Arts & Culture
Art of staying pretty
Published 07 February 2000
After the ugliness of Tracey Emin's bed, contemporary art is rediscovering beauty. But, asks Charles Darwent, is it just another marketing ploy?
If you had to second-guess the subtitle of a recent exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC called "Regarding Beauty", you might reasonably take a punt on it being "Mural painting in quattrocento Florence", or perhaps "Degas at the ballet". But you would be unlikely to guess that the show's actual subtitle was "A view of the late twentieth century".
Beauty in contemporary art? Some mistake, surely. Ever since the American abstractionist Barnett Newman declared in 1948 that the impulse of modern art was "the desire to destroy beauty", the B-word has become a byword in artistic circles. It has been expunged from the critical dictionary. If you had tried to justify a painting on the Pateresque grounds of beauty at any time over the past half-century, you would have been laughed out of court - or worse.
It is difficult to pinpoint the historical moment when beauty was disallowed as a measure of art, but it can be traced geographically, like many annoying things, to the Sorbonne in Paris. The new aesthetics of Jacques Lacan and his ancestors did away with woolly things such as individual experience. This was defended on the grounds of finding a universal critical language. But beauty, which was notoriously in the eye of the beholder, suffered from another problem: it was defined by an elite. In the Lacanian mind, beauty was inseparable from connoisseurship, which meant that it was associated with toffs such as Anthony Blunt and Clement Greenberg - all of them white, middle-class and male. In an anti-relativist age of ebonics and gender studies, this did not go down well. Until a few months ago, it still didn't.
Hence the oddness of the Hirshhorn exhibition. Hence, even more oddly, the sudden reappearance of beauty in contemporary British art. If Newman's words have been taken up by any one school, it is by the Brit Artists. Baudelaire may have held that "every age and every people have had their own form of beauty", but it is hard to spot in the work of, say, Tracey Emin or the Chapman brothers. Beauty never used to be particularly evident in the art of Gary Hume, who made a living painting mock-up of operating-theatre doors, complete with portholes, kick-plates and scuff marks. This is why Hume's recent show of work at the Whitechapel Gallery in London was something of a cause celebre. Hospital doors? Not as such. Hume's latest paintings, unveiled to an astonished public, feature pretty girls, flowers and angels. What is more, they are painted on aluminium panels in the highest of high glosses, making them shine like enamels. Asked what he was up to, Hume declared himself to be "a beauty terrorist". People gasped. They might have been even more shocked had they not already seen what is purportedly the latest big thing in Brit Art: namely, the work of the "new neurotic realists". Led by a charismatic roughneck called Martin Maloney, these artists exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London last year. The show nailed its beautifying colours to the mast with the title, Die Young, Stay Pretty. Maloney's own paintings reinterpreted the works of Nicolas Poussin, while a fellow exhibitor showed pieces of embroidery.
What is going on here? Well, there are various ways of looking at it. One is that some kind of millennial doubt has overtaken the world of contemporary art. Faced with the vertiginous yawing of the unknown, artists have turned to the safety of the familiar by re-adopting the values of Pater and Plato. Another explanation, put about by the professor and author Camille Paglia, who triumphs in being politically incorrect, is that cultural relativism has simply proved unstoppable. "[Beauty] is not a conspiracy by white, heterosexual males to keep women and minorities down," she growls. "They've looked for years and there are no women Michelangelos. There are no black Michelangelos." Paglia's thoughts appear on the cover of the catalogue to "Regarding Beauty", over the photograph of a noted post feminist icon: "Changing her costume style and hair color [sic] virtually every month, Madonna embodies the eternal values of beauty," says Paglia. "Together, I and Madonna [sic] will drive Lacan from America."
Well, maybe. A look inside the exhibition catalogue suggests a third explanation for the apparent reprise of beauty in art: namely, that it is a marketing ploy. The 90 works in the Hirshhorn show include photographs of Madonna; the beautiful Leigh Bowery as painted by Lucian Freud in Benefits Supervisor Sleeping; a rigorously ugly nude by Willem de Kooning; and an early Andy Warhol piss painting. "People do things to [beauty], but she can endure it, she can stand it, it doesn't affect her, mutilated as she is," wrote a cheery Louise Bourgeois in 1985. Maybe so - but then why use the word? To describe these works as beautiful in any normal sense is to reduce it to mush.
Beauty in art has at times been held to include qualities such as sublime horror or terribilita, but never anything remotely as anti-beautiful as the icy clinicalism of Freud, or the trash-glam gloss of Madonna. Back in Britain, the story is the same. Hume's flowers and angels have a kind of sneery gloss that equate their prettiness with trash. Likewise, Maloney's Stay Pretty pictures do not bend their knee to Poussin so much as flash two fingers at him: the Frenchman's allegorical heroes are reinterpreted in household gloss and the pink-nylon vernacular of EastEnders.
Ask Maloney why he and his followers should therefore have chosen to define themselves as "prettyists", and he maunders on about popular culture and the shifting definitions of academic aesthetics. Then he remarks, sagely and probably nearer to the point, that "everything nowadays is sold with a label".
There is intense pressure in the contemporary art market to come up with something new. Over the past 20 years, the easiest way to do this has been to come up with something ugly: firebricks, foetus earrings, canned excrement. But ugliness, even if it is easier to produce in the short run, has the unfortunate habit of losing its edge. So what about a label that is really new and shocking - beauty, for example? You never know, it might catch on. It makes you long for the good old days when beauty was as much as skin-deep.
Charles Darwent is art critic of the "Independent on Sunday"
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
