter what is far greater than ourselves. Traditionally, this close relative of beauty is called the sublime. In the sublime, we experience a glimpse of the transcendent, we are taken out of ourselves into a relation with things far vaster than ourselves. We stare through a telescope at the majesty of the Milky Way, and briefly experience our smallness. We look at an exquisite Greek vase from thousands of years ago and for a moment catch a glimpse of the brevity of our lives. The light filters through the trees of a forest, just so, and we are transported for a moment beyond time and space in the play of the dust motes in the beam of light. The sublime helps us to remember our place within the vastness, it helps our humility and our openness to wonder. It helps re-ground us in the essentials of our life. In hard times, we need splashes of the sublime, beyond just beauty.

And there are plenty more relatives of beauty that are important along side beauty. It makes sense to want a home to be familiar, comforting, ... well homey. Especially in hard times, some little corner of the world where one can be at home is a great luxury. The interesting helps to keep us engaged. The nostalgic helps us to remember our past. The graceful helps to lift us beyond mere necessity. The humorous, the cheerful, the silly, the festive, the cool, even the elegant are aesthetic goals worth seeking, if you can afford them, and usually you can afford at least some. And none of these aesthetic concepts is exactly the same thing as beauty. The angry, inspired, passionate, insightful, honest post-punk music I listened to as a youth, isn't really beautiful, but it is cool, and it is valuable, even aesthetically valuable. I do not think people should be cheerful all the time, or that one should be forced to live or work in a cheerful place. Enforced cheer is one of the more twisted aspects of our society. But we ought to have a place in our lives for cheerfulness on occasion. Cheerfulness isn't beauty or vice versa, but cheerful decor is sometimes appropriate, and I think that contemplating the differences helps us to see how lots of relatives of beauty all have a role in helping us to maintain a balanced and open perspective for confronting challenges.

Now I said that I don’t think a home should be beautiful, or at least not regularly beautiful. I think that a home should be homey, familiar, inviting and comfortable, and that is quite a different goal than beauty. But I do not mean that beauty should be missing, just that it should have a different place, or be an occasional visitor to the home, rather than the main aesthetic goal of a home.

But what of the ugly, the horrific, the terrifying, the repulsive, the tragic? Well, horror and tragedy in art usually thrive during economic downturns. People feel fear, and bitterness, and a whole host of foul emotions during hard times, and I think that is a good thing. Our world is not sweetness and light and people need to be able to face the dark as well as the bright aspects of our world. But pain is easier to bear when the pain makes sense than when it just seems meaningless. Childbirth involves intense pain, but women often find the pain far more manageable than other lesser pains precisely because they understand the point of it. Artistic explorations of the horrors and tragedies of our lives, can often help us to deal with them better precisely my making them more comprehensible. Some can find beauty even in horrors and tragedies (I’m quite good at that, and its one of the reasons I’m a goth), but even if you can’t experience them as beautiful, darker art, and darker aesthetic goals can still be valuable. But I wouldn’t want to live in a tragic house, or a horrific one, even if I want to read tragedies or horrors occasionally. Even ugliness itself is not always to be avoided. There are ugly truths, there are ugly tools. We must be willing to look on the ugly, even if we prefer the beautiful. I listen to beautiful music, like those haunting Depression era gospels, but I listen to ugly music too, like Einsturzende Neubauten. Without the beauty, it would be hard for me to find peace, without the ugliness, it would be hard to keep up the struggle, and I think both are important responses to our lives in hard times.

When life is a banquet where every wine flows it is possible to take beauty but find it bitter, and prefer as Rimbaud did camp and kitsch (it has been suggested that Rimbaud invented the idea of campiness). But after a season in hell, well … after that as Rimbaud says “All that is over. Today, I know how to celebrate beauty.”