Concepts of Beauty in Art

Concepts of viewer in ArtJohn Keats Beauty and TruthIn his famous apostrophe to the Grecian Urn, the immortal poet, John Keats, wrote Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou sayst, stunner is truth, truth beauty, that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.This very famous disputation on Beauty and Truth and their interchangeability poses a very important question in the postmodern era. Art and its convention of the Beauty/Beautiful has imperceptibly changed over the decades, from something that should reflect the Ideal (and in reality, twice removed from it, as per Plato), or in essence complete and offering pleasure to the senses to something, that expresses the unique sense/angst of the creator. Art has thus rediscovered its definition for beauty.If beauty is truth, hence it may dare to be grotesque too, for truth may be harsh or horrific. Beauty does not suggest something fine in the actual sense of the term, but that, w hich comes closer to the reliable expressions of the self and the vision of a generations psyche, that is fragmented, kitsch- the like, complex and beyond the metanarratives of a suffocating conformity. Beauty has evolved into a freedom for expression. Contemporary art, especially questions the paradigms of aesthetic values, with artists like Chapman Brothers or Justin Novak producing artwork that are clearly meant to provoke reactions and challenge notions of beauty, that had its grow in Kants Critique of Judgment (1790). It contemplated on the pure aesthetic experience of art consisting of a disinterested observer, pleasing for its own sake and beyond some(prenominal) utility or righteousity. Now, the very word pleasing may have different boundaries and modern art is trying to escalate their claims. If Marcel Duchamp make a fountain out of a urinal in 1917, that hurtled the Dadaist movement and that later amplified into a surrealist tendency looking into primitive art for the ir subconscious inspiration, to reveal the mental process, so the essential motivation behind the whole thing was subversion.If primitivism was motivating a new dimension by which beauty of the mind was revealed, then Picasso all in all subjectified art and personal experience into a fourth dimension and created a cubist movement to claim a break down of a jurisprudence that no longer held on to techniques, symbols and least of all universal criteria for judging anything. There are many an(prenominal) socio-ideological forces behind the same and the destructive World Wars had many reasons to question the notions behind the traditional idea of Beauty, and it addressed the subjective, transcendental and alienated psyche of modern man. Metaphysical hopelessness gave absurdity to beauty, while the meaninglessness of this Being, made beauty seem more akin to grotesque, either by derision or by the light of their tragic truth.What makes the question more intriguing is that, whether c ontemporary art has found a better form of beauty (constructed to please and create a certain discursive paradigm) in the grotesque, since it frees us from any moral and political/ideological constraints? Can it be linked to greater dimensions of teleological magnitude, or should it be treated as an alternative method of understanding true aesthetic, if not the complete aspect of aesthetic itself? Is grotesque possible without the knowledge of Beauty itself?I shall attempt to answer the following questions that I raised, with a hardly a(prenominal) examples. One must first understand the idea behind perception and the dialogical force that surrounds it. If the world is raised as an illusion in wholenesss mind then the mind has been symbolically trained to read it as a language. This matrix of complex spontaneity is paradigmatically and syntagmatically (Roman Jakobson, 1987) being challenged, when Grotesque plays the part of Beauty. The Dystopia arises out of a bust archetype that must restructure itself to include elements of the grotesque within the beauty, and reach towards the same aesthetic experience the sublime. But interestingly what produces sublime is shock. But one must not conf implement this with the cathartic experience of the Tragic pity and terror, but something quite opposite to an ideal communicative situation that all much(prenominal) art produces. thereof this element of mimesis and/or representation of the ideal have given way to an infinite subjectivity (Hegel, Lectures on Fine Art, given in the 1820s), or the abyss of the merciful mind and condition. But the self is interpellated as per La seat and later Althusser too estimated the impossibility of a single position from where one can judge, since the self was preconditioned with a lot of logocentricism (Derrida), which are again socio-culturally specific as per Barthes. Thus there is a complete inquiry into art through with(predicate) the artists personality or self (or selves).Ju stin Novaks disfigurine often conforming to the bourgeoisie values, distort them to such an ironic extent that one cannot miss the counter realism that it offers. frequently it serves to offer no alternative reality, but just launches one amidst a grotesque re-examination of old values and with its attendant disillusionment. Once there is a understood barrier between class and gender is dismantled, the escape is into nothingness the sublime height of vast unending solutions and this underscores the definite presence and the horrors of undying conformism. If truth is beauty, then Novaks artworks reveal the finer sides of it by shattering the comfortable and compartmentalized thought processes with which one can objectify art from a safe distance. The grotesque thrift of these truths gives beauty to the mind by releasing it from the shackles of confinement and overpowering illusions. Truth is not universal, but a power to accept the inextricable complexity of human behaviour, mind and his/her social, cultural and historical environment. Is Grotesque a rebellion? Or is it an inextricable element of