Beauty and the Contemporary Sublime

by Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe

Esteemed critic, painter, and writer Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe offers a provocative critique of beauty in relation to the contemporary notion of the sublime, which is now found in technology and a high-powered economy rather than in nature. Refuting established views, this book questions today's ideas of beauty, including those applied to contemporary art, and proposes a secular theory of beauty as glamorous rather than good, frivolous rather than serious. An illuminating read, this book provides excellent course material for classes in philosophy, cultural studies, art history, and aesthetics.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction, Theory

180 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1999

Reviews

[Philip Cherny · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would probably more accurately rate this book 3.5 stars, as I found it better than average. Gilbert-Rolfe very eloquently elucidates certain heavy philosophical ideas with descriptive prose and examples. I’ve bookmarked several quotable passages that highlight some of his astute reflections worth returning to. Unfortunately, he does not seem as effective an argumentative writer, as his convoluted prose often tends to bog down his arguments. He quickly breezes through ambiguous abstract ideas that need much more elaboration. Within a paragraph or two he casually alludes to several philosophers without offering much in-depth discussions of their ideas. In fact he rapidly hops around disparate topics—contemporary painting, Kant, Heidegger, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Fashion modeling, and Laocoön—and treats them as if on a level playing field despite their disparate contexts. I find this aspect of his project admirable as much as I find it irritating. A painter who primarily finds his muse in the glamour of fashion photography, Gilbert-Rolfe offers an interesting, somewhat unique perspective in the influx of beauty-revisionist authors (e.g. Dave Hickey, Arthur Danto, Elaine Scarry, etc.) in the 90s and early 2000s. But I am not wholly convinced of some of the assumptions he adopts. He narrates complex issues that have been worked out in the history of art and philosophy in a way that makes them seem simpler than I think they really are.

His line “The beautiful is powerless but always exceeds what frames it, and what always frames it is discourse.” (48), pretty much sums up his reasoning for advocating beauty in contemporary art (which has already been the case in art practice, if not art theory.) He assumes some questionable premises to do so. I’ll accept his notion that beauty is essentially powerless in the sense that it is “intransitive” (one cannot successfully “control” beauty through discourse and exploit it for ethical purposes, since it is most often a whimsy), but I would not overlook its apparent regulative function—beauty seems far from “frivolous” insofar as advertisers manipulate it to promote the purchase of a commercial product. And even if no one can hold absolute instrumental power over beauty, beauty still retains some power (if only an ambiguous one) over us, since it is desire (desire that can be constructed but not harnessed.) Instead of praising it as powerless, I would consider beauty, like the sublime, a matter of power relations, at least from a psychological standpoint. Gilbert-Rolfe sort of addresses this issue in his discussion erotic beauty in Helen of Troy towards the end of the first chapter, and later when he writes (weirdly) about the bikini-clad virginal figure in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but he really does not follow through with it. He kind of leaves the question hanging by dismissing it as if it’s not important to his argument. Embracing frivolous beauty does not dismantle modernist discourse as he much wishes. I would agree with his claim that beauty cannot be reduced to discourse or critique, but only in the sense that one still experiences a feeling we call “beauty” regardless how we frame it with discourse. Discourse on beauty is discourse about it, but it’s not exactly clear to what extent it changes our attitude towards it. It often seems difficult to draw the line between the two, and self-critical beauty seems worthy of our attention.

The strangest argument Gilbert-Rolfe tries to make I think is the gendering of the sublime as androgynous (either masculine or feminine), and beauty as strictly feminine. It’s really unclear to me what exactly he means by “masculine” and “feminine,” and it seems like a dated metaphor. I think he should shift the language to get exactly at the aspect he wishes to highlight (beauty is passive maybe?) He starts translating it into literal gender terms when he writes about how fashion for women is almost always frivolous, while mens’ fashion is either functional work clothes or frivolous beauty. Okay, interesting point, but he’s very vague and inconsistent with the examples he provides and never really indicates exactly what this gendering pertains to.

Towards the end of the book, he makes some intriguing claims about how because of photographic technology, beauty is now inextricably bound with glamour, and the place where one finds beauty as glamour is in glossy photographic images, shiny movie screens, and computer monitors. He also writes about “blankness” (I think of the clean, shiny Apple products as this clean “blankness” par excellence), as a new paradigm for instilling both beauty and sublimity. He jumps ahead a bit (still very interesting claim, but very vague), and writes of its implications of trying to transcend beyond the physical and obviate the body. I’m a bit weary of the age-old simplistic image/body split, but I see where he’s going with this, and there is something to it.

"Too much in contemporary art defines itself by what it struggles to resist, particularly since a formulaic resistance is now what would need to be subverted were there to be life left in the idea of subversion." (146) Okay yes, but the flip-side to this argument: just as one cannot resist desire (beauty), one cannot just ignore our ambivalence towards desire, our dissatisfaction with the merely beautiful, our desire for something more. For those artists sensitive to human concerns, aesthetic beauty comes with its own critique. It's not an either/or situation.

This book is not for everyone, and it’s a bit dated. It has some interesting ideas, but I’d recommend skimming through most of it.

[Janet · Rating 4 out of 5]

This small tome largely falls within the category of art theory. I rated it highly because his writing is so astute but also because my MFA thesis work concerned the Contemporary Sublime. I find his art theory writing to be uncanny and complicated, scholarly and erudite. Not for everyone.

[Curtis Anthony Bozif · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gilbert-Rolfe is probably too smart for his own good. He reads like like one of those authors who never met a period in a sentence he didn't hate. He's fantastic when he sticks to painting and the technology, but I found him less convincing when he tries to make analogies with high-fashion, models, and glamour-shot photography. Lastly, this, like so much cultural criticism at the time, feels irredeemably dated, written as it was so very soon before 9/11, social media, Trump, A.I., and perhaps Gilbert-Rolfe's biggest, most glaring blind spot, climate change and the ecological polycrisis confronting all of life on this planet today and in the near-, middle-, and long-term future.

[Xavier · Rating 5 out of 5]

Okay. I'm giving this book a 5 star rating cause I've heard good things about it. But honestly I've never read it. I would be willing to trade it for something or sell it. The thing is, I would like to say that I did read it and comprehend it, but the book is way too dense for me. The subject is contemporary aesthetics and I was never one for philosophy. So if you think this is something that you would like, let me know.... newyorkcinema@yahoo.com

[Mills College Library]

111.85 G4659 1999

[Steven Felicelli · Rating 2 out of 5]

an interesting take, but not for Art lovers (more for dense, jargon-laden theory lovers) - and being 17 years old it overstates and understates quite a bit - its trajectory seems a bit off to me