Uncontrollable Beauty: Toward a New Aesthetics

by Bill Beckley (Editor), David Shapiro (Editor)

This distinguished series presents selections from the greatest national collection of American art, offering popularly priced, high-quality reproductions coupled with lively, informative text.This anthology offers incisive reflections on beauty by eminent artists, critics, and literati who help redefine it for a new generation of creative thinkers.

Genres: Art, Philosophy, Nonfiction

423 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1998

Reviews

[Glenn Russell]

Detail of one of the most beloved beautiful paintings in the world. I'm sure you know the artist and title.

As humans, we are sensitive, aesthetic, embodied beings, beings who are transformed in the process of seeing, hearing and feeling the world around us. And since the arts play such a central part in our world, we would be well to have a clear and deep understanding as we approach aesthetics and beauty. Uncontrollable Beauty is a major step toward such an understanding.

The book is divided into three sections:

1) Theory;

2) A debate over an exhibition where contemporary Western works of art were displayed in juxtaposition with primitive art, so called;

3) Practice, that is, the ways art is considered, made, evaluated, valued, appreciated and criticized.

There are twenty-seven essays from a range of contributors, including philosophers, art critics, curators, poets, artists, and a psychologist; some names will be easily recognized - Arthur C. Danto, James Hillman, Frank O'Hara, for example - but most, I suspect, will not. So much the better for injecting some freshness into the study of beauty. Perhaps this is why Uncontrollable is in the title, which is grand since, when it comes to the richness of beauty, who would ever want control?

To convey a taste of depth in these selections, I will focus exclusively on one essay – Notes on Beauty, a seven page essay written by Peter Schjeldahl, senior art critic for The New Yorker magazine and a man who has been involved in the world of art in one way or another for over fifty years. Here are a number of author quotes along with my comments:

"In my experience, an onset of beauty combines extremes of stimulation and relaxation. My mind is hyperactive. My body is at ease."

Present at a concert of traditional Indian music with sitar and tabla, at one point the sitar played a series of short but complex phrases and the tabla player replicated the phrase on his drum, in both rhythm and pitch. I recall how my mind did indeed become hyperactive and my body rested in a state of deeper ease.

"Mind and body become indivisible in beauty. Beauty teaches me that my brain is a physical organ and that "intelligence" is not limited to thought, but entails feeling and sensation, the whole organism in concert."

At a Winslow Homer exhibit at the Met in New York, my entire body tingled - I almost couldn’t believe how a painter could make the ocean so alive and vibrant. Schjeldahl words are a lesson for all of us - the experience of beauty involves every cell of our being; it is not a head trip.

"Nothing in itself, beauty may be a mental solvent that dissolves something else, melting it into radiance. Sometimes the object of beauty is not just unexpected, but bizarre, with an aspect I initially consider odd or even ugly. Such experiences are revolutions of taste, insights into new or alien aesthetic categories."

Initially, I found many paintings of Francis Bacon dreadful but now, after looking more closely, I quite enjoy those works.

"An experience of beauty may be intense, leaving a permanent impression, or quite mild and soon all but forgotten. But it always resembles a conversion experience, the mind's joyful capitulation to a recovered or new belief. The merely attractive (pretty, glamorous) and merely pleasing (lovely, delectable) are not because they lack the element of belief and the feeling of awe that announces it."

That’s my experience with glamorous advertisements – after the initial visual hit there is nothing deeper compelling me to view a second time.

"Meanwhile, can there be any possible problem with "intense pleasure or deep satisfaction to the mind? Any society that does not respect the reality of "intense pleasure and deep satisfaction of the mind" is a mean society."

I couldn’t agree more. And I would go further: any society that doesn’t respect the intense pleasure and deep satisfaction of feelings and sensations is a mean-spirited society, a very mean-spirited society.

"Beauty is not superfluous, not a luxury, but it is a necessity that waits upon the satisfaction of other necessities. It is a crowning satisfaction."

All of our everyday experiences contains potential beauty – it is a matter of our becoming attuned to the life around us at every moment.

[Cory Card]

Could have benefited from some serious editing of essays... The first part "theory" is well put together but the second two sections are rather hit and miss.