beauty?Disfigurines 2006, by Justin NovakGrayson Perrys ceramic works portray this polemicist by making them superficially beautiful (as beauty has been notoriously claimed to have been) and underneath it remains the darker motives of an artist who tries to wrest with disturbing truths (or shall one call them abode truths, with a larger social back drop to them). His works like Coming Out Dress 2000, Weve Found the Body of your Child 2000 or the windy Cool People 1999 (reminds one of Eliots famous lines from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock In the room the women come and go, Talking of Michaelangelo). Not only does he deal with issues like cross-dressing, child abuse and social sterility (spiritually hollow cool fashionistas), but also he plays with this abnormal interrelation between beauty and grotesque. He raises questions rough seek and the sublime. In s hort he subverts the notion of beauty with beauty that is skin deep Reality is a diabolical faade and Perry questions whether hegemony denotes or connotes the medium of taste in art.Transvestite to transgression, the Chapman Brothers question the inevitability or orthodox value of the canon. This reflects in their works, defacement and torture figures create the complete picture of Beauty. They usher in a new experiment with taste, bad taste and the notions of good taste. Art moves into the realms of public or mass low category, which becomes an essential democratic medium for evoking or carrying forward a provocation to rouse the sense of that horrifying answerless void. With the Chapman brothers there is a sadist tone attached to their insult or reiteration of Goyas influence especially in the irrecreation of his Disasters of War, which inflict bold horror. But the grandeur of that horror is reduced to a trivial and yet a sardonic acetaste comes off them. They twist the sensation of violence into an aestheticground and arouse a variety of physical and mental demands for perceiving Beauty amidst such a squandering grotesqueness. Beauty here lies in the release from retentiveness back appreciation, awe and complete shock. Violence does not stand-alone and nor does any other human emotion. Sex, 2003 is thus desire, decay, diabolical, deliberate, freedom or defeat. Purity is not that remote fromits pornographic mockery of it and they are interrelated in their apparent verisimilitude.A true representation of kitsch art, their works like Zygotic Acceleration, roused shock as they act to portray the sexualisation of children due to the media and increased gender awareness. These treatments nevertheless push questions about morality that grotesque beauty actually challenges. Thus morality and beauty in its aesthetic straight forwardedness seem to flatten out newer boundaries of experiences, which the Chapman brothers challenge through their craftsmanship.Traditi onal Sculpture, especially in the hands of the Chapman Brothers and Justin Novak or Grayson Perry are objects of anti-canonical parody, grotesque imitations or thought-provoking reverse-discourses. All these postmodern artists are challenging aesthetic experience. All these artworks succumb to one the power of the grotesque that sublimates beauty with its truth, and they make us realize that truth is not about a fixed standard, but accepting the actual absence of it. What makes contemporary art more beastly in its beauty is the power to derive happiness (or sado-masochist satisfaction) out of this grotesqueness. The grotesque shocks but this is a pleasure in itself, because it is the very representation of the consciousness. Theatre and artwork met with experimentalism in the defend by Artaud, who made audience a spectator to cruelty that is harsh, exceptionally brutal and yet beautiful. By shattering estrangement and by creating something that allows no objectivity (in the likes of Kant or Brecht) Artaud demands a complete involvement of the senses. Moreover, this is where art threatens to change the soul of the perceiver by its dominating beauty, which horrifies the perceiver with its verity and unique angst.Wittgensteins concept of seeing-as, allows contemporary art to shun master narratives completely and standout on their own purely as visual sensations. From British Avant-Garde art that confuses common and the uncommon (like use of mannequin by Chapman Brothers or genitals replaced by the faces in their remake of Goyas Disasters of Wars series). Grotesquerie is about questioning the status quo, about unflinching self-criticism and about embrace outsiders. From Simon Carroll deconstructing the chronology of ceramic vases with his pastiches like Thrown Square Pot2005, engages the observers mind with complex questions that he poses through the irregular construction of his surfaces.Thrown Square Pot2005, Simon Carroll.The artists seem to incubate on the apparent hyperreality of contemporary situation, where art has become a vastly reproduced object fractured beyond identity. Formlessness becomes the beauty without symmetry and deliberate cruelty an aesthetic grotesqueness. Thus the gap between what is apparent and what may actually exists gives the artists ample space to bridge this defined categories with crushing forces of expressions that though grotesque to the shocked senses is ultimately beautiful by virtue of its truth.Works CitedEliot, T. S The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Eliot, Thomas Stearns. Prufrock and Other Observations. London The Egoist, Ltd, 1917 Bartleby.com, 1996. www.bartleby.com/198/. 30.01.2007. ON-LINE ED. Published May 1996 by Bartleby.com Copyright Bartleby.com, Inc. (Terms of Use).Hegel, Lectures on Fine Art, (edited by Hotho) Aesthetics Lectures on Fine Art, Vol. 1.translated by T. M. Knox, 1973. Poetical Works. London Macmillan, 1884 Bartleby.com, 1999 Jakobson, Roman. Language in Literature. Ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy. Cambridge, MA Belknap, 1987. See influential essay philology and Poetics by Roman Jakobson, in their collection Language in Literature (1987).