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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Saturday, October 09, 2004
Umberto Eco has been pondering changing notions of beauty through the twentieth century, drawing a division between the avant-garde art of provocation and the popular art of mass-consumption:"Avant-garde art does not itself pose the problem of beauty. And while it is implicitly accepted that the new images are artistically "beautiful", and must give us the same pleasure that Giotto's frescoes or Raphael's paintings gave to their own contemporaries, it is important to realise that this is so precisely because the avant garde has provocatively flouted all aesthetic canons respected until now. Art is no longer interested in providing an image of natural beauty, nor does it aim to procure the pleasure ensuing from the contemplation of harmonious forms. On the contrary, its aim is to teach us to interpret the world through different eyes...
Visitors to an exhibition of avant-garde art who purchase an "incomprehensible" sculpture, or those who take part in a "happening", are dressed and made up in accordance with the canons of fashion. They wear jeans or designer clothes, wear their hair or make-up according to the model of beauty offered by glossy magazines, the cinema or television, in other words by the mass media. These people follow the ideals of beauty as suggested by the world of commercial consumption, the very world that avant-garde artists have been battling against for over 50 years."
In many respects, this is similar to the type of thesis Camille Paglia has been presenting for several years, wherein elite forms of art became increasingly moribund during the course of the twentieth century and declined in favour of popular music and film. With the advent of pop-art the eclipse of old forms of artistic expression was complete. But on the whole, it seems to me that Eco is nearer the mark in describing a fragmented world where there is no monopoly on any form of artistic expression; even in the mass culture it is difficult to find anything that resembles a popular movement in the way that the sixties and punk music did. Instead, all forms of artistic expression seem more like micro-cultures, an expression of lifestyle in an individualistic age.Labels: Aesthetics, Art, Literature
posted by Richard 8:45 pm
