Aesthetic vs Conceptual "Beauty"

     In this week’s reading, we were given two perspectives on a theory of aesthetics in art - Amelia Jones first broke down Dave Hickey’s model, which was supposed to go against the “liberal” art historians’ manner of interpreting art's meaning through historical context.¹ In his model, good art is simply “beautiful”, without causing any special emotional or physical reaction in the viewer. As Amelia Jones continues, she immediately starts to unravel the logic behind this idea. Hickey’s model places himself in a position of authority, the arbiter of beauty, by suggesting he is able to remove himself from the cultural, political, and sexual implications of the subjects, and accurately identify the pure aesthetic beauty of the forms. But, he is only able to do so because the artists - whose work he has already identified as beautiful - are able to adequately represent beauty in the art.²

    Not only does this trigger red flags immediately by the fact that it’s self-fulfilling, but also, it simply doesn’t make sense. For there to be any basis for which to judge a thing, someone would have to have set that basis… which means it’s automatically subjective. In Hickey’s model, the art isn’t being judged objectively - it’s being judged subjectively based on Hickey’s white Eurocentric male perspective: where a young, nude, white, and submissive woman is the visual epitome of beauty.

Edouard Manet, Olympia, 1863. Musee dÓrsay, Paris. 
https://artincontext.org/olympia-manet/ 

    Jones goes on to use Olympia by Edouard Manet to prove this point. The artist was intentional to replicate many of the forms and elements that had been used throughout history to appeal to critics like Hickey. It features a young, nude, white woman reclined before her black maid - a juxtaposition used by other artists at the time to emphasize the young, nude woman’s whiteness.  The difference between those beloved paintings and the widely-hated Olympia, was the fact that she was intended to make the (typical white male) viewer feel uncomfortable.³

Ironically, the difference in reactions we see from paintings like The Venus of Urbino by Titian in the 1500’s, and Manet’s Olympia a few hundred years later, is what proves Jones’ point. While you may or may not consider it as “beautiful” as the paintings it references, that was never Manet’s - you know, the artist - intention in painting it. Manet was not trying to make a beautiful painting for hanging on a wall to decorate a space, he was trying to say something.

    As an artist working towards a graphic design career, this is an important concept for me to keep in mind. While a lot of my work in the future is going to be based largely around designing for non-artists and non-art-professionals, what can I learn from this about the differences between design for aesthetics and conceptual art? I think the main take-away for me is in two parts: the first being that it is impossible to judge any art objectively, which means it’s of the utmost importance to understand the point-of-view of whoever I’m designing for. This is why art historians do what they do - it’s easy to interpret art from your own perspective, but more insightful to try to do it from the creator’s perspective.


    The second part to this is that, although design in marketing is often thought of as a more aesthetic and less conceptual process, the last thing you want is to leave the viewer feeling disinterested. The design needs to look good, but it should also still be saying something that the viewer can connect with, that causes them to pause, that can instill an emotion in them or send a particular message, that can communicate something specific. Something that Hickey would consider a waste of his divine time.





¹ Amelia Jones, "Beauty Discourse and the Logic of Aesthetics," in Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age, ed. Emory Elliot et al (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 217.

² Jones, "Beauty Discourse and the Logic of Aesthetics," 218.

³ Jones, "Beauty Discourse and the Logic of Aesthetics," 226-30.



Works Cited


Jones, Amelia. "Beauty Discourse and the Logic of Aesthetics." In Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age. Edited by Emory Elliot, Louis Freitas Caton, Jeffrey Rhyne, 215-39. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.


Edouard Manet, Olympia, 1863. Musee dÓrsay, Paris. https://artincontext.org/olympia-manet/



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